At an early age of 16, Lee began his career in the comic book industry right after graduating in high school by sending over 150 pages of sample artworks to uninterested Marvel and DC editors. 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. In an interview with Wizard he states:

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.

Lee has illustrated cards for the The Gathering collectible card game.

Dreamwave

A year later, he and his brother Roger Lee founded Dreamwave Productions. They began to publish their first mini-series Darkminds followed by other titles like Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Warlands, Fate of the Blade, NecroWar, Sandscape and other graphic novels.

Controversially, Lee is the subject of much criticism over his financial practices, especially surrounding the closure of Dreamwave and the failure to pay its staff whilst items such as sports cars were exempt from debt collection agencies, due to being surreptitiously transferred from company to personal ownership prior to declaring bankruptcy.[2] Also, his art-style, usually in regards to Transformers, came under fire from fans. After the studio closed its doors, it became the butt of many art-based jokes or cynical takes on the Dreamwave closure episode, especially in light of the revelation that many of his art pages were actually being drawn by uncredited (and, eventually, unpaid) sub-contractors.

Work for Hire

When Dreamwave Productions closed, Lee formed a new production company known as Dream Engine and parlayed his work on the Transformers franchise to land a string of jobs for Marvel and DC, most notably a X-Men/Fantastic Four mini-series and an arc on the Superman/Batman series for DC. He also contributed to a relaunch of Cyberforce for Top Cow Productions, another Image studio. Most of the new projects with Dream Engine failed to bring Lee the high profile acclaim of his Transformers work, with the Washington Times in particular criticizing his ability to draw humans versus the larger than life robots from Transformers.