Sketch of Comics Creators Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill

This is for all the comics fans out there. It’s a sketch of the comics writer, Alan Moore, with the artist Kevin O’Neill. It’s based on a photo of the two that was published last week on one of the comics sites that reported the sad death of O’Neill. Moore began his career in comics with the strip ‘The Stars My Degradation’ in Sounds, which he wrote and drew under the pseudonym Kurt Vile. This was a satire of the American superhero comics of the time. He also created ‘Laser Eraser and Pressbutton’, about a future female assassin and her companion, the psychotic cyborg Axel Pressbutton, which was revived in the 1980s as one of the strips in the adult comic Warrior. From there he progressed to writing Captain Britain in Marvel UK, as well as the eccentric genius, ‘Abelard Snazz – the Man with the High-Rise Head’ and a number of stories for ‘Tharg’s Future Shocks’ and ‘Time Twisters’ in 2000 AD. He was then poached by DC Comics over in the states, writing Swamp Thing and later The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This last strip was illustrated by O’Neill, and was about a Victorian superhero group made up of Alan Quartermain, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man, Dorian Grey and Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. This was later filmed with Sean Connery playing Quatermain. Moore and O’Neill were also responsible for the edition of the Green Lantern Corps that the American Comics Code refused to pass as suitable for children. When Moore asked what was wrong with it, and if he could change anything to get it passed, they told him, ‘No.’ It was O’Neill’s artwork. That was totally unsuitable for wholesome American youth. By this time, O’Neill and his art had already appeared for years in British comics like 2000 AD. Moore also wrote ‘V for Vendetta’, which originally appeared in Warrior. This was about a masked vigilante, whose real identity is never revealed, and his female companion Evie, attempting to bring down the corrupt, brutal government in a future Fascist Britain. It was later filmed with Hugo Weaving as ‘V’ and Natalie Portman as Evie, with the dictator played by John Hurt. It was this film that launched the Guy Fawkes mask as the symbol of the hackers’ group Anonymous and universal protest across the world.

O’Neill launched a number of favourite strips in 2000 AD, where his particular strengths were drawing robots and aliens. He co-created with writer Pat Mills, ‘Robusters’, about a robot disaster squad, ‘ABC Warriors’, about a group of war robots fighting tyranny, injustice and the Volgans, and ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, about an alien sorcerer fighting the evil Terminators, a xenophobic human military order determined to exterminate all intelligent aliens. He and Mills also created a short-lived strip for DC, Metalzoic, about a group of robot apemen on a far-future Earth, where robots had evolved to become the dominant creatures and formed an entire ecology of robot animals – mammoths, sharks, lions, giraffes and so on. He and Mills also created the violent and nihilistic anti-superhero strip, Marshal Law, set in a devastated future San Francisco. This was about a superpowered policeman who was employed to fight violent and criminal superhero gangs, formed by former soldiers left traumatised by a war in Central America. Alan Moore has also praised O’Neill’s depiction of humans. O’Neill is also very good at depicting grotesques, and Moore believed he was the greatest artist of that kind of human life since Hogarth. High praise indeed! O’Neill also illustrated strips for other comics, as well writing a number of SF fanzines. As an artist, I think his work transcends the medium and is itself great art, like the other comics artist Jack Kirby, comparable to H.R. Giger, the man who created the Alien and the Russian artists of the austere style. O’Neill was a real character at conventions, with many funny anecdotes and his death is a real loss to British and American comics.

2000AD and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Artist Kevin O’Neill Dies Aged 69

I was saddened to learn of the death on Monday of Kevin O’Neill, one of the great British comics artists behind many of the favourite strips in 2000AD over here and DC Comics and other publishers in America. O’Neill was the co-creator, with writer Pat Mills, of the Robusters, ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock strips in 2000 AD, the galaxy’s greatest comic. Robusters was about a robot disaster squad, led by Hammerstein, an old war droid, and Rojaws, a foul-mouthed sewer robot, who formed a kind of double act. The squad was owned by the dictatorial Howard Quartz, alias ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, because after some kind of disaster, only ten per cent of him – his brain – was still human, housed in a robot body. The penalty for failure or simply upsetting the boss was destruction, and the pair were always on the verge of being pulled apart by the sadistic but thick robot bulldozer, Mekquake. ABC Warriors was a continuation of Hammerstein’s adventures, first in a world war against the Volgan Republic, and then on Mars and a far future Earth, as the leader of an elite squad of robots dedicated to fighting evil. Nemesis the Warlock was a weird sword and sorcery strip set in the far future. The surface of the Earth had become a devastated wasteland and humanity had retreated underground. Renamed Termight, short for ‘Mighty Terra’, it was a medieval society ruled by an evil order of warriors, the Terminators, that hated and feared intelligent alien. Led by their Grand Master, Torquemada, Earth regarded such aliens as demonic and waged a war of extermination against them. O’Neill’s art, which is angular and geometric, was suitably Gothic and horrific, creating a nightmare variety of alien creatures. His art was so horrific, in fact, that later, when he was working on the Green Lantern Corps, a superhero comic for DC, it put the wind up the Comics Code Authority. This had been founded in the 1950s during the moral panic over comics. It was supposed to judge whether or not a comic was suitable to be read by children. Although it was supposedly voluntary, in fact all children’s comics had to be submitted to the Authority as otherwise the mainstream newsagents over there wouldn’t carry them. The writer, Alan Moore, who also created the cult strip about a future Fascist Britain, V For Vendetta, took the unusual step of contacting the Authority. Would the comic get approved if various changes were made? No, they replied. It wasn’t the strip’s story; it was the artwork. It was totally unsuitable for children. This became something of a source of pride and amusement to O’Neill and the other creators at 2000 AD. So grim was his art that rumours started circulating that he had an occult temple in his basement and drew only at night. These were completely false. On the other hand, a fan once told his fellow 2000 AD artist, Dave Gibbons, that O’Neill’s art gave him nightmares which he could only cure by looking a Gibbons. When O’Neill wasn’t traumatising people with his serious strips, he made them laugh with Dash Descent, a parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. He also drew the Tharg’s Future Shocks strip which a court later ruled had been plagiarised by the film maker Richard Stanley for the film Hardware. This was set in a decaying city in which a scavenger in the radiation deserts finds and brings back the remains of an experimental war robot, the B.A.A.L. His artist girlfriends reassembles it and it then goes off on a frenzy of killing. Hardware is a cult film, which stands up even now, three decades after it was made. Highlights include cameo appearances by Lemmy, as a water taxi driver, and the voice of Iggy Pop as a radio announcer. It’s just a pity Stanley didn’t work out a deal with 2000 AD first. He also contributed in other, minor ways to the comic. He created the look of Tharg, the comic’s alien editor from the star Betelgeuse, and introduced the credit cards telling readers who the writer, artist and letterer were, quite against the publisher’s policy. But this allowed the people, who actually created the strips, to gain the proper recognition and respect for their work.

