Jim Lee

Jim Lee is an American comic book artist and publisher. He is the founder of Wildstorm Productions and a co-founder of Image Comics. Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1964 and grew up in the United States. Lee attended Princeton University and majored in psychology with the intention of becoming a medical doctor. However, towards the end of college, he decided to follow his interests in art instead and pursued a career in comic book illustration.

Although he originally began his career as an inker, Lee found success at Marvel Comics as the penciller of its best-selling title, Uncanny X-Men, during 1990-1992. His artwork quickly gained enthusiastic fan popularity, which led to the creation of a new and successful spin-off series in 1991, simply titled X-Men. At first he only drew the titles, then eventually took over the plotting as well (one of the issues that led to the departure of long-time X-Men writer Chris Claremont in 1991). Other Marvel titles Lee worked on prior to the X-books included Alpha Flight and Punisher War Journal.

In 1992, Lee was one of the original seven artists who broke away from Marvel to form their own company, Image Comics (the others being Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane and Whilce Portacio). Lee's group of titles was christened Wildstorm, and became one of the company's more successful imprints, publishing books such as WildC.A.T.s and Gen 13.

Lee returned briefly to Marvel during 1996-1997 to plot a year's worth of issues of Fantastic Four and Iron Man; he also pencilled the former. These were part of a major revamp for Marvel's characters known as Heroes Reborn, with Rob Liefeld revamping Captain America and The Avengers. Shortly after his Marvel projects he worked on an original mini-series called Divine Right.

In late 1998 Lee left Image Comics, selling Wildstorm to DC Comics. By now Lee's job as publisher had mostly precluded any art jobs. In 2003, however, he collaborated on a year's worth of Batman stories with writer Jeph Loeb that became a runaway sales success. In 2004 he began a year's stint on Superman, this time with writer Brian Azzarello.

Jim Lee's artwork is known for being detailed, dynamic, and stylized. Since their time at Marvel Comics, he and the Image founders have drawn comics in a way that is loosely categorized as the "Image style". His particular drawing style was often imitated by younger artists throughout the 1990's. Lee's work is inked most often by long-time collaborator Scott Williams.