Jim Lee (born August 11, 1964) is an American comic book artist and publisher. He is known for his stylized, detailed and dynamic style. Some have called his work bombastic but he remains one of the most popular illustrators in comics.

In the early 1990s, Lee became an industry superstar without precedent for his work on Marvel Comics’ X-Men franchise. He later founded Wildstorm Productions, an imprint of the creator-owned Image Comics, which was moderately successful. Most recently, he has done acclaimed artwork for classic DC Comics properties Batman and Superman.

History

Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1964, but grew up in the United States. Lee attended Princeton University and majored in psychology with the intention of becoming a medical doctor in 1986, but decided to pursue a career in comic book illustration instead

Although he began his career as an inker, Lee found success at Marvel Comics as a penciller. His early Marvel work included Alpha Flight and Punisher War Journal.

In 1989, he filled in for regular illustrator Marc Silvestri on an issue of the best-selling series Uncanny X-Men and became its regular artist when Silvestri left in 1990. During his stint on Uncanny X-Men, Lee first worked with inker Scott Williams, who would become a long-time collaborator.

Lee’s artwork quickly gained enthusiastic fan popularity, which allowed him to gain greater creative control of the franchise. In 1991, Lee stayed-on as co-writer of Uncanny X-Men while illustrating a second series simply called X-Men, co-written by Lee and long-time X-Men scribe Chris Claremont (although Claremont clashed with Lee and left after issue #3). Lee also designed new uniforms for characters such as Cyclops, Gambit, Jean Grey, Rogue, Psylocke and Storm, creating the images that an entire generation of X-Men readers would associated with the characters. X-Men #1 still is the best-selling comic book of all-time, although variant covers illustrated by Lee caused many fans to buy several editions of the comic book.

In 1992, Lee was one of seven artists who broke away from Marvel to form Image Comics (the others were Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen , Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane and Whilce Portacio ). Lee's group of titles was christened Wildstorm and published books such as The Authority, Gen 13, and Lee’s pet title WildC.A.T.s, which was adapted into a short-lived cartoon series. Like most Image properties, these series were criticized for emphasizing art over story-telling (although not to the degree Liefeld’s were), but sold well.

Lee and Liefled returned to Marvel in 1996 to launch a revamp of classic characters known as Heroes Reborn. While Liefeld reworked Captain America and The Avengers, Lee wrote Iron Man and wrote and illustrated The Fantastic Four. Both of Lee's series were moderate successes.

Shortly afterwards, he worked on an original mini-series called Divine Right, in which an internet slacker downloads secrets of the universe and is thrown into a wild fantasy world.

In late 1998 Lee left Image Comics, selling Wildstorm to DC Comics. Lee's career as a publisher had mostly precluded any art jobs and he desired to return to his roots as an illustrator. In 2003 he collaborated on a year's worth of Batman stories with writer Jeph Loeb that became a runaway sales success (See Batman: Hush). In 2004 he began a year's stint on Superman, with writer Brian Azzarello.

Jim Lee is not related to fellow comic book artist Jae Lee.