Yet I've recently begun to look at some even-earlier Jae Lee art, from his very first major comic book assignment: the 1990 John Byrne revamp of Namor, the Sub-Mariner, which Lee began drawing in 1992, reportedly devising his own layouts from Byrne's plot outlines, which were then scripted over by Byrne and Joey Cavalieri. Not unreasonably, these early '90s works are typically dismissed as fashionable juvenilia fittingly, Lee was barely into his 20s at the time. As a result, Ozymandias was the only segment of that misbegotten project to feature art that was not only slick, or professional, but openly conversant enough with the order and symmetry favored by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons to depart meaningfully from the original text.Īs with many readers, I initially felt this approach marked a major departure from Lee's prior works, which tended to favor more photo-real figures gesturing vigorously against stage-like horizons this itself was whittled down from the more evidently labor-intensive crowding of Lee's pages with colorist José Villarrubia in such late '90s/millennial works as Inhumans and The Sentry, which grew out of the ganglier, over-stylized musculature of Image revolution miniseries like Youngblood: Strikefile and WildC.A.T.s: Trilogy. I mean, sure - why not include a moment of portraiture for Pa Kent and his weird hands in the midst of Batman/Superman #2, a Greg Pak-written team-up comic that would doubtlessly carry less charge if divorced from the very specific visual style Lee has devised with colorist June Chung, a simplification of the approach the duo brought to Before Watchmen: Ozymandias: figure work derived from early 20th century illustration, explicitly *posed* in and out of shadow against stylized, often sparse arrangements of background silhouettes, with frames arranged in symmetrical, circular patterns.

Features THIS WEEK IN COMICS! (7/31/13 – Number Two in Superhero Fiction)Ībove we see a typically curious isolated frame from artist Jae Lee, one of the most singular talents currently active in superhero comics.

The Blonde Gang Killings by Jae Lee