JIM LEE IS LATE. Over an hour late. And no one knows where he is.
Waiting for him are the three young superstar artists Joe Maduriera, J. Scott Campbell and Huberto Ramos, none of whom seem to mind his absence. The three are lounging on the couch in Lee’s WildStorm Productions office in San Diego, staring intensely at the empty chair in front of them where their new boss should be. Madureira, who gained critical acclaim on Uncanny X-Men, flew across the continent from New York. Ramos, who gained speed on DC Comics’ Impulse, came all the way from Mexico. And Campbell, who rose to fame on WildStorm’s own Gen13 --well, he lives only 20 minutes from the WildStorm studio. But they’ve all congregated here to chat about Cliffhanger, their upcoming new creator-owned imprint which Lee will be publishing through his branch of Image Comics. “And we’re supposed to be the young and irresponsible ones,” laughs the laid-back Campbell. Madureira just rolls his eyes and smiles. Ramos is anxious to get started. “Jim had a late night. I think he was finishing up an issue of Divine Right,” says Ramos in his slight Mexican accent.
But Cliffhanger isn’t really about Lee. It’s about Campbell, Madureira, and Ramos. It’s about the next wave of talented artists making the jump from established properties to creator-owned comics, similar to the formation of Image Comics back in 1992. Campbell’s new title Danger Girl launches cliffhanger in March, followed by Madureira’s Battle Chasers in April and Ramos’ Crimson in May.
Wizard met the young crew during Cliffhanger’s early developmental stages to discuss their risky career move to form this bold new imprint. Lee is supposed to be involved in the interview, too, but the trio grows restless. “Let’s just do this without him,” laughs Campbell. “I’m sure he’ll show up sometime in the middle or for dinner afterwards.”

