Posted in: Comics, DC Comics, Superman | Tagged: jim lee, MacKenzie Scott

Jim Lee Draws MacKenzie Scott As Supergirl For Princeton Alumni Weekly

Jim Lee draws MacKenzie Scott as Supergirl for the cover of Princeton Alumni Weekly

Published Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:27:05 -0500

Article Summary

Jim Lee returns to Princeton to draw MacKenzie Scott as Supergirl for the Alumni Weekly cover.
MacKenzie Scott, Princeton alum and philanthropist, is celebrated for her transformative giving.
Jim Lee's path from Princeton student to DC Comics President began with a bold choice over medicine.
Lee’s comic book career skyrocketed after college, leading to global fame and industry leadership.

Jim Lee attended Princeton University in 1984, where he drew editorial cartoons for the school newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Something we clearly have in common, I drew cartoons for my university newspaper, The Courier of Newcastle University. It won me Student Cartoonist Of The Year, while all Jim Lee got out of it was a world-famous career as a comic book creator, co-founder of Image Comics, founder of WildStorm and now President, Publisher and CCO of DC Comics. And now he has returned to his alma mater to draw the cover for the latest issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

The magazine honours the philanthropist businesswoman MacKenzie Scott, an early employee of Amazon and former wife of Jeff Bezos, who graduated from Princeton in 1992 and, in recent years, has begun giving away billions of dollars of her personal fortune to worthy causes and people. The article does reflect a different time than demonstrated healthcare poverty amongst its students, recalling when "she tried glueing a broken tooth by herself because she couldn't afford a dentist. She was on the verge of quitting college as a sophomore for lack of funds." And so when she was giving out the cash, "Whose generosity did I think of when I made every one of the hundreds of gifts I've given so far?" Scott wrote in a 2021 essay on philanthropy. "It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out sophomore year."

As for Jim Lee, while his classmates predicted in his senior yearbook that he would found his own comic book company, he felt obliged to follow his father's career in medicine, studying psychology at Princeton, with the intention of becoming a medical doctor. But in 1986, as he was preparing to graduate, taking an art class and reading Frank Miller and Klaus Janson's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, he decided to postpone applying to medical school for one year, in order to give himself time to break into comics. The argument with his parents saw him leave home, though there was an instant reconciliation with his father, and he promised that he would attend medical school if he did not break into the comic book industry in one year. After a number of rekections, he met Archie Goodwin at New York Comic Con, and from there Carl Potts hired him to draw Alpha Flight and then The Punisher War Journal. And the rest is history… and within a few years he would dsraw and co-write X-Men #1, the biggest selling comic book of all time. No wonder Princeton do their best to get him back… even if he does make Mackenzie Scott look like a bit more like a victim of the Joker than Supergirl here…

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