IPOD
RADIO
Jae Lee
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Dec 5, 2006
Over the past 15 years Jae Lee has become one of the most stylish and innovative comic book artists in recent memory. He burst onto the scene with a stint on Namor the Sub-Mariner and since then has worked on dozens of other books from Fantastic Four to The Sentry to his creator owned Hellshock. But recently Jae Lee has a wild time by throwing himself headfirst into the horror genre by working with two of the great horror creators, by proxy. I use that word because currently he is working on a series of comic book miniseries based on the Stephen King novels The Dark Tower with the legendary Peter David doing the dialogue. But I was lucky enough to get to talk with Lee about his work creating the pictures for The Illustrated Dracula.
Buy The Illustrated Dracula
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did The Illustrated Dracula come to you in the first place?
Jae Lee: I was approached to work on it by my agent. He said that Viking Press was looking to do a series of illustrated classics for a new audience. I thought Dracula was perfect for my style. I spent my career doing gothic artwork and Dracula was definitely the genesis of it all.
DRE:
Have you read Dracula recently?
Jae:
I never read the original Dracula before. When I first started working on this, I thought I could just wing it and base the illustrations on images from the movie. In fact I called up a friend of mine and told him I was working on this project and said “I’m going to illustrate that scene when Dracula is coming out of the coffin on the boat and walking along the top of the boat like in Nosferatu. He’s like “Uh, that scene’s not in the book.” Then I thought “This could be quite embarrassing. I’d better go back and read it just so that I don’t make a fool of myself.” When I started reading it; I really got into it because it’s nothing like what I’ve seen in the movies. For instance, one of the chapters early on where Jonathan Harker is trapped in the castle, I think that part could be an entire movie right there. With the movie, you just can’t really get a sense of what the character is thinking and all the complex emotions that someone feels.
DRE:
Had you ever done a work like this before?
Jae:
I’ve written my own stuff before, but in terms of illustrating a book, this is the first time. It reminded me of when I was in elementary school doing book reports. I’d have to read the book and then instead of writing up what the book was about, I would just do illustrations and get credit. None of the other students were able to do that so the teacher was always impressed by what I did. I would purposely choose such literary classics as the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back. Obviously I wouldn’t have to read it; I could just watch the movie.
DRE:
I know Dracula has been portrayed as bald before but were you trying to come up with something totally new for that character?
Jae:
I went back and forth on this with my editor Rebecca Behan. The description was that Dracula has gray hair and a long silver mustache. I’d seen some illustrations of him before that are faithful to the book and he always looked like some swinger from the 70’s. I just couldn’t make that mustache work. I thought I would just go back to that classic Nosferatu look because that’s the most striking visual. I don’t think anybody could come up with anything that creepy. I know it’s not the way it’s described in the book, but the way I justified it in my mind was that he’s a shapeshifter. He appears differently to everybody so I took some liberties with that.
DRE:
From what I can tell, one of your influences is Mike Mignola.
Jae:
Oh yeah. I loved his stuff.
DRE:
That’s what I figured. He did that great Topps adaptation of [Francis Ford] Coppola’s Dracula. Did you remember that?
Jae:
Yeah, I have those issues. I haven’t looked at Mignola’s stuff in a while but certainly whenever you’re working on a style with high contrast black and white, you can’t help but be influenced by what he’s done.
DRE:
He also did designs for the actual Dracula movie as well. Were you trying to stay away from what he did?
Jae:
I haven’t looked at it since it came out back in the early 90’s. I had no idea he did designs for the movie.
DRE:
The Brides have a bit of an Asian influence. Was that something that you wanted to bring to it?