WIZARD: To get right to the point, why do this? Why leave your high-profile assignments to start a brand-new imprint at such a young age?
MADUREIRA: I guess you can say that right now, we’re at the hight of our popularity, and if we were going to do something like this, now would be the best time. I was burnt-out on Uncanny X-Men and just felt the need to do something I could put my heart into. Doing my own creator-owned title and havingour own new line, we won’t have any baggage of any other company sneaking into our universe.
CAMPBELL: When Image first started, it was the best of the best in comics. But as it grew larger, it certainly didn’t have that best-of-best feel. What we’re hoping to do with this label is set a precedence of quality back into comics.
RAMOS: I think we all came to the point in our careers where we felt that we had stories of our own to tell. We’re three young guys doing their own ideas, each completely different from the other and all in one new line.
WIZARD: So why did you three in particular band together?
CAMPBELL: We were all friends before, all had our books coming out at the same time and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do it together?” The three of us symbolize security in numbers. I wouldn’t have had the nerve or the ego to do a new label with just me. I mean, who would care? It only has importance if there’s a group of talented guys doing something new. It seems like we are the next graduating class without us dressing up to symbolize it. [Laughs] But technically, that’s what it is.
RAMOS: We were all looking to publish our titles under existing companies. The timing was there to start something new. It definetly helps when you’re working with guys that you really like and admire.
MADUREIRA: It’s like an extra kick in the pats or a friendly competition. You see what other guys are working on and you just want to rush home and start working to do something better.
WIZARD: Do you guys feel this venture will affect your careers in any way?
MADUREIRA: It was great being on Uncanny X-Men because everyone reads the X-Men. It’s the highest-selling comic, and it was great being perceived as one of the most popular artists. But this line isn’t about popularity. It’s about making a living and enjoying the work I’m doing. To be honest, I really stopped enjoying my work on X-Men and it was affecting the quality of art. It’s about doing something the way that I want it done and having control over my property, instead of a huge company forcing me to draw things that I may not necessarily agree with.
CAMPBELL: To me, I want to somewhat legitimize myself as somebody that isn’t a one-hit wonder with Gen13. I want people to realize that there’s a whole mess of ideas in my head and that Gen13 was just one of them. One of the most frustrating things is that I see myself being morelike a creator that would exist in the movie industry, because you constantly get to try new ideas; move from project to project. Unfortunately, in comics, that’s suicide. Whenever you do something new, there’s constant fan backlash. It’s frustrating as a creator who wants to continually do new things. That’s one of the main reasons I was detoured from wanting to become a Disney animator. I couldn’t handle being locked into drawing a particular way for the rest of my life. If anything, Danger Girl will break me out of the mold and lead me into whatever I decide to do next.
RAMOS: This isn’t going to hurt me in any way. [Laughs] If anything, being associated with Joe and Jeff will only help me. I think that anything you do with your heart is well-received.
CAMPBELL: [Nodding in agreement]: For the first time I can remember, I drive my car and it crosses my mind how much it would suck if a truck hit me, because I wouldn’t have been able to finish Danger Girl #1. I have to get this thing out. Even doing Gen13, I never had this feeling of exitement for my work.
MADUREIRA: Before, in our careers, we were doing stuff for somebody else. I was drawing the X-Men for Marvel. Jeff was doing Gen13 for Jim. Humberto was doing stuff for DC. But this is for us. We may lose popularity. We may not sell 150,000 copies, but we’ll hone our skills as artists and put out our best work. We’re doing it because it’s stories that we want to tell. How can this not be our best work?
WIZARD: What exactly are each of your titles about?
CAMPBELL: Danger Girl is almost like a “James Bond” meets “Indiana Jones.”It will have characters that will actually get hurt and bleed. They are regular people doing extraordinary things versus extraordinary people that do what I think are ordinary things. I’m trying to do angles and panels in my art that give you a sense of theatrical-wide grandeur, or whatever you want to call it. I want each issue to feel like you just saw 20 minutes of a movie that continues on and on.
One of the things that fans seem to enjoy about my style is my ability to draw attractive women. Know that and not wanting to completely ruin my career, I realized I had to incorporate that into Danger Girl. My goal is to make the most fun comic book out there.
MADUREIRA: I was always into fantasy. Stuff like Dungeons & Dragons or Final Fantasy VII for Sony PlayStation. What I’m trying to do is combine everything I like from fantasy, the characters and environments, and mix them with cool technology like big robots and machinery. My story follows a group of characters that come together. They eventually become heroes, even though that’s not what they set out to do. And they’ll each have obstacles to overcome from their individual pasts. I’m creating a world and characters that I can do anything I want with, whether that means killing them off or making them into gods. It will be a very visual book, very cinematic and almost like “Indiana Jones” in its action. I want to make it feel like a movie.
Up till now, all fantasy books are about is a wizard, a dude shooting arrows on a horse or a guy with a big ax. Battle Chasers won’t be a Conan comic. There are colorful villains that are in outlandish costumes, not spandex, and our stories, especially my own, will definetly have the superhero action and melodrama.
WIZARD: What about you, Humberto?
RAMOS: My book is about vampires. Most people feel like the vampire theme is overdone, but the secret is how you tell the story. In my story, vampires are a bit different. It’s a personal rendition of what’s a vampire, how you become a vampire and how you accept being a vampire. It’ll also have a lot of action and a lot of comedy. You don’t think of comedy with vampires, but it will have a very fun mood to it all. Besides the vampires, the story will have monster hunters, witches, werewolves and every single creature that you can find in the night. I’m trying to work in every scary tale that you heard when you were a kid about all the creatures of the night, and put every single one of them in this book in some capacity.
WIZARD: Okay, no offense, but you aren’t considered writers. Do you feel that will affect the way your books will be perceived? And if so, are you nervous about tackling the writing?
MADUREIRA: I’m going to be writing this book myself with a guy I met in advertising named Munier Sharrieff. I’m a little nervous only because I don’t think artists get a chance when they want to tell stories their own way. When you see an artist is going to write, it’s like “Oh, God, he’s an artist, he can’t write.” But artists are storytellers. [They] have their own ways of telling a story, which are probably more visually exciting. I might not offer you a better-written story than some of the writers out there, but I’ll definetely tell my story in a different way that’ll excite you. I’m not Frank Miller and I’m not going to write some literary masterpiece, but I think it will be a highly enjoyable book and hopefully even open people’s eyes to how to tell a story in comics.
CAMPBELL: I agree. With respect to the good writers in the industry, I don’t think comic book writing is rocket science. I’ve already been very heavily involved in co-plotting Gen13 over the years. I got a pretty good sense of what I like and what I don’t like about stories. At the same time, I do realize that I don’t have the skill to tackle the writing alone. So I am working with another guy by the name of Andy Hartnell. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s going to write Danger Girl with me. I always bounced ideas off of him for Gen13. As things went along, it just worked out for him to co-write Danger Girl. His biggest asset is in the dialogue department.
MADUREIRA: Not to sound so cocky, but we can pretty much call up any comic writer and ask them to write our books, assuming they would accept. But I really want this to be mine. I want it to be my version of my characters, doing what I think they should be doing and talking how I think they should talk.
RAMOS: [Smiling]: I’m different. I’m not so good with writing in English. [Laughs] But I have friends who can. I have these friends who tell really great ghost stories set in amazing situations. They are Osco Pinto and Fransisco Haghembeck, who take my ideas and make them into great stories. It’s hard enough for us foreigners to get work drawings comic books; you can imagine how much harder it is to write them. Since we’re all from Mexico and our English isn’t the greatest, we asked for help to script it. I asked Brian Augustyn [Ramos’ former editor on Impulse and his co-creator on Ash: Cinder & Smoke], a guy who I really admire and is my really close friend.

