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M O D E R N

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S E V E N T E E N :

LEE EEKS W

By Tom Field and Eric Nolen-Weathington

MODERN MASTERS VOLUME SEVENTEEN:

LEE WEEKS edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Tom Field front cover art by Lee Weeks all interviews in this book were conducted by Tom Field and transcribed by Steven Tice

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • August 2008 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-893905-94-8 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2008 Lee Weeks unless otherwise noted. Strong & Al ™ and ©2008 Lee Weeks. The Enforcers and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Howard Downs and Lee Weeks. Alfred Pennyworth, Batman, Captain Marvel, Commissioner Gordon, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Huntress, Ratcatcher, Robin, Starman, Superman, Wonder Woman ™ and ©2008 DC Comics. Beast, Ben Urich, Bucky Barnes, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Cyclops, Daredevil, Dr. Octopus, Elektro, Fantastic Four, Foggy Nelson, Galactus, Gambit, Ghost Rider, Gwen Stacy, Hulk, Human Torch, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, J. Jonah Jameson, Johnny Blaze, Jubilee, Justice, Kingpin, Matt Murdock, Mr. Fantastic, Nick Fury, Peter Parker, Psylocke, Punisher, Rogue, Scarecrow, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, Thing, Tithe Collector, Typhoid Mary, Vision, Winter Soldier, Wolverine, X-Men ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. Magnus Robot Fighter ™ and ©2008 Random House, Inc. Tarzan ™ and ©2008 ERB, Inc. Dale Arden, Flash Gordon ©2008 King Features Syndicate, Inc. and ™ Hearst Holdings, Inc. Remo Williams, The Destroyer, and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Warren Murphy. Mike Danger ™ and ©2008 Mickey Spillane. Scooby-Doo and all related characters ™ and ©2008 Hanna Barbera/Warner Bros. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Alien Worlds, New Wave and all related characters ™ and ©2008 respective owners. Editorial package ©2008 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication For Mumma — Thank you for keeping me endlessly supplied with pencils, pens, and paper... not to mention your love. — Lee To Doris Evans, my grandma. You’ve been a bigger influence in my life than you probably realize, and I love you very much. And as ever, to Donna, Iain and Caper, my beacons of light. — Eric Acknowledgements Lee Weeks, for going above and beyond with his help in putting this book together. Special Thanks Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Seventeen:

LEE WEEKS

Table of Contents Introduction by Tom Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: Made in Maine—Soup and Nuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Law and Spirit—An Artist’s Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Part Three: Breaking In... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Part Four: ...And Breaking Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Part Five: Jungles of Green and Concrete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Part Six: Picking up the Gauntlet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Part Seven: Re-Birth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Part 1:

Made in Maine— Soup and Nuts LEE: And there were lots of neighborhood kids. We had five boys in our family, yet we would not be considered a big family at that time. There were lots of kids that read comics. We used to get ours at Curtis’ Pharmacy on Water Street in downtown Hallowell. On Tuesday there would be a race after school to get to there. With the old newsstand distribution system, you couldn’t always be sure how many copies of a comic would make it to your store.

MODERN MASTERS: You and I go back a lot of years, and we’ve talked a lot of comics and a lot of creators over the years. When you hear a term like “masters,” what kind of names go through your head? LEE WEEKS: In comics, specifically, the usual suspects— names like Kirby, Kubert, Caniff. We’re all learning from these guys; they are our teachers. Foster, Raymond, Alex Toth. And some of the more modern comics guys, modern being relative, but certainly John Buscema, Neal Adams, and others—Gene Colan, Frank Miller, of course. I think there are others, really—I try not to say I know “this is the best guy,” but probably a half a dozen or so I would say share a very special resonance.

MM: It just occurs to me that you had more brothers in your house than any of us had channels on our TV at that time. [Lee laughs] So comics really were our culture. That’s what we did. LEE: In fact, I vividly remember the cable man drilling through the window sill to bring the first cable into the house, where we got as many as, what, eight or ten channels?

MM: Give me a sense of when you first started paying attention to comics and who the comics artists were?

MM: So comic books were always in your house. Were they Marvels, DCs, the typical stuff that most of us read at the time?

LEE: I paid attention early on because I wanted to do everything my older brothers did, and they liked comics, so I picked it up by osmosis. It was really two interests: comics and drawing. Back further than I can remember, apparently my dad would stick crayons in my hand. And a little later than that, I remember the Kirby and Ditko conversations between my brothers.