Jae:
It was totally unconscious. I don’t know if I actually quite see it but I’m sure there’s so many things I do subconsciously that I’m not even aware of. In fact I was just at a signing where someone mentioned that all my characters looked really sad, even Dracula. She said that she actually felt sorry for him and that was the first time she felt that way towards that character. I think I do tend to draw my characters hunched over and looking upset. I have such a hard time drawing people smiling or laughing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
DRE:
Your smiles would look like evil smiles because they’d have the contrast there I think. It’s interesting that you say so much of what you do is unconscious because, just to bring up Mignola again, because Mignola told me that when he was asked to do designs for Atlantis: The Lost Empire he walked into the Disney animators studio, they had his drawings blown up huge and brown down into squares so they could teach all the animators how to draw like him. He said he could never teach anyone how to draw like he does because he just does it. Are you self taught?
Jae:
I’m all self-taught. In fact, it’s funny because one of my best friends is a professor at the Maryland Institute of Art and he can talk about art until he’s blue in the face. But I can’t quite describe some of the things that I do. I don’t know why I do it and he said it’s because it’s just intuitive. It’s not something I can explain because again, I don’t know why I do it. I can see why Mignola can make a comment like that because you either have the design sensory or you don’t. That can’t be taught.
DRE:
Have you always inked your own work?
Jae:
When I first started at Marvel, I was just penciling. This was back in the old newsprint days when not a lot of artists were using heavy shadows. I’d say for most artists, about 20 percent of the page was ink and for me it was more like 80 to 90 percent ink. The ink saturation was so heavy that when it printed, it would be so muddy. All the black ink and the colors would run together. I remember I spent so much time penciling my first page with all this detail and then when the inker went over it, it just got killed and I was really upset. At that point, I was 18 years old and I should have been grateful to be working in comics but for me it just ruined the moment. But they wouldn’t let me ink my work for a little while. Finally I couldn’t handle working with other people anymore. The artwork wasn’t looking the way I envisioned it, so I started practicing my inks and I sent in a sample of my inks and they let me do it.
DRE:
Wow, so you’ve been inking your stuff since almost six months into your career.
Jae:
Right. I’m such a control freak I just couldn’t let it go. Then over the years, I’ve had inkers tell me they would love to work with me but I always say “Thanks but I don’t think so.”
DRE:
For The Illustrated Dracula, how was it working with a writer that didn’t give you notes?
Jae:
I never felt alone because of my editor. We would go back and forth on our ideas. It’s strange working with someone as legendary as Bram Stoker. You almost wonder what he would have thought of it.
DRE:
What’s it like knowing that people might be reading Dracula for the first time with your artwork in there?
Jae:
I think that’s amazing. I would think that if you’re in school and you had to read Dracula and you had a choice between a version without pictures and one with pictures, I think you’d go for the one with pictures.
DRE:
How many drawings are in the book?
Jae:
I think there are 31 drawing with nine chapter-head designs. I originally started the project about two and a half years ago and it took several months. It’s hard to define because to execute the cover took about two days. But just trying to come up with the idea and doing different versions of it, starting it and then scrapping it, and restarting and scrapping it, that’s a long process.
DRE:
What got you into drawing gothic stuff?
Jae:
I’d have to say that when I first started in the early 90’s, the style in comics was superheroes with the big muscles and I wanted to get away from that. I wanted my work to look different and I’ve always been into the darker stuff. I’ve always been drawn to movies where the director has very strong visual presence. When you watch a Ridley Scott movie, you know that’s a Ridley Scott movie just from the color choices and the way it’s lit. Then there are directors that you could replace and you couldn’t tell who directed what. I felt the same way about the art. I didn’t want to be interchangeable with anybody else. I wanted my work to stand out on its own and at the time there weren’t a lot of people doing this style.
DRE:
I was surprised to find out that you were the youngest person to ever work for a major comic book company. Had you done stuff before Namor for Marvel?
Jae:
Marvel Comics Presents was my first job.
DRE:
What character did you draw?
Jae:
It was The Beast. I worked on that for a year and then I worked on Namor. So Namor was actually my first regular assignment but it was my second project.
DRE:
Did you feel like you got dropped in the deep end working with John Byrne for your first regular gig?
Jae:
No, I grew up idolizing his stuff so it was a dream come true. At that point, I never thought I’d be working with a legend like him so it was a surreal moment when the editor, Terry Kavanaugh, and I drove out to Connecticut to meet with him. I got a chance to check out his home and hang out with him for the afternoon.
