Absolute Batman: Hush--Talking with Jim Lee
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Nov. 29, 2005 Sign up now!
By Kai-Ming Cha -- Publishers Weekly, 11/29/2005
When Jim Lee was a student at Princeton University, his parents wanted him to become a doctor. Instead, he's became one of the most beloved and famed artists of superhero comics. DC has just released Absolute Hush, a hardcover collection of Lee's popular Batman project with longtime DC writer Jeph Loeb.
Hush is a big book. What do you think of this new format?
It's the way the story was meant to be presented. As an artist you want to showcase your work in the best possible light. We draw twice up the size of a regular comic so the book that came out is as close to what the original looks like without going up to 100%, which would be a huge unwieldy book. This is the complete story. It's the one I'm most proud of.
You have no formal art training. Instead of art school, you went to Princeton.
I was a psych major at Princeton and I was going to apply to medical school. My senior year I took art classes taught by New York City abstract expressionist artists. The way they would talk about art and the fact that they were making their livelihood from their passion was very inspiring.
Probably my single biggest love, my passion, was for comic books. I sat down and drew my portfolio that summer after I graduated. It took about three months of sending in submissions and it was really going nowhere, so I went to a convention in New York and showed my stuff to an editor at Marvel. They gave me a try-out story, and that's what got me in the door.
It seemed like a real pipe dream at the time. Here I took all these classes, spent all this money on a formal education and now I want to draw guys in tights saving the world. There's not a career path laid out for you, but that's what I liked about it. I wanted to get into the real world and work. I didn't want to do another four years of school, two years of residency or specialization. So there was a certain amount of impatience on my part.
You've been on both sides of the board—penciling for Marvel and then starting up Image Comics and Wildstorm. [Lee cofounded Image Comics after leaving Marvel in 1992. He also founded Wildstorm Comics around that time and sold the company to DC Comics in 1998]. So what's better, publishing or creating?
They definitely exercise different parts of the brain and fulfill the different needs that I have. Drawing is a solitary experience—not having stimuli around you is more conducive to getting your work done, whereas publishing is all about networking, talking to people, collaborating and moving projects along. I sold my company [Wildstorm] to DC, and it allowed me to do both. Before, because I was the sole owner, the buck stops here. It was hard to find time and escape from publishing responsibilities for artistic pursuits. After I sold my company, I was able to get back out there, and that was very gratifying. Actually, Hush was the first big project I did when I made that transition.
Did you feel anxious about working on Batman?
The biggest challenge of Batman wasn't what he was going to look like—I was pretty clear on that—it was making the deadlines. I hadn't done a lot of monthly work up to that point. So getting back, sitting at the table—eight to 10 hours a day, every day, working by myself off Jeph's scripts—it was a big change.
Hollywood is often turning to comics for inspiration these days. What do you think of superhero movies, merchandising and all the different tie-ins?
Well, after Batman Begins [the movie], Converse approached DC and asked me to do a Jim Lee line of Converse shoes, which is pretty flattering. So you can badmouth all the ancillary stuff, but at the same time, if they're going to produce the Converse Batman Jim Lee shoe, that's pretty kick-ass.
So what's the Jim Lee plan for the future?
I've mapped it out for the next four years—that's the length of my contract. I do want to write original stories; the distribution is there. Maybe something biographical like Jewish baseball players, post-Depression. But right now I also have the opportunity to work on heroes from my childhood, so I want to do that while I still have the passion and enthusiasm for those stories.
Right now there's a certain number of pages in me. Drawing a page takes six to eight hours. I'm never going to draw a page in one hour. You figure 250 pages per year—that's 12 stories. The physical capacity, the variables involved—right now I'm running on all cylinders. At some point it would be good to slow down. But I say that every year.