LEE: There seemed to be boxes and boxes of every kind of comic book, and I enjoyed them all: war comics, mystery comics, even Richie Rich comics and Gold Key Star Trek comics. It just seems there was a plethora of genres available. And I loved all the variety. But certainly the ones that seemed to have a higher value to my older brothers, and so to me, were the Marvel and DC titles.

MM: Context, here: We’re talking 1960s. You and I both grew up in Maine, and comics were just a huge part of the culture. It’s just what kids read, and you certainly had older brothers, so you had tons of comics around the house.

MM: Were you guys serious collectors? LEE: I wasn’t at first, but my two oldest brothers, 6

Malcolm and Eric, were. The middle brother, Mark, he probably read them second-hand, more like myself, and then my little brother, Dean, picked them up, too. I remember Eric’s collection more than Malcolm’s. Mal’s actually gotten back into it the last couple years. Eric had a pretty substantial collection but sold it in the mid-’70s for a song to a guy with a mail order business. He got nowhere near what they were worth, but he needed to buy books for school, so he sold his collection. He had some vintage comics, and they were bagged. He used to get his supplies from that same guy, so I think that’s why he thought to sell him the books. MM: Did they go and find these, or did they buy them off the stands? LEE: Bought off the stands. [laughs] Malcolm’s first book off the stands was Spider-Man #24. At one point Eric wanted to go back and get Amazing Fantasy #15. No, no, no, excuse me. It’s the other way around, I’m getting them mixed up. He traded one of his copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 for a new copy of Superman. MM: Oh, my. Didn’t one of your brothers have three copies of Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man? LEE: I think so. That’s what I understand. MM: One got traded away, just traded for some routine comic book. Didn’t another one end up, like, in a scrapbook? LEE: One was burned by Dad. I don’t know if it was the Seduction of the Innocent effect or what, but I think there were a lot of comics burned back then. I used to think it was pretty unique to us, but I’ve heard of others since. MM: Wow. Can you talk about some of the characters you saw? You remember the

Fantastic Four, you remember Spider-Man. What sort of impression did these stories, these characters, leave on you? LEE: Just huge. I mean, they were just tremendous stories, especially for an entry-level young child to read. Wonderful morality plays with very simple yet multi-dimensional characters, simply executed. Clear-cut themes, as in SpiderMan, “With great power must also come great responsibility.” You know, I haven’t really drifted back and thought of this stuff a lot, but I remember lots of energy... and goodness. MM: If I were to ask you memorable comic stories from your youth, what would they be? LEE: Spidey #33 and FF #51. Spidey #33 was “The Final Chapter.” Just a great story—still is. Some others, I’m not sure how much I’m remembering from early childhood, or if it’s more from re-reading them as an older teenager. I can tell you one of the first comics I felt was distinctly my own, and not a second-hand comic, was 7

Previous Page: “Prior to recently finding this drawing of Captain America done in 1967 at age 4, my earliest surviving drawing was from about 1972.” Above: “Hallowell, Maine, or as I sometimes call it, ‘Mayberry North.’ The building at the far left is Boynton’s, and about eight doors or so down used to be Curtis’ Pharmacy, where we bought all our comics growing up.” Left: “A pencil portrait of Dad drawn as a Mother’s Day present in 1983 at age 20.” Captain America ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Part 2:

Law and Spirit— An Artist’s Education And I’m not sure anybody around me was equipped to help me if I had asked.

MM: What made you make the leap that you did when you went off to the Portland School of Art and started your formal art education?

MM: What was your experience like when you got there?

LEE: I pretty much knew I was going to go to art school after the accident. I had a sense this is what I’m supposed to do. I was happy about it, and though it would be another 20 years before I began walking with Him, I felt like God had spared me, and I had a sense— albeit a vague one— there was a purpose. I think about halfway through my senior year of high school I made the decision to go to Portland. I put together a portfolio, mostly a bunch of unfinished drawings. Specifically I remember sketching the potbellied coal stove from our kitchen and a few other things just to have something other than comic pages and portraits in my portfolio.

