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Jim Lee is a big name in American comics, having drawn probably all your favorite DC and Marvel characters, from Batman to X-Men, at one point or another. But as president and chief creative officer of DC Comics, he’s also responsible for trying to expand the reach of comic books beyond their current base. One of the places he’s looking for inspiration, it seems, is Japan, where the diversity of stories in manga and anime is something Jim Lee thinks DC Comics can learn from.

During an interview with Nikkei in Japan, Jim Lee was asked about his thoughts on manga and the reason for their soaring popularity.

“The stories told in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful,” Lee says. “I often find myself wondering, ‘What is missing in Western comics, and why aren’t they able to achieve the same flavor?’ Also, I think manga has an advantage over American comics, which are mostly about superheroes, and that’s where the majority of sales and readers are concentrated.”

The secret to manga’s success, in Jim Lee’s eyes, is that Japanese comics have more diverse stories on offer.

“In Japan, it’s closer to ‘literature,’ and anyone can read it, and it’s not just hero stories. There’s a much wider range of genres, like stories about cooking and soccer. You can draw stories from that. So I’m very happy that manga has been so successful, because it gives me a goal to aim for. The manga market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes, ‘What can we learn from this?’ The question is, ‘How do we access that?’"

In the early years of Lee's employment at DC, the company launched its own manga imprint, CMX, looking to take advantage of the success other American publishers such as TOKYOPOP had with importing manga for an English-speaking audience. While Lee wasn't involved in the decision to launch CMX, he was co-publisher when DC made the decision to end it, at the time telling ICv2 that the licences for "key" manga were "hard to obtain," and described the manga licensing market as one of a proving ground to get "lesser-known" manga licenses from Japanese publishers/licensors to "prove" you could handle bigger ones in the future. After six years, Lee and DC decided to pull back its efforts there and re-focus it back into its core DC line, including the then in-development 'New 52' relaunch.

"It’s not just a matter of art style, but a ‘sensibility’ that’s involved," told Nikkei in 2026. "The stories that are successful in Japan are very different from the stories that are successful in the West. What can we learn from that? I think this is a debate that will continue forever.”

Lee was instrumental in DC's current multi-year partnership with Kodansha, the world's largest manga publisher - and owner of the licenses to several of those "key" manga titles. Currently the deal has DC licensing its characters to Kodansha for it to publish authentic DC manga in Japan, and then for DC publish it itself in English speaking markets. 

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