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In the mid-to-late '90s, Marvel Comics had some serious troubles stemming from the mass exodus of seven key artists/writers to form Image Comics, to a major misstep in buying a distributor (and failing miserably), and the 1994 bond market crisis. By 1996, it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Marvel's then owners, MacAndrews & Forbes, were looking for someone to turn its comics division around, and apparently reached out to superstar artist (and future DC Comics publisher) Jim Lee and his business partner (and future Marvel publisher), John Nee.

No, this isn't 'Heroes Reborn' where Lee and Liefeld led reboots of some of Marvel's comics. This would've been something bigger... much bigger.

30 years later, Nee casually dropped this knowledge in a wide-ranging interview in which he talks about his talks with Marvel over the years to work for them before he ultimately did in 2017 through 2021.

"In 2017, I was recruited to join Marvel, which was a lifelong dream. I'd had four opportunities to work at Marvel," Nee tells ICv2's Milton Griepp. "Once with Ronald Perelman. MacAndrews & Forbes had wanted to acquire WildStorm and ostensibly put me and Jim in charge of Marvel, which would have been an incredibly fun thing to watch. I don't know how that would have worked out."

Nee doesn't say exactly when that would've been, but MacAndrews & Forbes owned Marvel from 1989 to 1997, in a buyout by Toy Biz that helped Marvel emerge from bankruptcy.

In 1996, there were rumors that 'Heroes Reborn' was a plan to cede editorial control of Marvel Comics to outside companies (in this case, Lee's WildStorm and Liefeld's Extreme) but then-editor-in-chief Bob Harras publicly refuted those. Popverse has been told by a senior Marvel employee who worked there at the time that internally it was considered a trial effort for Marvel to outsource its editorial department to another company.

Who is John Nee, and what were he and Jim Lee doing in the '90s?

Nee was recruited by Jim Lee in 1992 as part of his exodus from Marvel, setting up his publishing company Wildstorm Productions with Nee acting as its president. Together, Lee and Nee created arguably the industry's most cutting-edge coloring department, secretly developed a massive consumer products design devision doing work for Disney and Sony, all the while cultivating future comics stars like Travis Charest, Mark Millar, Dustin Nguyen, Bryan Hitch, and John Cassaday, and at the same time being able to work out collaborations with A-list talent that Marvel and DC couldn't anymore, such as Alan Moore and Barry Windsor-Smith.

When Lee sold Wildstorm to DC Comics in 1998, Nee went with it, becoming VP/GM of Wildstorm, then later becoming vice president (and later senior vice president) of business operations before ultimately leaving in 2008.

Nee said that Marvel approached him again in both 2002, 2003, and 2012 while he was an executive at DC Comics, before ultimately taking an offer in 2017 to become its publisher, which he did through 2021, when Disney downsized Marvel and eliminated it as a full-time position.

These days, Nee is publisher at PUG Worldwide, and is overseeing a new collection of Jim Lee's X-Men run at Marvel.

Interested? Here's where to find your closest local comic store, courtesy of Sweet, and here's a guide to how (and where) to read comics online. If you're looking for the best comics in recent memory, check out the Eisner Awards winners and the Harvey Awards nominees. And if you like free comics, here's everything we know about Free Comic Book Day 2027.