LEE: Oh, it was incredible. As much as I loved growing up in my tiny town of Hallowell, we had very limited experiences in terms of cultural diversity. Completely rich in character for what it was, but all of it within a particular bandwidth on the dial. Portland was an avant garde school with its share of esoteric characters. It was the biggest cultural shift in my life to that point, and there were things going on at home that made it tough. Again, I don’t remember there being anybody around me to sit me aside and say, “This is what to expect.” There wasn’t on-campus housing. For the first couple months, I tried living all by myself, but I didn’t like that at all. I thought it would be the greatest, being by myself. I think growing up with four brothers and all these friends around, being suddenly alone was not easy. Then around November, there were three guys that lost a fourth roommate. They were looking for somebody to take that fourth spot, and asked me, so I jumped at it. That ended up having its own craziness, but still, there was a lot of fun.

MM: Did you go off to Portland with a sense that you were going to go there and get a formal education, but a commercial career in comics is really what you had in mind?

MM: This had to be an eye-opening experience just artistically, everything you were exposed to, from your roommates to your educators. What was it like?

LEE: No question, Tom, long-term I wanted the comics career. I didn’t know when it was going to happen. I was trying to chase the dream, but be responsible, too, and I knew there were jobs to be had in graphic design, and you could make a living doing that. Honestly, there are many questions that I should have asked, and I didn’t.

LEE: I couldn’t make sense of it at first, very honestly. The focus was entirely abstract, which I knew nothing about. I 20

had some drawing chops for a kid my age, but in class after class, there was no interest in the classical or academic approach—no anatomy, proportion, etc. I didn’t know what to make of it. I remember one day in particular in life drawing, I was nailing this figure, and the teacher just kind of walked by, and the person next to me was working from the same figure and drawing something that, no exaggeration, looked like a crumpled up brown paper bag. There was nothing in it to even remotely suggest he was drawing a human. And she walked past me and stopped at his paper bag drawing and said, “Oh, my, this is marvelous.” She fawned over it, and I became confused, like everyone was in on the joke except me. I hid my interest in comics for the most part. A couple of my roommates were kind of into it, but that was about it, at least for the first semester. The idea behind the school was the first two years was what they called the foundation program: two years of basically unlearning everything you knew. Instead of being focused on representational ideas, ideas of making something look like something, they wanted to tear that all down, so we would focus on the abstract principles that go into making any picture work, whether it’s a photograph, a drawing, whatever it is... a sculpture. And it’s true, what makes a picture work are its underlying abstract principles, not so much the subject matter. But, I’m not sure I agree with the approach that wipes out all classical instruction during that period. It should incorporate both. Although I greatly appreciate it now, I certainly didn’t understand it at 19... not initially. I remember something finally clicking while working on an

assignment for my two-dimensional design class. I was looking at some comics one night, and trying to make a connection, looking at some “Kirby Krackle,” which is that wonderful cosmic effect with all the dots Jack used so often so well. I was looking at the Kirby Krackle and it kind of opened me up a bit. “Oh, I think I kind of get it. Look at these varying shapes and spaces, and repeating forms. That’s really what he’s doing.” And it’s just another thing that makes Kirby so great, among many other things: His drawings work so beautifully abstractly. Turn a page upside-down and, without even knowing what’s going on, there’s all this excitement on the page. So, I was doing an abstract assignment. It was just some repeating forms and various sizes and shapes and trying to create tension and stuff—working out the “figure/ground relationship,” and I thought

Previous Page: 1983 self-portrait in charcoal done from the mirror, at age 20. Below: Cover pencils for Stan Lee Meets the Thing, complete with Kirby Krackle. “Finally, I get to work with Stan Lee. This cover is a complete ape of FF #51, with Stan playing all the non-Thing roles. I suggested the cover copy, ‘This Stan, This Monster’.” Fantastic Four, Thing ™ and ©2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Two-page spread for Marvel’s black-&white Destroyer magazine. “Destroyer could have been a lot more fun than it was, but working with Will Murray, who was also writing the novels at the time, was great.” Next Page: Page 2 splash of Daredevil #297, the first part of, “The Fall of the Kingpin” storyline. “Playing with the blacks in DD’s costume is one of the things—along with the sheer simplicity of it—that makes drawing him so much fun.”