DRE:
You drew Iron Fist right after Byrne brought him back. Do you have any desire to work on Iron Fist again?
Jae:
I have absolutely no desire to work on him. I was actually supposed to do an Iron Fist series right after Namor, but then I left for Image Comics so that project never happened.
DRE:
I always wondered why they didn’t do anything with Iron Fist after they brought him back.
Jae:
But then I ended up doing some issues of Spider-Man guest starring Iron Fist. Now it’s, a been there, done that kind of thing.
DRE:
When is the finished book of Hellshock coming out?
Jae:
It was supposed to come out about a year and a half ago, but I just got so wrapped up with not knowing how to end it and I was going nuts. But I finally did finish it and it is coming out by the end of the year.
DRE:
Does it wrap it up forever?
Jae:
It’s open ended. I could go back to it if I want to torture myself.
DRE:
I know you’re under contract to Marvel and you’re doing two years worth of the Dark Tower stuff, at least. Do you have a desire to go back to writing when you wrap that up?
Jae:
Possibly. There are some ideas that I have but probably not Hellshock. I have ideas for a shorter storyline that has a beginning and an end. With Hellshock, it was going to be this big epic that was going to last 100 issues or so, but I’m not near ready to tackle something like that.
DRE:
How far are you into Dark Tower?
Jae:
It’s a series of miniseries and right now I’m on the fifth issue of the first miniseries which will be seven issues long. So I’ll be done with the first miniseries before the first issue comes out in February of 2007. The total amount of issues will be 30 so it’s going to be six separate miniseries.
DRE:
Do you have to go to a lot of meetings for this since it’s a licensed project?
Jae:
No and that was one of my fears of starting this project. On one hand, it’s a dream come true. I never ever in my wildest dreams thought I would be working with Stephen King, but on the other hand there is so much pressure. I know how personal and important Dark Tower is to him and he’s been living with these characters for so many years so I didn’t know how he’d feel about the characters being interpreted so literally. In the books, there were some illustrations but they were pretty vague or you just see a couple of the characters. This is the first time that you’re going to be seeing these characters and every corner of that world clearly for the first time. My biggest fear was that it wasn’t going to live up to Stephen King’s expectations. But when Marvel and Stephen King had their first meeting and they had my artwork there, Marvel did say that if he had any feedback in the way the characters looked, please let them know. He quickly stated that when he wrote the description of the characters, he was pretty vague on purpose because he wanted the readers to form their own idea of what these characters should look like, except obviously for Roland who is supposed to look like Clint Eastwood. But in terms of the other characters, however people see it, is the way they should be and he’s very open to any interpretation.
DRE:
Is the violence being toned down?
Jae:
We’re not purposely toning it down. To me, we’re not shooting for a younger audience or anything like that. I’m definitely going to stay faithful to the source material without watering it down. But I was never a big fan of gore anyway. When someone is being disemboweled in a horror movie with an axe and there’s intestines and blood everywhere, that’s not creepy or scary, it just looks silly. With something like Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining where you really don’t see any violence, that’s much more frightening. That’s the aesthetic I like to go with. So for something like this, I think if you show the violence, especially in a comic book, it can look really cartoony. So the less you show, the better.
DRE:
Is Peter David writing full scripts?
Jae:
Normally he does but with this project we’re doing this in the old Marvel style with Stephen King and Robin Furth providing the plot. Then the plots are handed over to me. I draw it out then I send it off to Peter David and he scripts it.
DRE:
Is doing it in that style more nerve-wracking than something like Hellshock?
