25 December 2025
[comics] Happy Christmas from Kev O'Neill … Go look at some Christmas cards designed by the late Kevin O’Neill. He did some stunning Christmas comics covers as well.
10 December 2025
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed in 2010 … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘A few years later I went up to the DC offices in New York — I was curious to see an actual copy of the Comics Code. I’d never actually seen one. I’d asked Archie Goodwin, and he said he’d look around, but he couldn’t find it — which is pretty funny, actually! Eventually, he found a very old one, it had some stuff like “no werewolves, no vampires” etc. They did have a phone number on it for the Code, and I rang them up, and this woman answered — I said I was a British comic-book artist visiting New York, and I’d heard so much about the Comics Code, could I come up and visit the offices? And she said, “There’s nothing to see here” — and hung the phone up!’
9 September 2025
[comics] Leonides and the belt of gold – by Kevin O'Neill … An early, unknown and unpublished Kevin O’Neill comic.
5 December 2023
[comics] Classic 2000AD Covers From Kevin O’Neill … Really vivid colour on these great scans from 2000 AD production art owned by Steve Cook.
9 March 2023
[comics] Marshal Law: Not Approved by The Comics Code Authority! … Pat Mills brings us some obscure 1990s Marshal Law art by Kevin O’Neill.
19 January 2023
[comics] Kevin O’Neill’s Mek Memoirs … Pat Mills digs out some early comics from Kevin O’Neill that got him a job on 2000AD in 1977. [More Mek Memoirs]
23 November 2022
[comics] An Appreciation of Kevin O’Neill, 1953-2022 … David Roach remembers Kevin O’Neill. ‘In an industry that could often default to a mass-produced conformity, Kevin was that rarest of things, truly unique, with an artistic voice that was unmistakably his own. In his long career he never once tried to fit in or compromise; indeed, he was seemingly incapable of being anything other than himself. ‘
14 November 2022
[comics] Alan Moore Remembers Kevin O’Neill … I was very sad to hear of the death of Kevin O’Neill last week. The link above is what Alan wrote for a New York Times Obituary for Kevin. ‘I am going to miss him like I’d miss sunsets.’
23 May 2022
[comics] Garth Ennis and Kevin O’Neill on Reviving the Infamous Kids Rule OK! for Battle Action Special … Wonderful interview, with lots of British 70s comics history from O’Neill. ‘I was often asked to change little small things in my artwork for ludicrous reasons later on. But the fallout from Action, which the Garth story is built around, was massive at the time because you cannot underestimate the power of the tabloid newspapers when they turned on comics. I believe Action was torn up on a BBC show called Nationwide with Frank Bough, who was disgraced years later for various misdemeanors, but he tore up a copy of Action on-screen as worthless trash. That was the atmosphere. I don’t think 2000 AD could have been canceled before it was launched because too much time and money had been spent developing it, but by God, it probably came close. And nobody knew what was happening.’
1 March 2022
[comics] Kevin O’Neill’s ‘Mek Memoirs’ … Scans from an obscure, early Kevin O’Neill robot comic. More details on Kev’s early work here.
24 December 2021
[comics] A Hellraiser Christmas from Kevin O’Neill … [via Twitter]
18 February 2021
16 March 2020
[comics] A jam comic cover from Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons and Kevin O’Neill … Created for a 1979 Society of Strip Illustration (SSI) newsletter.
2 September 2019
[comics] We Almost Got an Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill Bizarro Comic? … Details on one of AM’s unstarted projects. ‘Me and Kevin O’Neill would really love to do a Bizarro mini-series, examining this whole Bizarro world. I mean, it’s square. How do the physics work on a world like that? What about the people who live on the corners? If you look at the pictures of the Bizarro world, there are continents that fold around the corners, so presumably you must have people living at right angles to each other. I just want to see Kevin draw it. I’m sure he’d be up to it.’