In February of 1990 a bomb went off when Tish and I learned she was pregnant with Vaughn, our first daughter. Actually, I got the call from the doctor and gave my wife the news—which was funny, that I knew before her. And it was like a bomb— a good bomb—went off. I was so out of my mind, bouncing off the walls. Life changed in an instant... forever. And it was the joy of what we were about to be blessed with that made me realize my career wasn’t going the way I had hoped it would. Frankly, I remember a specific conversation I had with myself where I asked, “How did you get here? How did something that you loved to do more than anything else become so unsatisfying?” And I just kind of took inventory and realized I wasn’t doing what I had sought to do. It’s pretty exciting to have an idea, a vision, and then see your vision come to fruition. But I just kind of accepted assignments, and waited for someone else to offer me the right gig. Anyway, I sat in my living room one night, just a couple days after finding out about the baby on the way. I sat with a sketchbook 46

determined to find out what it was I wanted to draw, whatever that was. And, within five or ten minutes, I was doing lots of sketches of Daredevil, and I thought, “The next time I go in, I’m going to ask to draw Daredevil.” And that was the beginning of a very big change in my work, my career, my outlook, and everything. MM: That’s right, and you did a bunch of G.I. Joe covers, and some interiors, right? LEE: I did one story and about a year-anda-half worth of covers. And what’s interesting about that is Larry Hama enters the picture again. I had a couple of neat conversations with him where he gave me some tremendous advice, and I put it to work right off the bat in the issue of G.I. Joe I drew, which I completed in about three weeks. For me, that was blazingly fast, and it was pretty fun. But the real turning point up to that point was learning we were going to have a baby. It just changed everything. I didn’t get into this to do it halfway, and I didn’t want to do it halfway anymore.

Part 4:

...And Breaking Out Dave’s work was so beautiful and beautifully simple. Our book, Fall of the Kingpin, was a sequel in that it dealt with some things from the Born Again storyline, turning the tables on the Kingpin.

MM: Where did Daredevil come from? Because I don’t remember that ever being a character that you talked about a whole lot, or expressed a whole lot of interest in. LEE: Totally from the Frank Miller run in the mid-’80s, just coming out of the low period when I wasn’t drawing. When I worked at the 7-11 we would tear the covers off the magazines for returns, back in the old days of newsstand distribution, and that was when Frank’s “Born Again” storyline was coming out. I so related to that story. And still do, even more profoundly so in some ways today. People call these things funny books, but that story really had an impact on me. And I fell in love with the character, with his struggle to do the right thing. It really meant something to him to do the right thing, and there’s a great moment when he’s holding Karen Page as she is going through heroin withdrawal, and he’s thinking about all the stuff that he’s lost, running through it all—job, money, relationships, etc.—but ultimately says, “I’ve lost nothing.” He ends up realizing he lost all fear when he lost all hope. Though I don’t agree with that particular line, certainly life, though lived through the material, is beyond material. It’s something much deeper than that. MM: Well, talk about what goes around, comes around, didn’t you ultimately end up drawing a cover for a Born Again trade paperback? LEE: No, that was actually the final four issues of Daredevil that I drew, #297 to #300. It’s a sort of sequel to, although I wouldn’t in any way try to suggest that it belongs on the same bookshelf as, Born Again. I am in awe of what Frank and Dave Mazzucchelli did. 47

Part 5:

Jungles of Green and Concrete LEE: Leading up to that project, I always felt like the pages rarely came out just as I’d like them to. If out of 22 pages, I could get one or two pages to the point I could say, “Yeah! That’s what I’m trying to do,” that would make the job a success for me. If that happened once or twice an issue, I was thrilled. I had an idea of what I was trying to do, but didn’t have the mastery over the skills to pull it off consistently—still don’t, but much less so then. By the time I got to Daredevil #300, I started to have more, “yeah” pages. Possibly that was a function of drawing under such deadline pressure that I worked faster and got more of a flow. With Predator/Magnus, I was given the time to do it, and consequently it was the first job where, page in and page out, I was hitting my marks more consistently. I was also exploring a lot of things that I’d not drawn much of before— futuristic settings, the tall spires, the cities—yet trying to give it a more grounded feel than maybe it had had in the past in Magnus, Robot Fighter.

MM: You left Daredevil and signed on with Dark Horse to do that Predator/Magnus, but, really, the early part of the ’90s was a lot about you just sinking your teeth into various special projects. Is that fair to say?

