At New York Comic Con today, DC Publisher and CCO Jim Lee welcomed a special guest during his Jim Lee & Friends Panel — Joe Quesada, the longtime Marvel executive who left the House of Ideas earlier this year to pursue other projects.
Apparently one of those projects will be drawing variant covers for Batman. DC revealed two of them at the panel:
On a panel that included Marc Silvestri, John Ridley and more, Quesada was the final surprise, as the former Marvel Editor in Chief and Chief Creative Officer showed his variant covers for Batman #131 (coming Jan. 3), and Batman #132 (Feb. 7).
While this is Quesada’s first work for DC in decades, it’s not his DC debut — in fact, Quesada got his start at the publisher back in the 1990s. Quesada worked on the D&D licensed series Spelljammer for the publisher, as well as The Ray and Batman: Sword of Azrael. Quesada co-created the character who would eventually replace Batman when his back was broken by Bane.
Quesada would go on to work at other publishers, including Valiant, his own Event Comics and eventually Marvel, where he headed up the Marvel Knights line before being named Editor in Chief in 2000.
Edit: Chip Zdarsky’s “story” about how this all came together is pretty funny. And no doubt untrue.