INTERVIEW: Jim Lee

Jim Lee, the iconic artist and Co-Publisher of DC Comics, is releasing through Titan Books a collection of his art, some never before seen, and a look inside his creative process.

For it, I was able to do a pretty wide-ranging interview with him.

A more full version of the interview about the book will be appearing on Huffington Post soon (we’ll be sure to link it up here), but I wanted to give you a sneak peek at some of the things we’d be covering and a look at some of the art contained in the book.

It’s a gorgeous coffee table collection and is going to be released November 2, 2010.  You can preorder it on Amazon here.

One of the most exciting pieces of news from the interview is transcribed below:

Big Shiny Robot!: When you guys launched digital, one of the things you guys hinted at that everyone was really excited about were incentives for retailers funded and promoted by the digital side.  What new stuff  do you see coming up with that that you can talk about that will help get people to download comics digitally into a comic book store and buying trades and buying the new print issues?

Jim Lee: There are a number of initiatives we’re working on.  We’re looking at e-couponing.  We’re looking at ways to improve the Comic Shop locator service that already exists within the app itself, through the DC Comics app.  And we’ve looked to the advice and input of a large number of the countries best and largest retailers, looking for ways to further bring them into the loop.  There are things we’re exploring on the content side where stories will start out digitally and end up in print in the store.  And we’re looking for ways that reward fans that are buying print with perhaps digital copies of their books.  There are a number of ways we can do it, we’re confident we can do it, and we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t think we could help our brick-and-mortar partners and expand the overall size of the pie, of the retail marketplace.

So it looks like we should be seeing digital comics that come with our paper comics much the same way we see digital copies of movies coming with DVD’s with DC.  This is a great step DC is taking.  Since their recent reorganization, they’ve really been trying to get out ahead on a lot of things and this would certainly make them the best bang for your buck if you care both about print books and digital archives.

Check back soon for the rest of the interview on Huffington Post.

You can preorder “Jim Lee Icons” here.