LEE: Yeah, the entire decade was special projects, jumping around. On the one hand, it makes it hard for the ever-changing fan base to figure out who you are. People think you’re either the new guy coming in, or a really old guy just coming back. But I kind of liked it that way. I just wanted to do the stuff that excited me. Actually, I’d never heard of Magnus before I took on that job. MM: Oh, you didn’t remember that from the Gold Key comics when we were kids? LEE: No. I had no memory of it whatsoever. I mean, I may have seen it. I saw so many comics, growing up. My first memory of Magnus, however, was when I did that job. The original concept was actually Magnus/Terminator. That’s what they were trying to get done, but weren’t able to work out all the licensing, so having a framework for a story— or maybe they redid the whole story—they ended up doing Predator/Magnus instead.

MM: What did you use for reference, there? Did you have the Valiant stuff that was out? Did you go back and look at some of the Russ Manning material from Gold Key? LEE: I’m sure I looked at it some, but not a lot. As far as my feel for that kind of world, I thought more like Blade Runner... and Moebius. That’s what I remember

MM: Your memories of the work? 58

most. I loved dirtying things up a little bit, especially as we would go from the higher parts, the penthouses where these Elites lived, the hunters that were out trying to hunt the Predator, from there down into the belly of the beast, the lower parts of the city, I really tried to show a lot of chipped paint, rubble, rust, dust the deeper we went. MM: Is that the first major project that you penciled and inked? LEE: Yeah, I think I inked just those first couple jobs, the job with you, the job with Bruce Jones, some short stories. I penciled and inked my first issue of Justice and, I think, my last two or three issues of Justice. And a smattering of pages here and there, a short story here and there. Yeah, this would definitely have been the first big thing that I penciled and inked.

MM: Did you go right from that to doing the Predator/Tarzan series with Walt Simonson? LEE: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s where the bookshelf with Captain America and Ghost Rider comes in, and the Gambit mini-series, after which I did Tarzan. MM: Oh, that’s right. There was a Gambit mini-series that Klaus Janson inked, right? LEE: That’s right, written by Howard Mackie, who also wrote the Captain America/Ghost Rider bookshelf. MM: That was called Fear. LEE: That’s right. And, actually, the Gambit mini-series may have come before Fear. They kind of blur together for me. MM: Again, it’s part of this period where 59

Previous Page: Magnus trading card art. The cards were stapled into issues of the Predator vs. Magnus, Robot Fighter mini-series. Above: Pages 12 and 13 from Predator vs. Magnus, Robot Fighter #1. Magnus, Robot Fighter ™ and ©2008 Random House, Inc. Predator ™ and ©2008 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

Right: Panel from Batman Chronicles #1. Below: Pencils for page 7 of Batman Chronicles #1. Next Page: Cover art for Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet. “Another pal from the Duck Soup days, Bruce Canwell, wrote The Gauntlet—one of my favorite gigs ever. Bruce is associate editor of The Library of American Comics, which is producing the Terry and the Pirates six-volume collection. Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Robin ™ and ©2008 DC Comics.

using it for. And then there are guys, actually, maybe just one guy. He might be the only one, a guy like Sienkiewicz, who starts with a tight pencil job like what I did on Batman Chronicles, and these pages come back with all these Sienkiewicz-isms on it. There was no question that Bill inked it. And yet, I’m looking at it, and my jaw’s hanging, because at the same time, it still looks like my drawing, and yet it’s this other thing. He understands my line better than me. He knows what to preserve and what he can play with so that it’s obvious Sienkiewicz had done it, but it still looks as if I drew it. I just—it blew me away. He’s got a special gift. MM: And what a kick that must have been, because I can remember being a teenager with you and looking at Moon Knight as

Sienkiewicz sort of evolved over that, especially just before he left the book, when he really had just hit a new plane. LEE: Well, going back to an earlier part of the discussion, one of my earliest memories of Sienkiewicz was while in my hospital bed. I think that’s where I saw the issues he inked of FF, which was such a dramatic departure from the Fantastic Four’s look. But he inked a couple issues, didn’t he? Or he penciled them. But I remember it was hard for me to see his style. I was a kid, and I was looking at things more superficially back then. But, yeah, I just really didn’t appreciate what a phenomenal talent he is. Back then he would have been not much.... MM: Not much older than us, but seemed much older. LEE: Yeah, he must have been 22 or 23 at the time. He was just a kid. 68

Part 6:

Picking up the Gauntlet

MM: There are two things that stand out for me in that period. One would be the Thing black-&-white story that you wrote and drew for Marvel, and the other would be Batman Chronicles: The Gauntlet, that you did with Bruce Canwell. What do you remember about The Gauntlet? How it got pitched, and how you got the momentum behind it. How did the project initiate? LEE: Y’know, I always tell people I’ve gained more of my understanding of storytelling from conversations with Bruce than just about any other person. In one of those conversations it just came up that I wanted to do something with him.