[Ramos is interrupted as the office door opens, and Jim Lee strolls in. “Am I late?” he asks sarcastically, as he plops into his chair behind his desk and stares at everyone, smiling the whole time. “I’m ready when you are,” Lee says, laughing. Ramos is the one to roll his eyes this time, while Campbell and Madureira bite their lips as they hold back their desire to bust on Lee]

LEE: Just mix in quotes from me at the beginning of this article and people will think I was never late. [Laughs]
WIZARD: Sure, Jim. Anyway, how did this whole new line come about?
LEE: The concept was: Get some of the best young guys in the business together and do a brand-new imprint. Jeff [Campbell] was part of the [WildStorm] studio and had talked about doing Danger Girl early on. With Joe, I talked to him four years ago in the very earliest stages of Image Comics, when he’d just started working at Marvel. He was working on Deadpool, way before X-Men. I talked to him about doing something for WildStorm, but he was under contract with Marvel. So I said, “Do a run on X-Men, get popular and whenever you think of doing anything else, give me a call.” Soon as I heard he was leaving Marvel to create his own thing, I immediately contacted him. Basically, Jeff and Joe are friends--both had creator-owned projects--so I put the deal together. I have really been trying to stay in the background of all this; I’m their advisor.
WIZARD: Where did Humberto fall in?
LEE: We’ve all known Humberto for a long time. We knew he was doing this Crimson project and Jeff, Joe and I felt that a good third person for the line would make it stronger and solidify it. So we called Humberto. He was very agreeable and excited about it.
WIZARD: It’s another tough question, but it almost seems like Humberto was tacked on at the end. Is there more to it than that?
LEE: These three guys gravitated toward one another out of a common respect for each other’s work. That’s really all it was, as opposed to, “Hey, let’s find a guy who is going to be as hot and high on the top 10 list.” Humberto fit in with these guys. He gets along with them and is a talented artist. Whether or not he’s a “hot” artist now is irrelevant. I feel Humberto will rise to that status.
CAMPBELL: We fully and strongly believe in Humberto’s ability to produce a great comic book. Look at his Impulse run. There’s a much more important aspect here than who is popular enough to join.
WIZARD: Humberto, how do you feel about being associated with these guys?
RAMOS: It gives me more of a challenge to reach their level. My book won’t have the expectations of theirs, so there’s less pressure. I’m honoredthat I was asked and that I’m going to get grouped with these guys. It’ll probably help my book sell.
I hope people don’t think I was just added on. I realize that I’m the odd man in this group, but it just means I’ll work extra hard to meet the level of expectation. The three of us make a good team. Let’s leave it at that.
WIZARD: Will anyone else be joing? Rumor had it Mike Turner was originally asked, but declined.
LEE: My understanding is that Mike has an agreement with Top Cow still.
MADUREIRA: As for others, we are not looking to bring anyone else in right now.
CAMPBELL: In our first year, we’d like to make sure that we’ll do okay by ourselves before we think about growing.
WIZARD: What about other people like Randy Queen or Mike Wieringo who have been looking to do creator-owned projects?
CAMPBELL: The three of us work. I’m sure each one of us can think of two or three other guys that we know that could have been a part of this line too. But we’ve already been warned about the subject of stealing talent from other Image studios. We’re not looking to do that. We just wanted a good group of three guys to launch an exciting new imprint.
WIZARD: What’s the structure of this new company? Who’s the leader?
LEE: It’s an imprint of WildStorm and thus, the distribution, marketing and production will be taken care of by WildStorm. I’m there to give them my two cents, but they’re the ones to determine the success of it. They’ll determine whether the books come out on time and how they’ll look.
RAMOS: And if we want to add someone, we’ll probably do it like I was added. We’d talk about it amongst ourselves. It’s a company of friends.
WIZARD: Whereas Homage is the writer’s haven, this is almost like the artist’s haven of creator-owned books. So why not just be a part of Homage?
LEE: That’s one of way looking at it, but there are certainly artist-driven properties at Homage. Homage tends to have creaoter-owned books that are a little more retro, and appeal to a slightly off-the-beaten-track crowd. I thought, what better way to capture the attention [of fans] than through a new line which is clearly in the mainstream, but outside the superhero realm? This is for fanboys.
WIZARD: Will you guys ask Jim to do a book in your line?
CAMPBELL: Obviously, we would be honored.
WIZARD: And would you ever do a book in their line?
LEE: I don’t know if it will happen anytime soon. I am pretty wed to WildStorm. I see this line as the next generation. You can’t go back to dressing like a teenager. So the possibility exists, but it’s unlikely.
WIZARD: Do you consider this the second wave of Image Comics?
MADUREIRA: That’s not a bad way to look at it.
CAMPBELL: I look at this as a way to get people excited about comics again. Id that comes across as the second wave of Image, great.
RAMOS: Second wave or not, it’s being with the people I want to be with.
LEE: Though it’s a bit different, I can definetely see it as the second wave. It’s the second time that the biggest comic book names have gotten together to do their own thing. And they have us [the original Image founders] to look at any mistakes we made. So yes, I guess you can call it that because it’s going to create a lot of excitement. Fans’ll be excited.

THE END

    -Special thanks to Sp1deyB0Y for typing this article for us!  Thanks Casey!

    -Reprinted from Wizard 78.  Special Thanks to Gambit2656 for the Cliffhanger image.   Thanks, Eliot!