QUICK OBIT ON KEVIN O'NEILL

I liked Kevin O'Neill's art on such works as NEMESIS THE WARLOCK and MARSHAL LAW. He seemed, to my American eyes, to be aligned with the punk aesthetic of the 1980s, though I've not come across any statements by O'Neill to that effect. Everything in his universe seemed, to coin yet another word, "hyper-steroidal," full of twisty figures and bulky muscles-- though if so, it was a "steroidism" with a very different agenda than, say, the Image muscle-fetishism of the 1990s. Many of the latter artists became grotesque by accident as they sought to "soup up" the bigfoot aesthetic of Jack Kirby. But O'Neill wrought grotesque forms as if that was the only type of thing worth drawing: a horse-headed alien (Nemesis), a future cop wearing barb wire on his arm (Marshal Law). 

At the same time, much as I admired his devotion to grotesquerie, I tended to think of O'Neill as an intense one-trick pony. In the debut stories of MARSHAL LAW, his collaboration with writer Pat Mills, several characters are put through the wringer, all in keeping with the mythos of the irony, where there's no value that can't be sullied. But future installments had nowhere to go beyond finding new ways to bag on superheroes.

But happily, O'Neill collaborated with Alan Moore on THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN-- and in so doing, I believe O'Neill pushed his art into new directions. It was more than just the discipline required to replicate the myriads of settings and physical body-types needed to pull off the "Victorian Justice League" concept. Since Moore and O'Neill were aping the characterizations found in the 19th-century prose-fiction that defined Western popular fiction for the next century, both of them had to "up their game" if they hoped to convince readers that they could come up with something as impressive as their pop-fiction ancestors.

Take the above scene between Edward Hyde and Mina Murray. The Hyde of LEAGUE is not Stevenson's Hyde, just as LEAGUE's Mina is not Stoker's. But there's an attention to characterization that goes beyond the average pastiche. Moore had produced exemplary characterization before in works like SWAMP THING-- though, to be sure, he could sometimes be as lazy and dilatory with his characters as any nineties Image-writer. But LEAGUE gave O'Neill a chance to execute visual characterizations as no earlier project (that I'm aware of) did before. In the above scene, Hyde is no less grotesque here than elsewhere, and even the demure Mina is rendered with some pop-eyed cartoonisms. But there's an unsentimental tenderness between the two that makes them seem real, or as real as such characters can seem. 

Of course, verisimilitude was not LEAGUE's primary appeal. O"Neill and Moore shared a fascination with the history of popular fiction, predominantly that of the British Isles, with the creations of America and France coming up second and third. I have this or that quarrel with the ways they rewrite that history, but I can't imagine any artist but O'Neill managing to bring so many pastiched characters and locales under his aegis. O'Neill had to draw beauty as often as ugliness, and the result is a sort of weird enchantment that combines the appeal of both artistic modes.

I had put off reading TEMPEST, the final LEAGUE work, since I felt the series had to some extent "jumped the shark," more for reasons relating to Moore than to O'Neill. But because O'Neill passed this week, I descended into the last LEAGUE, and though I have my usual complaints about Moore, I give him all respect for having conceived a template on which Kevin O'Neill's art could realize its utmost potential.