Jae:
In a sense but at least I have the original Dark Tower books to fall back on. The first miniseries is an adaptation of book four, Wizard and Glass, so I can always fall back on that. If there’s a scene that needs expanding, I can always pull out the book and reference that. Therefore in a sense it is like having a full script, although there is a scene in the comic that is not in the book. But after the first miniseries, that’s a whole different ballgame. We will continue the Roland adventure so I think it’ll be much more challenging.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Over the past 15 years Jae Lee has become one of the most stylish and innovative comic book artists in recent memory. He burst onto the scene with a stint on Namor the Sub-Mariner and since then has worked on dozens of other books from Fantastic Four to The Sentry to his creator owned Hellshock. But recently Jae Lee has a wild time by throwing himself headfirst into the horror genre by working with two of the great horror creators, by proxy. I use that word because currently he is working on a series of comic book miniseries based on the Stephen King novels The Dark Tower with the legendary Peter David doing the dialogue. But I was lucky enough to get to talk with Lee about his work creating the pictures for The Illustrated Dracula.
Buy The Illustrated Dracula
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did The Illustrated Dracula come to you in the first place?
Jae Lee: I was approached to work on it by my agent. He said that Viking Press was looking to do a series of illustrated classics for a new audience. I thought Dracula was perfect for my style. I spent my career doing gothic artwork and Dracula was definitely the genesis of it all.
DRE:
Have you read Dracula recently?
Jae:
I never read the original Dracula before. When I first started working on this, I thought I could just wing it and base the illustrations on images from the movie. In fact I called up a friend of mine and told him I was working on this project and said “I’m going to illustrate that scene when Dracula is coming out of the coffin on the boat and walking along the top of the boat like in Nosferatu. He’s like “Uh, that scene’s not in the book.” Then I thought “This could be quite embarrassing. I’d better go back and read it just so that I don’t make a fool of myself.” When I started reading it; I really got into it because it’s nothing like what I’ve seen in the movies. For instance, one of the chapters early on where Jonathan Harker is trapped in the castle, I think that part could be an entire movie right there. With the movie, you just can’t really get a sense of what the character is thinking and all the complex emotions that someone feels.
DRE:
Had you ever done a work like this before?
Jae:
I’ve written my own stuff before, but in terms of illustrating a book, this is the first time. It reminded me of when I was in elementary school doing book reports. I’d have to read the book and then instead of writing up what the book was about, I would just do illustrations and get credit. None of the other students were able to do that so the teacher was always impressed by what I did. I would purposely choose such literary classics as the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back. Obviously I wouldn’t have to read it; I could just watch the movie.
DRE:
I know Dracula has been portrayed as bald before but were you trying to come up with something totally new for that character?
Jae:
I went back and forth on this with my editor Rebecca Behan. The description was that Dracula has gray hair and a long silver mustache. I’d seen some illustrations of him before that are faithful to the book and he always looked like some swinger from the 70’s. I just couldn’t make that mustache work. I thought I would just go back to that classic Nosferatu look because that’s the most striking visual. I don’t think anybody could come up with anything that creepy. I know it’s not the way it’s described in the book, but the way I justified it in my mind was that he’s a shapeshifter. He appears differently to everybody so I took some liberties with that.
DRE:
From what I can tell, one of your influences is Mike Mignola.
Jae:
Oh yeah. I loved his stuff.
DRE:
That’s what I figured. He did that great Topps adaptation of [Francis Ford] Coppola’s Dracula. Did you remember that?
Jae:
Yeah, I have those issues. I haven’t looked at Mignola’s stuff in a while but certainly whenever you’re working on a style with high contrast black and white, you can’t help but be influenced by what he’s done.
DRE:
He also did designs for the actual Dracula movie as well. Were you trying to stay away from what he did?
Jae:
I haven’t looked at it since it came out back in the early 90’s. I had no idea he did designs for the movie.
DRE:
The Brides have a bit of an Asian influence. Was that something that you wanted to bring to it?
Jae:
It was totally unconscious. I don’t know if I actually quite see it but I’m sure there’s so many things I do subconsciously that I’m not even aware of. In fact I was just at a signing where someone mentioned that all my characters looked really sad, even Dracula. She said that she actually felt sorry for him and that was the first time she felt that way towards that character. I think I do tend to draw my characters hunched over and looking upset. I have such a hard time drawing people smiling or laughing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
DRE:
Your smiles would look like evil smiles because they’d have the contrast there I think. It’s interesting that you say so much of what you do is unconscious because, just to bring up Mignola again, because Mignola told me that when he was asked to do designs for Atlantis: The Lost Empire he walked into the Disney animators studio, they had his drawings blown up huge and brown down into squares so they could teach all the animators how to draw like him. He said he could never teach anyone how to draw like he does because he just does it. Are you self taught?