He had a story I thought was exceptional. What a great idea, that Robin would be put to a final test before Batman would allow him to become his full-fledged sidekick. MM: And, just to clarify, we’re talking about Dick Grayson here—the original Robin. LEE: The original Robin, right. Obviously, you avoid putting a year to something like that, but Dick Grayson was put through basically a test that consisted of a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek. I loved it. When you can clearly pitch a concept in a couple sentences, the idea is strong. And one thing that I think I’ve had a knack for is, when I’m really excited by something, I can usually get other people excited about it, with the work. But that was easy to pitch. They approved it pretty much immediately. MM: How’d you work on that? Did Bruce send you a detailed plot? Did you work from a script? LEE: I think it was a very detailed plot containing some script. Actually, it was a pretty organic process. There were lots of things that would come to my mind as I was drawing scenes, and I’d call up Bruce and talk with him. But the skeleton, the spine of the story idea was so strong that there existed a flexibility. When your target is so clear it makes things easy and fun. MM: How large of a story did you have at that point? LEE: It’s a 48-page bookshelf. It was done under the umbrella of the Batman Chronicles. It was very satisfying working up the cover. I put some people that we know into the book. There’s a bridge scene that I had a lot of fun working out, due in part to the bridge being based on the Hill to Hill Bridge in the next town over in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It’s probably the most intelligent story I’ve ever

Part 7: Re-Birth MM: Talk a little bit about some of the work you’ve done this decade, because it’s been, again, special projects spread throughout. Certainly Captain America was a big one, but there have been some others, as well.

LEE: I’ve had a couple of runs on Hulk, and there was the “Cap Lives Again” storyline I did with Dave Gibbons, among other things. Somewhere in there, back in the ’90s, when Marvel was shutting down Daredevil so they could restart him under the Marvel Knights imprint, they asked Dan Chichester and myself to come back and do the final issue of the first volume of Daredevil.

MM: How did that feel for you, going back to Daredevil and working with Dan again after the intervening years?

LEE: I said no, at first. I didn’t want to repeat myself. Then Dan called, I think, once or twice, and he changed my mind, which I’m happy for, and happy with the way it came out. Robert Campanella inked it, and he did a terrific job. It was like coming back to an old friend. To this day, Daredevil is comfortably easy to draw. I just feel like I know that person, both in and out of costume, pretty well. It was a lot of fun doing that job. MM: What have been the most fun jobs you’ve worked on in recent years? LEE: Boy, it’s so different now. A couple days ago I put the finishing touches on Captain Marvel, and, in many ways, that’s been an incredibly satisfying project, with a few bumps in the road.

Around the middle of it, we changed inkers. In most cases, the job on the board usually becomes my favorite. I really get into what it is I’m doing at the time. I loved doing the Captain America stuff with Gibbons and Palmer. It was very, very intense. I keep copies of all my pencils, and sometimes I go back and look at those. One of the things that is most memorable to me was the premise being that it’s an alternate history, an alternate reality. It’s some kind of a different time stream where Cap is found floating in the block of ice, à là Avengers #4, only, instead of the Avengers finding him, he is plucked from the freeze only to find himself on a Nazi sub. He’s brought back to headquarters, which are in Manhattan, only Manhattan has been Nazi-fied, which is revealed in a double-page spread—maybe the most ambitious one I’ve ever tackled. It’s actually Manhattan,

but with some additions and changes. The Nazis had won World War II in this time stream and taken over the world, so we had things like the Albert Speer Dome, the Reichstag building in this skyline shot. I threw in a nod to one of the prominent buildings from the Fritz Lang German expressionist movie, Metropolis, and a few other things. But just creating this Nazi version of Manhattan, lots of zeppelins, dirigibles floating around—it was a real challenge MM: You generally haven’t inked your work the past few years, have you? LEE: Just some short stories here and there. I did some stuff for “Civil War,” a continuing short story run in Frontline, called “Sleeper Cell,” and I inked some if it, not all of it. Just some little things here and there. 81

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Modern Masters Vol. 17: Lee Weeks