Pat Lee, a popular artist best known for his stint on the Transformers (and unfortunately for the failure of his publishing company Dreamwave) has returned to comics with a series for Dynamite, WIDOW WARRIORS, it was announced at today’s Diamond Retailer Summit in Chicago. PR below:
Pat Lee, the creator who revitalized The Transformers, makes his return to comic books with Widow Warriors! Written by Lloyd Chao and drawn by Pat Lee, Widow Warriors is a full color series that will be released by Dynamite Entertainment! Based on the popular Chinese legend Women Warriors of the Yang Family, Widow Warriors takes place during the reign of Emperor Song Ren Zhong (AD 1022-1064), a powerful barbarian tribe invaded the western territories of the Chinese Empire. A brave clan of generals, the Yang, and their men fought bravely, but were massacred by the invaders. Unable to convince the Emperor to send reinforcements, the widows of the family, also trained warriors, took it upon themselves, journeying west on a perilous mission to avenge the deaths of their loved ones and save a nation.
“I was pretty thrilled to be able to collaborate with a Chinese and international team on Widow Warriors, my first comic series after several years,” says Pat Lee. “The original story is so rich with historical characters that it was a real challenge to filter it down into an American comic format. I wanted to blend my comic style with the richness we find in historic Asian art and culture, and we are pretty happy with the end result. We are going to turn Widow Warriors into a film next, and I think a lot of the panels already have a cinematic feel to them.” ”Pat has grown as an artist, and we’re proud to be working with him on this project. Looking at the art, you can see the depth he’s added since the beginning of his career. We’re proud to be working with Pat on this project, and hope that this is the first of many projects together.” states Dynamite President Nick Barrucci. At an early age of 16, Pat Lee began his career in the comic book industry right after graduating in high school by sending over 150 pages of sample artworks to Marvel and DC editors with no success. It took nearly a year before he finally caught the attention of Image co-founder Rob Liefeld at a Toronto convention in 1994. Four months later, he was hired by Image Comics and went off to train at Extreme Studios. There, he learned an invaluable skill: speed. Lee worked on various titles such as Bloodpool, Extreme Sacrifice, Black Flag, Glory, Darkchylde, Avengeblade, Extreme Prelude, and Prophet. Soon after, he was hired in Wildstorm Productions to work on Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S., Allegra and Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks. His career in comic books led him to work in Marvel Comics with a Wolverine/Punisher mini-series entitled Revelation. Pat and his brother Roger Lee founded Dreamwave Productions. The two secured comic licenses for the popular toy line Transformers, which Lee would illustrate. His work on Transformers brought newfound attention on the Transformers property, making way for the incredible success it would eventually achieve on film.
Continuing the biography:
“Then, a combination of shady ethics and poor company management turned the company into a massive sinkhole. Sensing the end was near, Lee transfered as many assets of the company as he could to his parents. He lied to the artists working for him that they would eventually be paid, then declared the company bankrupt. He never paid anyone and this led to severe financial hardship for many of them.”
“To this day Lee has never expressed even an iota of remorse about his awful behaviour or financially damaging a number of people whom he called ‘friends’.”
“Lee’s most recent work in comics was taking credit for the illustrations of another artist on the Image relaunch of Cyberforce. When the artist came forward and exposed that Lee was penciling a little under 5% of the pages he was receiving credit for, the Lee had no comment and went into hiding for 2 or 3 years.”
“It is frankly shocking that he has returned to comics.”
Please get hired by DDP, please get hired by DDP…
Thank you, Mr. Butcher.
can not believe after all the people he screwed with dreamwave that Dynamite is actully wanting to work with Pat lee. hope they have it in the contract that some of the money he makes off it goes towards his debt but doubt ful it will happen.
I know they said Pat Lee is the artist, but who is drawing it?
Ba-dum-bum!
Yeah, actually I think Pat Lee is “best known” as a guy who hired ghosts to do his work and then didn’t pay them, not as “a popular artist”.
And somewhere Nick Simmons has read this story and is thinking “there is hope for me yet”, because the people in the industry are so retarded that all is forgotten in a year or two.
Sickening.
wow, I never knew of all this about Pat and Dreamwave…thanks guys! O.O
Thanks Pat for the thieving Transformers years. IDW seems to have one uppped you on that one though.
Nice job, Chris. Better luck next time, Beat. (Or is this going to be labeled simply a case of “Don’t shoot the messenger,” or worse — “Don’t shoot the shill, cuz the shill tried to play the sorta-ironic-shill card with a cop-out line like ‘PR below'”?)
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