Jae:
I’m all self-taught. In fact, it’s funny because one of my best friends is a professor at the Maryland Institute of Art and he can talk about art until he’s blue in the face. But I can’t quite describe some of the things that I do. I don’t know why I do it and he said it’s because it’s just intuitive. It’s not something I can explain because again, I don’t know why I do it. I can see why Mignola can make a comment like that because you either have the design sensory or you don’t. That can’t be taught.
DRE:
Have you always inked your own work?
Jae:
When I first started at Marvel, I was just penciling. This was back in the old newsprint days when not a lot of artists were using heavy shadows. I’d say for most artists, about 20 percent of the page was ink and for me it was more like 80 to 90 percent ink. The ink saturation was so heavy that when it printed, it would be so muddy. All the black ink and the colors would run together. I remember I spent so much time penciling my first page with all this detail and then when the inker went over it, it just got killed and I was really upset. At that point, I was 18 years old and I should have been grateful to be working in comics but for me it just ruined the moment. But they wouldn’t let me ink my work for a little while. Finally I couldn’t handle working with other people anymore. The artwork wasn’t looking the way I envisioned it, so I started practicing my inks and I sent in a sample of my inks and they let me do it.
DRE:
Wow, so you’ve been inking your stuff since almost six months into your career.
Jae:
Right. I’m such a control freak I just couldn’t let it go. Then over the years, I’ve had inkers tell me they would love to work with me but I always say “Thanks but I don’t think so.”
DRE:
For The Illustrated Dracula, how was it working with a writer that didn’t give you notes?
Jae:
I never felt alone because of my editor. We would go back and forth on our ideas. It’s strange working with someone as legendary as Bram Stoker. You almost wonder what he would have thought of it.
DRE:
What’s it like knowing that people might be reading Dracula for the first time with your artwork in there?
Jae:
I think that’s amazing. I would think that if you’re in school and you had to read Dracula and you had a choice between a version without pictures and one with pictures, I think you’d go for the one with pictures.
DRE:
How many drawings are in the book?
Jae:
I think there are 31 drawing with nine chapter-head designs. I originally started the project about two and a half years ago and it took several months. It’s hard to define because to execute the cover took about two days. But just trying to come up with the idea and doing different versions of it, starting it and then scrapping it, and restarting and scrapping it, that’s a long process.
DRE:
What got you into drawing gothic stuff?
Jae:
I’d have to say that when I first started in the early 90’s, the style in comics was superheroes with the big muscles and I wanted to get away from that. I wanted my work to look different and I’ve always been into the darker stuff. I’ve always been drawn to movies where the director has very strong visual presence. When you watch a Ridley Scott movie, you know that’s a Ridley Scott movie just from the color choices and the way it’s lit. Then there are directors that you could replace and you couldn’t tell who directed what. I felt the same way about the art. I didn’t want to be interchangeable with anybody else. I wanted my work to stand out on its own and at the time there weren’t a lot of people doing this style.
DRE:
I was surprised to find out that you were the youngest person to ever work for a major comic book company. Had you done stuff before Namor for Marvel?
Jae:
Marvel Comics Presents was my first job.
DRE:
What character did you draw?
Jae:
It was The Beast. I worked on that for a year and then I worked on Namor. So Namor was actually my first regular assignment but it was my second project.
DRE:
Did you feel like you got dropped in the deep end working with John Byrne for your first regular gig?
Jae:
No, I grew up idolizing his stuff so it was a dream come true. At that point, I never thought I’d be working with a legend like him so it was a surreal moment when the editor, Terry Kavanaugh, and I drove out to Connecticut to meet with him. I got a chance to check out his home and hang out with him for the afternoon.
