Jim Lee, ICONS, & the Legion

Via MTV Splashpage, here's part of an interview with Jim Lee on his long-awaited book Icons: The DC Comics and Wildstorm Art of Jim Lee (Amazon link), which goes on sale next week:

MTV: When you went through the book, remembering some of these characters and your work with them, were there any that made you think, "Hey, I want to work with that character again."

LEE: Sure, there’s a whole section where I did Legion of Superheroes. I loved the fact that when Dave Cockrum worked on those books — and actually on X-Men as well — he just sat down and created costumes, and wouldn’t even necessarily know who those characters were. He just kind of created these looks. I’ve always been inspired by that kind of notion, so I just kind of sat down and just started sketching costumes and seeing what worked and what didn’t work, and it was all very rough draft stuff. None of that stuff was thought out — it was just kind of spur-of-the-moment, you know? Going with the moment?

And I liked how a lot of them turned out, so it just got me excited by the idea of actually working on these costumes. The Legion has gone through all these eras where they all had major fashion changes in the styles of costumes that they’ve had, and that’s always been part of their lore, I guess. So the idea of working on that and redefining them for the 30th Century was something that was very appealing to me.

Via Publisher's Weekly:

PWCW: You've also got brand new art, both on the dust jacket, and in an all-new Legion of Super-Heroes story, written by Paul Levitz. What can we expect from the story and does it fit into current Legion canon?

JL: It can if you want it to. We expressly made a story where it’s more fantastical in nature. It’s the Miracle Machine and so it kind of takes the thoughts of whatever’s near it and makes it reality in their mind. That story came about with me and Paul just kind of talking about our favorite Legion stories and our favorite Legionnaires and we crafted that short story together and then he wrote it out after that. It’s really the chance to get to work with Paul, really the quintessential Legion writer. I was having a lot of fun drawing the characters but once Paul put the dialogue in, because we didn’t work full script on this issue, the characters really came to life.