Jim Lee (born August 11, 1964) is a Korean-born American comic-book artist and writer, co-founder of Image Comics, founder of WildStorm, and a publisher at DC Comics.
Starting out at Marvel Comics in 1987, Lee drew for Punisher War Journal and Alpha Flight before becoming famous through his collaboration with Chris Claremont on Uncanny X-Men and its adjective-less spin-off.
In 1991, he and several other artists left Marvel in order to form Image Comics, with him starting Wildstorm as his own studio, but he would end up selling Wildstorm to DC in order to return to writing and drawing.
Wildstorm would serve as an imprint of DC until 2010, when its assets merged with DC and Lee himself was named co-publisher. With Dan DiDio's departure from DC in 2020, Lee became DC Comics' sole publisher as well as the Chief Content Officer for all things adapted from DC Comics within Warner Bros. Discovery.
Comic Books created by him:
- Wild C.A.T.s (WildStorm)
- Stormwatch
- Deathblow
- Backlash
- Gen¹³
- The Intimates
- Batman: Hush
- All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder
- Justice League (2011) (first year only)
Tropes:
- Author Appeal:
- Lee's Wildstorm work in The '90s noticeably had common themes about Ancient Astronauts, Government Conspiracy, and black ops groups.
- In terms of art, Lee really likes detail. His New 52 designs all incorporate a lot more line work than the characters' previous designs, and he has stated that he dislikes drawing Superman's original costume specifically because there's not too much for him to play with, especially compared to a character like Batman whose look he can alter quite a bit without fundamentally altering the look like with Superman (see the New 52 costume).
- Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: As if his detailed artwork didn't take too much time, he created all those titles for Wildstorm, worked as editor/publisher, helped with DC Universe Online, and at times makes alternate covers for DC.
- Nice Guy: Alan Moore apparently liked him enough to tolerate him selling Wildstorm to DC in spite of swearing to never work for them again.
- Only Six Faces: As phenomenal as Lee's artwork can be, it's obvious that everybody he draws are just the same four people with varying hairstyles.
