Jim Lee Draws Spawn

While it is most common to see Jim Lee — DC Comics co-publisher — drawing DC characters, with the occasional Marvel character thrown in, seeing him do other people’s creator-owned characters these days is a bit of a rarity.

Therefore, fans were pretty excited to see the legendary comics artist tackle Spawn, Image Comics’s flagship character and the demonic antihero at the center of Todd McFarlane’s long-running comic book series.

You can see the sketch, which Lee did live on his Twitch stream, below.

Lee was a co-founder of Image Comics when seven superstar artists broke away from Marvel in 1992 to create a universe of creator-owned properties. Only two of the original books — Spawn and Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon — still publish an ongoing series that has continued uninterrupted for the 26 years since the company was founded.

Lee left the company in 1999 to sell his studio, WildStorm, and its properties to DC Comics.

Responses from the audience were largely ecstatic, with one representative fan saying that seeing Lee draw Spawn was “like Scorcese directing a Star Wars film.”

Lee regularly draws for his Twitch stream, and often gives away, auctions, or donates the images he creates. McFarlane, for his part, does the same, but generally on Facebook and usually under the auspices of a drawing tutorial.

Other recent Lee “crossover” drawings include a Spider-Man, a Goku, and…well…Doctor Fate using his magick to remove pepperoni from his pizza.

Which, I’ll be honest, I now kind of want as a poster.

McFarlane has teamed with Blumhouse, the producers of The Purge, to develop a feature film version of Spawn. While this will be the second time the character has made it to the big screen, last time around it was a PG-13 action movie that drew influences from the comic book films of the day. This time around, McFarlane has promised a hard-R horror version wherein Spawn is more of a dangerous wraith and characters like Sam and Twitch play more of a role.