DRE:
You drew Iron Fist right after Byrne brought him back. Do you have any desire to work on Iron Fist again?
Jae:
I have absolutely no desire to work on him. I was actually supposed to do an Iron Fist series right after Namor, but then I left for Image Comics so that project never happened.
DRE:
I always wondered why they didn’t do anything with Iron Fist after they brought him back.
Jae:
But then I ended up doing some issues of Spider-Man guest starring Iron Fist. Now it’s, a been there, done that kind of thing.
DRE:
When is the finished book of Hellshock coming out?
Jae:
It was supposed to come out about a year and a half ago, but I just got so wrapped up with not knowing how to end it and I was going nuts. But I finally did finish it and it is coming out by the end of the year.
DRE:
Does it wrap it up forever?
Jae:
It’s open ended. I could go back to it if I want to torture myself.
DRE:
I know you’re under contract to Marvel and you’re doing two years worth of the Dark Tower stuff, at least. Do you have a desire to go back to writing when you wrap that up?
Jae:
Possibly. There are some ideas that I have but probably not Hellshock. I have ideas for a shorter storyline that has a beginning and an end. With Hellshock, it was going to be this big epic that was going to last 100 issues or so, but I’m not near ready to tackle something like that.
DRE:
How far are you into Dark Tower?
Jae:
It’s a series of miniseries and right now I’m on the fifth issue of the first miniseries which will be seven issues long. So I’ll be done with the first miniseries before the first issue comes out in February of 2007. The total amount of issues will be 30 so it’s going to be six separate miniseries.
DRE:
Do you have to go to a lot of meetings for this since it’s a licensed project?
Jae:
No and that was one of my fears of starting this project. On one hand, it’s a dream come true. I never ever in my wildest dreams thought I would be working with Stephen King, but on the other hand there is so much pressure. I know how personal and important Dark Tower is to him and he’s been living with these characters for so many years so I didn’t know how he’d feel about the characters being interpreted so literally. In the books, there were some illustrations but they were pretty vague or you just see a couple of the characters. This is the first time that you’re going to be seeing these characters and every corner of that world clearly for the first time. My biggest fear was that it wasn’t going to live up to Stephen King’s expectations. But when Marvel and Stephen King had their first meeting and they had my artwork there, Marvel did say that if he had any feedback in the way the characters looked, please let them know. He quickly stated that when he wrote the description of the characters, he was pretty vague on purpose because he wanted the readers to form their own idea of what these characters should look like, except obviously for Roland who is supposed to look like Clint Eastwood. But in terms of the other characters, however people see it, is the way they should be and he’s very open to any interpretation.
DRE:
Is the violence being toned down?
Jae:
We’re not purposely toning it down. To me, we’re not shooting for a younger audience or anything like that. I’m definitely going to stay faithful to the source material without watering it down. But I was never a big fan of gore anyway. When someone is being disemboweled in a horror movie with an axe and there’s intestines and blood everywhere, that’s not creepy or scary, it just looks silly. With something like Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining where you really don’t see any violence, that’s much more frightening. That’s the aesthetic I like to go with. So for something like this, I think if you show the violence, especially in a comic book, it can look really cartoony. So the less you show, the better.
DRE:
Is Peter David writing full scripts?
Jae:
Normally he does but with this project we’re doing this in the old Marvel style with Stephen King and Robin Furth providing the plot. Then the plots are handed over to me. I draw it out then I send it off to Peter David and he scripts it.
DRE:
Is doing it in that style more nerve-wracking than something like Hellshock?
Jae:
In a sense but at least I have the original Dark Tower books to fall back on. The first miniseries is an adaptation of book four, Wizard and Glass, so I can always fall back on that. If there’s a scene that needs expanding, I can always pull out the book and reference that. Therefore in a sense it is like having a full script, although there is a scene in the comic that is not in the book. But after the first miniseries, that’s a whole different ballgame. We will continue the Roland adventure so I think it’ll be much more challenging.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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