Superman Unchained - Jim Lee Interview

Jim Lee DC Comics’ Co-Publisher talked to Comic Book Resources about returning to the Superman title in the newly launched Superman Unchained, written by Scott Snyder.

“CBR News: On "Superman Unchained," I feel like Scott came in with a very clear idea of what kind of story he wanted to tell, but did you have a specific set of visual ideas you wanted to work in from the start?

Jim Lee: This was the second time I've done Superman, and I didn't think it would be fair to the project if I approached it with the exact same style I used the first time. I think with the launch of the New 52, I had a mission to take that New 52 Superman and make it work. I'd done the initial costume design and I'd been drawing Superman in "Justice League," but this was really my opportunity to show what the New 52 Superman really looked and felt like.

It was an interesting transition in that when you draw Superman, you tend to go old school with the default style -- the huge lantern jaw, the receding hairline -- and draw more of a Superman in his mid '30s that people are familiar with. With the New 52, the idea was to bring down the age of the entire DC Universe down a bit. That meant really changing the proportions of Superman and some of his facial features. And that's something you need to be conscious of every time you draw him. Otherwise, you fall back to this default Superman. If you look at what I did in "For Tomorrow" compared to what I do in "Superman Unchained," he's a more slimmed down figure, and I also try to do some more naturalistic poses for him. You'll see in issue #2, you'll see the military come upon Superman, and he stands there in a very nonchalant way. That's something I never did in "For Tomorrow." It's things like that which highlight the differences between the pre-52 Superman and now. But there are also things I've changed in the storytelling. Scott [Snyder] started out as a novelist, so he has very deep, rich, multilayered storylines, and I want to do justice to that. So before we even started the project, we sat down and talked about ways to make this a different type of story. I told him I really wanted to focus on the storytelling and do a lot of multi-panel buildups to larger images. I wanted to utilize the boarders of the page more than I had in the past. I think I've always by default gone to full bleed, and there's a lot of visual tension you can create on the page by pulling back on that and using that more sparingly. There's a starker contrast between a page that has full borders around the edges and then one that has full bleed. It just feels bigger in comparison. It was things like that and also how we could better showcase his powers. We talked a lot about the powers Superman has and why he has the powers that he does. Is there a link between his ability to heat things up with his vision and then see through objects and then freeze things with his breath? His powers have always been presented as though he's got A, B and C and then J and K. Is there a reason why all these powers come together? That's something we really want to explore.

It's interesting you talking about switching up your approach to page layout and making certain spreads feel bigger, because I felt that the early two-page sequence where the "bomb" drops was one that would work well in the digital comics format. Was that something you were thinking about as you drew this story?

Not necessarily. I thought about the big poster element and how it would look on a tablet. It should be exactly the same as the other pages because it was drawn proportional to a regular comic book page. And that double-page spread was a challenge, but not because of thinking of the iPad so much as the idea that Scott wanted a first person point of view through the binoculars. If you're tracking that through a double-page spread, I didn't want to just draw repeating circles of the same size going across. That would look monotonous. But in changing the size of the binoculars, would the reader be able to track the story? Will they start going left or right or some direction you don't want them to go? I created those bar elements you see with the smoke flowing through them as a graphical element to suggest both the aftereffects of the explosion but also to subtly reinforce the experience you should be having. I think I laid that page out three or four times before I settled on that. With any repeated elements, the challenge is how you represent it in a way that's visually interesting without breaking the left-to-right flow you should have going across the page. But that was a fun spread to do, but I didn't so much think about he digital side of it. I've been thinking a lot more about the print side in ways that served both my interests in being visually exciting and also what Scott was asking for on the page, which was a filmic experience that showed shot after shot almost like it was animated. It's all about maintaining visual cohesion and clarity."

Read the rest of the interview at Hitfix

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