16 January 2018
[comics] Starlord Cover Gallery … a cover gallery for Starlord – a short-lived science-fiction comic from 1978 with some great art from Kevin O’Neill and Carlos Ezquerra …
20 June 2017
[comics] Kevin O’Neill on the early days of 2000AD … ‘My memory of 2000AD in those days is just white paint, paste-up, altering stuff, copying and enlarging stuff and getting as good a lettering job as we could get, because sometimes that covered deficiencies. It was totally like a Frankenstein operation at times. If we ran out of time, we’d get Jack Potter to letter it because he’d do a great lettering job, big display lettering and stuff. That elevated material a little bit. It was like trying to bodge a thing into submission, really. 2000 AD was still finding its feet, it was still sort of similar to Action minus something in some departments, but going off in other directions. It got up its own head of steam, eventually… ‘
26 May 2016
[comics] A leather-clad Tinkerbell … a reread / review of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshal Law … ‘The first couple of issues mix cartoon satire and the grim ‘n gritty flavour of the time fairly uneasily. Putting it out front; the first sequence, when we stalk and murder a strippogram dressed as a superheroine, isn’t good. It’s all shown through the killers eyes and the killing is blatantly sexualised. Not just the death-by-claw-penetration, which you could perhaps make a thematic case for, but the fact that in four shots of the corpse falling from a tall building every one of them is a titshot. That’s something nobody was uncomfortable with back then – these were adult comics, Biff Bam Pow not just for kids – but is profoundly uncomfortable now. And Lynn, the Marshal’s girlfriend in his secret identity, gets three pages of loving relationship which ends with them getting it on before she’s dressed in Celeste’s costume and is leered at, stalked, raped and murdered to better motivate our protagonist. A woman in a refrigerator before they’d been named.’
10 December 2015
[comics] How we made 2000 AD … Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill on creating 2000AD … Kevin O’Neill: ‘That anti-authoritarian streak is part of the British character: it ran through Dennis the Menace and all the Beano stuff. Judge Dredd was never meant to be serious: the idea of shooting jaywalkers is just very, very funny. I loved the story about the oxygen board on the moon cutting off people’s supply if they didn’t pay their bills. We had to tone things down quite heavily. On the day the first issue went to press, we were whiting out blood and tidying up severed limbs. It was an out-of-control section of the building. NME, who were often in trouble as well, were just a couple of floors above. Our neighbours Buster hated us because we were having fun and swearing. I didn’t think 2000 AD would last a year.’
11 May 2014
[comics] Nemo and All Things “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” with Kevin O’Neill … great interview with one of British comics finest artists … ‘I think with the original League series, it just started with a small Charles Dickens reference, and some older Victorian comic characters. I remember talking about it and we felt, well, if we have a newstand scene, it would be great if all the publications are fictional publications from all over the place – and therein lies the path to complete and total madness, really.’
11 October 2011
[comics] It’s 1969, Ok? … Kevin O’Neill interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid …
Kevin O’Neill: It’s a pity we couldn’t have used Marvelman, ‘cause I always liked him when I was a kid, I thought he was a fantastic character, but it’s… it’s one of those characters that is now almost toxic, anyone who touches Marvelman, it’s like a curse, you know, you just want to pass it straight on, which is a terrible state of affairs for the character to end up in.
Pádraig: As I said, I’ve researched the thing in enormous detail for the past several years. The book was going to be called Poisoned Chalice, because both Alan and Neil refer to it as a poisoned chalice in different interviews I saw, and now I find that my own curse of Marvelman…
[Earlier I had mentioned to Kevin that the book I’ve written on Marvelman is now without a publisher, as MonkeyBrain Books, who had contracted to publish it, were taking a break from publishing, at least for the time being, leaving it without a home for the moment.]
Kevin O’Neill: Isn’t that weird?
24 February 2010
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed at the Comics Journal … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘What Robocop did by beating Judge Dredd to the screen was it stole the best of Judge Dredd, and when they made the Dredd movie, they were then worried about being compared with Robocop! So they took out all the black humor and all the satire, and their emasculated movie was almost a Judge Dredd movie, but not quite. Robocop was a more energetic movie. We did hear there were piles of 2000 ADs in the production offices. That does kind of show, doesn’t it?’ [via Metafilter]
23 November 2007
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interview — O’Neill discusses the LoEG: The Black Dossier … On Alan Moore’s scripts: ‘…when I tidied up my studio, it was the first time I’d put all the scripts into one place, because it’d been written over a number of years. And the finished “Dossier” was bigger than a telephone directory, it was a monster of a thing. If that had all arrived at the same time, I doubt if I could’ve started the book, it would have been so formidable.’
20 August 2007
[comics] Legend Horror Classics! Frankenstein!! — Scans of a pre-2000AD comic from Kevin O’Neill … [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]
22 December 2006
[comics] Have A Cosmic Christmas, Earthlets! — a slightly bonkers Kevin O’Neill Christmas Cover for 2000AD.
12 June 2001
[comics] Tom interviews Kevin O’Neill [Part One | Part Two] artist on Nemesis The Warlock and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Censorship in 2000AD: ‘It was a scene in which two giant Torquemada statues had a bridge slung between them. I didn’t see what was wrong with – there was no blood or anything. But the editors thought the bridge was some kind of penis! It was above the navel! I just thought, ‘Where the hell does he keep his penis?!’. I made the bridge look thinner and that pacified them. But at the same time, they completely missed that Torquemada was married to an underage girl. We had scenes of him in bed with his 14 year-old child-bride and they never even blinked!’