Sony Online Entertainment treated members of the press to a luncheon earlier today, part of the Comic-Con 08 push for DC Universe Online. The massively-multiplayer online action RPG, coming to both the PlayStation 3 and PC platforms, will be playable by the public for the first time tonight. We’ll be going hands-on with the title this evening, taking part in an in-game Brainiac themed live event with other DC heroes.

We sat down with DC Comics executive creator Jim Lee earlier today to talk about the SOE-developed, DC-branded game. Lee told me that he was the one who had approached SOE after catching wind of the project, an effort which had experienced multiple starts and stops.

As a fairly serious EverQuest player — Lee played Paladin, for the record — the artist turned exec knew his stuff. He dropped MMO-isms (LFG, instances, the grind) like it was his natural language, and with a working knowledge of the DC universe, fans of the genre and the brand should feel confident that it’s creatively in good hands.