Tripwire Reviews Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition Published By Rebellion

Celebrating The British Master Of Idiosyncracy

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Rebellion’s Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition out this week…

The 2000AD Art of Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition
Rebellion

After volumes focused on Brian Bolland and Mick McMahon, Rebellion’s Apex Edition series of large-format original art books turns to Kevin O’Neill, whose deeply individual style came to dominate a couple of 2000AD strips and influence a bunch of artists coming up behind him. He also had a foot in the back-office of the comic, employed as art assistant while creating strips and character designs before becoming a freelance artist. His combined role in 2000AD history as the comic took an existing British tradition of exaggeration and humour strips and evolved it into something much more intense is laid out for study in these pages, along with the handiwork of a singular British talent.

Rebellion is saving O’Neill’s 1980s work on Nemesis the Warlock for a future book, so the 2000AD strip most closely associated with him isn’t highly represented in this one. Instead the selection includes a Judge Dredd strip from 1977, the character’s design still modelled heavily on Frankenstein in the original Roger Corman Death Race movie, with O’Neill making the lawman’s leather uniform the fetish item it always partly was. Ro-Busters and ABC Warriors stories are increasingly ambitious, with O’Neill’s robots and aliens and non-human constructs switching between pathos and menace, comedy and tragedy. Shok!, the short story that inspired the 1990 film Hardware and earned the movie’s producers a letter from 2000AD‘s lawyers, and Terror Tale, the starting point for Nemesis The Warlock printed here in its original form rather than the one the artist redrew later, show how O’Neill’s imagination merged wildly imaginative organic and mechanised bodies with a talent for the strikingly dramatic image. His single-page covers and pinups have at least as much visual impact as the sequential strips.

Original art books like Rebellion’s Apex Editions or the more established IDW Artist Editions do a few different things. They lay out an artist’s technique for study in ways that might be more difficult to see later on the printed page, a recognition of the work the artist did when putting marks on the page, and by implication they question whether comics artists are suitably rewarded for this much effort. They put comics art on the same bookshelf pedestal as volumes of fine art, and put the artist first and foremost in the comics production line; text from writers and letterers appears, but in an Apex Edition it’s hardly the writer who feels in control of what you are reading. And they can be a remembrance of someone no longer around, as in this case. Kevin O’Neill died during the final stages of preparing this book, but had enough influence over the contents to be credited as its compiler. His legacy is spread across decades of comics pages, built on pencil and ink gymnastics like these.

The 2000AD Art of Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition is out from this Friday 23 June