Although legendary comic book artist Jim Lee technically got his start at Marvel with Alpha Flight in the late 1980’s, it was undoubtedly his work with Chris Claremont on the relaunched X-Men series in 1991 that effectively put him on the map, as the debut issue shattered sales records to pieces.
In the time since, he co-founded Image Comics with the likes of other industry heavyweights such as Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, among others. Later, he also founded Wildstorm Comics before illustrating such definitive works for DC like Batman: Hush and Justice League: Origin, finally settling into his current role of co-publisher there.
Although we’ve all learned to never say never in this lifetime, it doesn’t look like Lee will be producing any original artwork for Marvel any time soon. Still, the House of Ideas know full well how synonymous his name is with mutants and simply can’t ignore that fact as they plan to launch a bevy of X-Men related titles this spring.
As such, they’ve tapped Morry Hollowell to recolor some existing pieces of Lee’s art to serve as variant covers for X-Men Gold #1 and X-Men Blue #1. Marvel SVP Sales & Marketing David Gabriel had this to say about the bold move:
“Few artists are as synonymous with the X-Men, and specifically the Blue & Gold era of the X-Men quite like Jim Lee. We wanted to do something extra special to commemorate these two new titles, and we’re excited to bring Jim’s unique vision of Marvel’s merry mutants back to the fans for these two remastered variant covers!”
X-Men Gold #1 is set to arrive in comic shops on April 5, with X-Men Blue #1 following on April 12.
Published: Mar 16, 2017 01:31 pm