I rarely draw myself, in general, and if I do, I tend to do little cute manga-esque, almost bite-sized drawings of myself.
— Jim Lee
There is the intent of the writer and the interpretation by the artist. What the writer intended and what the artist interprets is not a 1-to-1 translation. It's a crossing of ideas that generates the stories that you see in print.
There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.
Any time you change something classic or iconic, you're going to have some part of the fan base up in arms.
Superman tends to stand very upright, and he's very symmetrical, and those are actually the most difficult poses for me to draw.
I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions - I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don't always see that in other artists.
The thing that weighs the most on how your final artwork turns out is the amount of time you have and the speed at which you can move.
Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.
It's interesting - a lot of what you accomplish in your lifetime either as an individual or as a company is determined by other people. I mean, you can do interview after interview and defend a point of view, but more often than not, the collective kind of opinion will be the one viewed historically and taken as gospel.
As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.
I think sometimes with new characters, you can kind of hit a creative valley, and it's important to recognize when you're in that valley so you can get back out and get back to that peak.
Costumes are all about identifying which force in a conflict you're on. That's where banners and flags came from - so people rushing into battle knew who to follow and who was on their side.
I don't buy comics anymore, for the most part. I eat my lunch off of them.
Wonder Woman is a lot of fun to draw.
I don't think you can measure your love or your passion for whatever you're working on.
I don't think you can be a comic book fan and not hate change.
'The Dark Knight,' 'The Rocketeer' and definitely the first 'Superman' movie by Richard Donner are the best. I tend to be softer in my judgment about what's a bad movie - I don't think anyone intends to make a bad movie, and sometimes it just doesn't click for some reason.
As a gamer, I like to go up and look at people's faces and see how good of a job they did.
Creating and producing creative work, to me, those are all happy accidents.
I think when you're knee-deep in coming up with editorial plans, the desire to sit down and pencil something is pretty strong.
So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.
Superman is the hardest character to draw. There are a couple of things that make him difficult. He's got a very simple costume and doesn't have the long cape like Batman. He's not a character that is necessarily always in shadow, and he doesn't have a mask.
One of the reasons I never had a problem handing over my characters to other creators is that I knew that they would add their own influences and takes on the characters and make them better for it.
I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.
I love the fact that I get something new to do almost every day and have new challenges.
More often than not, the fans really gravitate towards who's on the cover as opposed to how it's drawn or how it's composed, and so, a lot of the time, what an artist likes will be very different from what a fan likes.
I always figured Metropolis was north of New York, actually. Between New York and Boston, in my mind.
As lifelong fans of comic books, Dan Didio and myself, we definitely have our own takes on what make for successful comics and the kind of comics that we want to publish.
The way you challenge Superman is by having things happen very, very quickly in different places and then asking, 'Who does he save first? What powers must he use to save each person or stop each disaster?' That's one of the ways you make him interesting beyond the thematic and moral issues that make Superman.
I paint in acrylic and sometimes in oil. Sometimes I'll paint my kids. And I'll occasionally do some photography.
I want all my stuff to be converted into digital format so I can have my reference library to carry with me wherever I go.
If you look at the great superheroes in any universe, you will always find that they have the very best super villains opposing them. It's because they are foils; they are people that the heroes play off of.
Most video games, you build up toward the big, bad boss. And it's just a bigger, more powerful version of what you've been fighting all along in the game.
As a kid, I loved the whimsical Superman and Batman stuff, and as a teenager, Marvel was more angsty, and that appealed to me. Marvel dealt with more stuff I could relate to as a teenager.
I played a little bit of 'City of Heroes' - they have a really great character generation system. I was pretty impressed with that. I played 'World of Warcraft' with my kids. That's a lot of fun.
I think there's a responsibility of the publisher, of the company, to make sure the staple books that have been around for decades come out in a timely manner.
Once I started down the path of co-founding Image Comics, and even co-publisher, it just seems a lot more like a career path that isn't that atypical for someone with a college degree. Whereas, someone who draws comic books as a freelancer and lives from job to job is a more unusual story.
The first time I drew a Superman story was 'For Tomorrow' with Brian Azzarello in 2004. It didn't really hit me how important it was until I drew a scene early-on in the book that featured Superman crossing paths with a giant, intergalactic space armada.
I tend not to look at my work after I've done it. In fact, the only time I typically get to review it is when the fans bring up comics at shows, and I kind of flip through it and be like, 'Oh, I remember doing this!'
'The Authority,' by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, really pioneered the widescreen, action-packed style of storytelling.
In the '50s, a lot of stories were built around radiation and the proliferation of new technology. In the '70s, there were a lot of stories that dealt with the Vietnam War. So comic books have always been a reflection of the times we live in.
The downside to becoming a doctor, I think, is it's a very long process; four years of medical school, three years of internship, two years of residency, umpteen years of specialization, and then finally you get to be what you have trained almost all your life for.
I've been trying to make this argument that digital comics and print comics are both art, but there are subtle differences.
There's an obvious marketing component to doing something digitally where you're reaching out to new readers that you can't do in the existing print marketplace, or that it's difficult to do in the existing print marketplace.
Part of running DC Comics is that it's much larger than Image Comics is, or was. There's a challenge to being one of the industry leaders in that everything you do is scrutinized and watched.
I think the very simplest way to show Superman's power is to have him punch someone that's powerful.
Even today, a lot of the CGI you see in movies is so clean and crisp that it just looks fake. It's weird: the more advanced they get, the faker it looks.
I have to say, self-servingly, I downloaded my own comics. I downloaded 'Batman: Hush.'
When you try to do something bigger and more grandiose, a lot of times it's more apt to fall apart. It's a lot easier to lay down a bunch of singles than it is to get a home run.
The video game market is huge, and the ability to tell stories, and tell different kinds of stories in the gaming space is quickly evolving and changing for the better.
