I M A G E A S S O C I AT E
Jae Lee Jae Lee came to prominence at Marvel in late 1992, during just the first full year of his career. This was also during the mass exodus of the Image founders and their associates from the House of Ideas. Barely out of his teens, Lee was recruited by Rob Liefeld for Youngblood: Strikefile, and later Jim Lee hired him for the WildC.A.T.s Trilogy, as both titles served to lure the popular artist away from Marvel. At Image, Jae Lee started his creator-owned book, Hellshock, in 1994, which forced the artist to gain a new perspective into his craft. The seasoned illustrator returned to Marvel Comics with great success on The Sentry, Fantastic Four 1 2 3 4, and his Eisner Award-winning The Inhumans. You’ll find Mr. Lee providing his atmospheric storytelling to Stephen King’s Dark Tower, Marvel’s biggest mainstream project of 2007. What was your big break into this business? It was actually not an editor that discovered me but a writer, Scott Lobdell. I met him at a convention in 1990. I was straight out of high school, and I was showing my portfolio around; the editors that I showed it to weren’t very interested. And, in fact, one particular editor laughed at it and made fun of it. He’s a DC guy. But I was so sad, I was heartbroken. And then Scott saw what was going on, and he felt bad for me, and so he gave me his contact information and said, “Hey, why don’t you just work up some more samples and work on your storytelling and over the next few months keep sending me work, and I’ll show it around?” And that’s what I did. He was breaking in, himself. At that point he was just doing pick-up stories for Marvel Comics Presents, here and there. But he was in the Marvel offices all the time, trying to get work. That was a big book back then, when Sam Kieth was doing those little Wolverine stories. It was like a spotlight for a number of artists, wasn’t it? Yeah, Sam Kieth was doing it, and before it was Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X. Well, it’s funny. In Marvel Comics Presents, the stories that I took over for, there was a Beast story that Rob Liefeld was supposed to draw. It was an eight-part story, and he did the first two chapters, and then he quit to do New Mutants. And so I filled in for him. On the first two chapters there was a page or two here and there that he didn’t draw, so then I had to go back and draw those pages. And so when you see the two stories, I think it’s kind of jarring when you have Rob’s art and mine, because it’s so different. One page is really bright and characters are jumping all over the place full of action, and then you have one page that
is just all black. Did they get somebody to ink you back then? When I first started I worked with various inkers, but I didn’t like giving up that control. And I was never happy with the inks, so I was determined to learn how to ink. One time, I was visiting the editors, and I was also late on an issue, so I was inking the last page of one of the issues of Namor, and I was splattering it and going in with razor blades and just cutting the page up. And then John Romita Jr. happened to walk by, and he was horrified. He said, “What are you doing? Don’t do that! The penciler’s going to get really upset! You shouldn’t be inking like that!” He thought I was one of the bullpen guys inking over somebody’s work. Were you surprised that people accepted your art so quick when it was so different from what Jim Lee and the other guys were doing? Yeah, absolutely! The Jim Lees
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Jae Lee, courtesy of Jae Lee. ShadowHawk pin-up by Jae. ©2007 Jim Valentino.