Marvel's new Daredevil comic series has been warmly received by fans of the iconic superhero. Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett's reimagining of Stan Lee and Bill Everett's 'man without fear' has a gritty and highly grounded, noir-inspired tone and bold new elements, including a fresh status quo, with Matt Murdock now a law professor at Empire State University.
While the series honours Daredevil's rich heritage, Lee, a British artist from the West Midlands, says Marvel gave him total liberty to craft a new artistic vision. I caught up with him ahead of his appearance at MCM Comic Con London this coming weekend to learn more about reviving this much-loved classic as well as his own evolution as an artist and what he recommends for those pursuing a career in comics.
"Marvel have been great with it because they just let us cook. They were really behind everything," Lee says when I asked him how much control Marvel imposed over the Daredevil revival. The comic giant gave him and Stephanie free reign to bring their own vision to the new series, while Lee's own passion for the hero allowed him to respect the character's legacy.
"I've been reading Daredevil since I was a kid with the Ann Nocenti and [John] Romita Jr run, so I've got my touchstones. That's all gone in, but rather than thinking, what's someone done before?' – which I have done on other projects – I tried to make this our version. Even with drawing Owl, I tried to change him up a bit and make him our Owl."
With a character like Daredevil, Lee believes the reader should care about them as much as people as superheroes, and he found the Daredevil as interesting to draw as Matt Murdock as in his red suit.
"I tried to make him a bit of a hottie for everyone," he reveals. "I had a Robert Redford kind of idea of how I wanted him to look because I figured that was maybe a visual cue people used during the classic run, but I didn't look at any references. I did my version of what I think I remember Robert Redford looking like."
Having worked in concept art for games, Lee's in his element with character design. For Daredevil's new villain, he put lot of thought into making Omen feel like a deep and distinct enough character to have the potential to become an enduring new character who can appear in other books, not just a passing "freak of the week".
"He had to be monk like but also really creepy and bad ass so he could kick Daredevil's backside. Sith Lords were the thing that popped into my head as something priestlike and also frightening, but I wanted to lean into a superhero kind of costume, which a lot of comic and costume designers don't do so much anymore
"It's become all very clothesy, so I thought, let's give him a proper skintight suit but cross it with that Sithy vibe".
"Comics were Lee's first love, although he didn't see working in the industry as a possibility until relatively late on into a career in concept art for games. The spark that changed his attitude was when he discovered Frank Quitely's The Authority comics and "saw suddenly that the mainstream was accepting interesting things."
Colleagues encouraged him to start submitting work, and after a stint on 2000 AD, he got a breakthrough pencilling Stephanie Brown's Batgirl. He's since worked for both of the US giants, first DC, and then for Marvel on Spider-Man and Loki: Agent of Asgard before taking on the new Daredevil – although he says he still has to remember to draw cars driving on the right and has had to flip a panel on occasion.
Although he uses a Wacom tablet for colouring, he still does all of his drawing physically. While he recognises a table could give him advantages for efficiency, he's inspired by the feel of the connection of pencil on paper and his natural urge to doodle wherever he finds himself.
The same applies to more modern workflows, like using software such as Poser – "it make things super accurate and beautifully staged and lit, which I really like, but what most excites me is still the work of someone like Chris Bachalo – really stylised and expressionist."
"For a while, I was a bit worried that I wasn't doing all the things that everyone else was doing," Lee admits. "But I think actually that can be your strength to do just do your thing, and I think there's an appetite for all of it. Whenever you think 'this is the style everyone's going towards, something like Absolute will come out."
"A comic should be as enjoyable to read as to look at," he adds. "My approach is always the story first and show off afterwards. I want you to be able to read the book without any words.
That's not to say that his process of working hasn't evolved. He used to get the script and start drawing without doing any layouts, until an editor at Valiant insisted.
"At the time, I thought it was annoying because it was an extra level of work, but then I realised how designing the page is the really important part."
Now he draws his layouts first in five-page bursts, scans them and prints them out full size to put on a light box.
"It means that no matter how uninspired I'm feeling that day, I've got the layouts behind the behind the art already, so I know what I'm drawing that day. I'm never faced with the tyranny of the blank page".
This leads to Lee's main advice for aspiring comic artists – or two main pieces of advice both related to panel real estate: layout the page so you can see the flow of everything and learn to move the camera around.
"The first and most important tip I received is that it doesn't matter if you're drawing Galactus's head and then Antman on the next panel: if they occupy the same space inside that panel, it's boring.
"You have to be constantly moving the camera around and changing to keep it visually interesting. When people bring their folios to me, that's the thing I often notice they aren't doing.
This can mean having to think outside of the box to find new ideas to keep the reader's eye zigzagging down the page when it comes to the slower, more emotional beats, but these are the challenges Lee excels at tackling.
"If you have a scene somewhere like a coffee shop with people just sitting down, it can get really tough after a few pages, but I love the acting of it. There are things you can do to avoid repeating yourself: zoom in on a cup, step outside to see the coffee shop from a distance."
But the challenge that Lee has found most difficult in his career in comic art so far was the entire premise of one of his creator-owned projects. In Skyward, which Lee co-created with Lucifer showrunner Joe Anderson, the world has only 10 per cent of the amount of gravity that we're used to.
"Stylistically it was the easiest thing I've ever done because vibes-wise it was exactly the stuff I used to draw just for fun, but the logistics of having to design everything around how it would behave in a world with very little gravity was a constant issue. I'd be laying something out and put a coffee cup on the side to make a lounge look nicer and realise that it couldn't be there."
"In the end, I approached it by imagining that everything was underwater, so any motion would be off a bit."
With comic book art being quite an isolated job, Lee sees event like MCM Comic Con this weekend as a vital opportunity to get feedback from readers, connect with other people who work in the industry – "you leave with a new enthusiasm that stays with you when you're back locked away in the studio again".
MCM Comic Con will take place at the ExCel in London 22 to 24 May. You can learn more and reserve tickets on the website.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman will also be attending.
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