Kevin O’Neill, the British comic artist who co-created The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Alan Moore and other influential works has died, EW confirmed. He was 69 years old.
O’Neill was born on August 22, 1953 in southeast London into a working-class family. His artistic dreams were first realized through anthology comics such as The Beano (Home of Dennis, the threatincluding stripes) and American imports of Mad Magazine.
“These ink lines and squiggles offered me a glimpse into worlds that were more real, more powerful and more desirable than the one I lived in,” O’Neill told writer George Khoury in an interview for Real Brita history of British comics.
Top Shelf Productions “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” co-creator Kevin O’Neill has died at the age of 69.
O’Neill began working in the comics industry at the age of 16, initially as an office assistant for children’s humor comics Buster. At some point he had enough of children’s comics and started working on the new science fiction anthology 2000 ADO’Neill held the post of 2000 ADwhich became popular with readers and is still popular today. The most popular strips include Judge Dredd And Nemesis the Warlockwhich O’Neill created together with author Pat Mills.
O’Neill’s first collaboration with Moore took place in 1986, when the two worked on an issue of DC’s Tales of the Green Lantern Corps superhero comics. The Comics Code Authority objected to the issue and when DC asked why, the organization, which had been responsible for rating mainstream comics since the moral panic of the early ’50s, said they found O’Neill’s art style offensive. O’Neill, who was banned from mainstream superhero comics, reunited with Mills to Marshal Law, a hyper-brutal satire on classic superheroes and American culture that makes perfect use of O’Neill’s bloody, vibrant and grotesque art.
“Never forget: Kevin O’Neill’s entire style was deemed offensive by the Comics Code Authority. That’s a real level of heroism,” posted writer Kieron Gillen after news of O’Neill’s death broke. “His work on Nemesis and Torquemada lives on in my mind, building gothic palaces.”
Never forget: Kevin O’Neill’s entire style was deemed offensive by the Comics Code Authority. That’s a real level of heroism. All of his Nemesis and Torquemada works live on in my head, building gothic palaces. pic.twitter.com/NLD63IzATD
— Kieron Gillen (@kierongilen) 7 November 2022
O’Neill’s most famous comic appeared in 1999, when he and Moore first The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Although it began as a Justice League-like collaboration of Victorian pulp heroes like Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man, league evolved into an epic saga that lasted decades and included almost every imaginable fictional character in its canon. Each installment was more ambitious than the last: The Black Dossier was a multifaceted exploration of 20th century literature, while another story reinterpreted Harry Potter as the Antichrist of the new millennium.
O’Neill really shined in league spin off The Nemo Trilogywhich both the cyberpunk cityscape of Fritz Lang’s metropolis and the monster-populated arctic desert from HP Lovecraft’s In the mountains of madness. The Nemo Trilogy landed on EW’s list of the best comics of the last decade, where Darren Franich praised O’Neill’s blend of “German cinematic expressionism and techno-futurism into an explosive war adventure.”
Kevin O’Neill for Top Shelf/IDW On Lincoln Island, the treasures of several Nemo generations are exhibited in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest” by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ended last year with the last volume, The stormwhich both Moore and O’Neill presented as their farewell to the comic book medium. On their way out, they managed to tear James Bond to shreds and write tributes to the forgotten comic artists who had influenced their childhoods.
On the final pages, Moore wrote sarcastic, bittersweet farewells in both voices. The author’s note ends with these words: “Fortunately, thanks to a large audience of smart people, they were able to work together for 20 years on the best damn comic in the world before they were tragically devoured, along with everything else that was ever good, by pale neoconservative androids.”
Related content:
