So here's a sticky choice made by Frank-- he didn't want to include any of Jim Lee's characters, since they were sold off to DC Comics, literally one of the big two surviving comic book publishers around since the beginning with one of the greatest accumulations of sins against creators on record. Deluded that this jam might actually appear in an Image comic someday, he didn't want any compromised copyrights that might force a later exclusion, like when Michel Fiffe Image Jam #1 erased Void when it appeared in an issue of Savage Dragon. Same went for Alan Moore's 1963 characters, which became another rights boondoggle when Moore abandoned them (and then had his own America's Best Comics sold to DC by Jim Lee.) So how do you acknowledge the formidable presence of Jim Lee as an Image founder without using any of his creations?
Use one of Chris Claremont's, Lee's writer during his run on Uncanny X-Men. The debt WildC.A.T.s owed to Claremont is... measurable, come to think of it. That's probably why Claremont was (I believe) the first writer invited to publish their characters through Image, and he did so via a guest stint on said book. At one point, Huntsman was going to be Whilce Portacio's Image book as well, but Claremont was off in Paris at the time and Whilce wanted to get moving on a title... about another couple years later. Anyway, Lee drew most of Huntsman's appearances that weren't done by another ex-X collaborator, Marc Silvestri. Huntsman is still owned by his creator, and the association with Lee made him a good Wildstorm stand-in.
Since we're all about X-Men artists, another of Claremont's longtime collaborators who was also an influence on Lee and did work for Wildstorm was Alan Davis. In a better world, we might have had Claremont & Davis' Huntsman instead of Sovereign Seven and ClanDestine being consigned to the dustbin of Chromium Age historical footnotes. Davis also drew Alan Moore's seminal super-hero deconstruction Miracleman, which added layers of subtext by not only referencing Moore in a Jim Lee analog, but also a "creator-owned" property that was ultimately gobbled up by the other of the Big Two, Marvel (not to mention further tying into the McFarlane/Gaiman legal battle that cost the former the rights to Angela.) An absolutely delicious context cake!
That said, getting Davis would be a laborious longshot, but thankfully Frank has one of the world's great girlfriends, who stood in line for three hours to wait for him while Frank continued to move the jam around. Davis was doing while-you-wait quick pieces for charity (HERO, I think,) so it was a mad sprint once the call went out for Davis' availability. Given how many smiling faces Davis draws on his characters, Frank was amused by how crabby he was about drawing Huntsman. He complained the whole time about the inadequacy of the reference and the shortcomings of Lee's rendition of the character's costume and accessories. Regardless, worth it!
Side note: for those who would grouse about the exclusion of Wildstorm properties, several ultimately were included in the background at the choice of the final artist, who filled-out the jam with a multitude of additions.
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