Jim Lee is one of the most influential comic book artists and leaders in comics today. As DC’s President, Publisher and Chief Creative Officer, Lee has a hand in ensuring that DC’s iconic characters and universe are powerfully brought to life through comics, films, games, and more. Though we’re celebrating DC Universe Online’s 15th anniversary this year, Lee was a guiding force in the MMORPG years before he took the stage at E3 2008 to show gameplay off for the first time. After doing a few one-armed pushups on stage, of course.
To mark DCUO’s milestone anniversary, we chatted with Lee about his involvement in the game while it was still being developed. He reflected on some of the creative challenges he and his team faced, sharing funny memories and other reflections from that time.
Lee says he’s been an avid MMO player since the days of Ultima Online, but EverQuest was the game that first hooked him on the genre. “I spent a lot of time in that game, and that became a real passion,” said Lee. Fellow comic artist Joe Madureira got him into EverQuest right at launch, and he quickly maxed out his Paladin – noting that he was the first Paladin on his server to get the Fiery Avenger from the Plane of Sky after camping for 20 hours.
He attended the first EverQuest fan convention, where he met members of the development team. That introduction led him to illustrate an EverQuest comic and provided insight into how games are made. “Just seeing the work behind the scenes kind of informed and helped better shape my understanding,” he says. “I knew how to play the game and enjoy the game, I and could offer my opinion on that. But then I started getting into like, ‘Well, how is the game created? And how do you design a level to make it interesting?’”
That curiosity proved to be invaluable when Jim was tapped to be DCUO’s Executive Creative Director. “I signed up in 2005 or 2006 and spent five years working on the game. It came out in 2011, and it was the longest pregnancy ever.” Some of his strongest memories center on the astonishing amount of work that went into the game from all its creative teams. “It was a great experience, and I am thrilled that it has survived and flourished for 15 years.”
As DCUO’s Executive Creative Director, Jim Lee was responsible for shaping its overall aesthetics, from the costumes and characters to the worlds they inhabited. “You think, ‘Well, couldn’t they just look at a comic book?’ The truth is that every character has multiple costumes throughout the eras. We had an opportunity to go back and say, you know what? We’re just going to pick the coolest costumes of these characters from any era, and that will be this universe.’ I had a lot of the artists that were at Wildstorm that were working with me in San Diego, and we worked on that piece of it, doing the 3D turnaround or the 2D turnarounds and all that on every character we did.”
Lee says that one of the most rewarding creative challenges came from helping bring locations that had previously existed only on the page to life in 3D. “I remember sketching out Brainiac’s headquarters, the Justice League Watchtower, and a lot of these places where you would think, again, there’s reference art available,” he says. “But a lot of it’s not documented in a way that a game developer can kind of go, ‘Okay, I can make this into a space.’ Plus, you had to make it large enough to be, you know, to accommodate all the characters that might fit into that environment. There are other things you had to take into account that you normally don’t when you’re just drawing a comic book.”
DCUO’s character customization provided another creative challenge and opportunity. “What do new characters look like? And I remember just sort of printing out figures, different sort of body shapes, and just doing variations on costumes to what a player character would look like in this DC Universe. We knew by then what the [DC] characters looked like. But what does a player character look like?”
“We spent a lot of time drawing different figures, young adolescent to mature, bulkier to kind of the heavyweight cruise, you know, bruiser-type figures,” Jim recalls. “And it was amazing to me that what you thought looked really different and unique in terms of silhouettes on paper, once you put them into form and put them in environments, they looked remarkably the same. And so, you had to keep pushing yourself beyond what you were comfortable with to differentiate the shapes.”
DCUO launched in an era where licensors weren’t quite as comfortable with giving players freedom over their IP as they are now. Lee recalls that at the time, there was some healthy friction between granting players the ability to design and customize their own characters while not allowing them to get too close to their DC comics counterparts. “That sort of restriction has obviously been sorted out. And it’s nice that people in the game can grind it out and [make their characters] look like Batman, different eras of Batman, or different Batman from different storylines. I think it’s really cool that they have that ability now, because that was a philosophical challenge to overcome in those early days.”
We had to ask about DC Universe Online’s debut during Sony’s E3 2008 press conference, which was a memorable moment during the PlayStation 3 showcase. Or, more specifically, we had to ask Lee about the one-armed pushups he performed before revealing the first DCUO gameplay footage on stage.
“That was at the Shrine Auditorium, where they used to host the Oscars. And this was the first public presentation of the game. The Dark Knight movie had just premiered in New York City, literally the day before,” he recalls. “I went to the Dark Knight premiere in New York City. Christopher Nolan was there, and the cast and everything – it was a fantastic party, and Sony wanted me to be at their E3 presentation the next day in California. I think we left the premier party around like one or two in the morning, got on this jet, flew to Los Angeles, and went to the presentation in the morning.
“I had to memorize my presentation and everything, but it wasn’t there. I don’t think it started with anything funny, and I wanted to kind of break the tension. And I remember Jack Palance won his Academy Award there. He went on that same stage, and he did one-handed push-ups, and he was in his 70s at that point to kind of show his virility; I don’t even know what it was, just the most random thing. And I just decided to replicate that. And that kind of broke the tension for me. And then the chairman of Sony at the time gave me a thumbs-up backstage afterward.
We concluded our conversation by asking Jim Lee if he had a message that he’d like to share with the DC Universe Online community. After a little reflection, he offered this: “I just want to thank all the people that have supported the game over 15 years. You guys are just so resilient and curious and engaged. It’s been a true collaboration, and I thank you again for all your support.”
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