O’Neill left 2000 AD for work with the American comics companies. He and writer Pat Mills created Metalzoic for DC. This was another robot strip, set on a far future Earth where an ecology of robot animals had developed and taken over, and followed the adventures of a tribe of robot ape men and the human woman they had rescued. It still is one of my favourite strips, but sadly flopped, though it was later reprinted in 2000 AD. O’Neill was far more successful with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, written by Alan Moore. This had the idea that the great figures of 19th and early 20th century SF, Fantasy and Horror – Alan Quatermaine, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo and Dorian Grey – had formed a kind of superhero group. It was filmed with Sean Connery as Quatermaine. Back to causing gleeful mayhem, O’Neill and Mills created the violent, nihilistic Marshal Law. This was an adult comic set in a near future San Francisco. Devastated by an earthquake, the city was renamed San Futuro, and plagued by warring superhero gangs. The superheroes had been created to fight in a war in South America. As a result, many of the survivors had returned to America mentally and physically scarred, some turning to violent crime. Law was the member of a small anti-superhero squad, moved by a deep hatred of superheroes. He uttered phrases like ‘They say I hate superheroes. They’re wrong. Hatred is far too bland a word for the way I feel about them’ and ‘I’m hunting heroes. I haven’t found any yet’. Mills hates superheroes and has very left-wing politics and poured that into the strip. It commented on recent developments in genetic engineering and the patenting of GMOs, insane CIA plans to overthrow Fidel Castro and other South American left-wing regimes and how America trained the sadistic torturers for the continent’s Fascist dictators. There was also an overt feminist critique of the genre and the fictional glamorisation of the real horrors of war. The Marshal’s opponents were vicious parodies of various superheroes. Despite its grim premise, it was a hilarious strip, although the humour was pitch-black. It was too much for one publisher, however, and moved from one to another. It has now been collected into a single album, although sadly without the crossover strip featuring the Marshal fighting Pinhead from Hellraiser.

Outside of comics, O’Neill apparently published his own fanzine, Just Imagine: The Journal of Film and Television Special Effects. I also remember him being credited in Starlog for designing the aliens in the Disney film, Return to Witch Mountain.

I met O’Neill extremely briefly at the UKCAC 90 comics convention, 32 years ago. From what I can remember, he was a short, slightly built chap in a T-shirt championing solidarity with Nicaragua, whose left-wing regime was under attack by the brutal Contras funded by Reagan and Thatcher. He was drawing people’s favourite characters for them on badges supplied by the convention’s organisers. But he was an amazing artist, producing very high-quality drawings in a blur of speed. There are a series of videos of him speaking at various comics conventions about Nemesis, Marshal Law and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he appears as short, jolly fellow with a great sense of humour, chortling over the daft incidents he’s experienced during his career.

In a separate interview, also on YouTube, Alan Moore commented on his art, praising him as one of the greatest British artists of all time. Moore remarks that O’Neill’s celebrated for his robots and aliens, but not for his humans. But Moore considers that he is brilliant depicter of humans as grotesques, and in that sense is one of the best artists since Hogarth. It sounds like something that should go in Private Eye’s ‘Pseud’s Corner’, but in my opinion it’s absolutely correct. Particularly as Hogarth produced sequential art himself as the kind of precursor of comics. I strongly believe that comics artists, or at least the very best, are insufficiently appreciated. I think they can be as good as serious fine artists. Way back in the 90s I submitted a piece to one of the art magazines arguing that comics artists like O’Neill and Jack Kirby were artists, whose styles meant that they should receive the same appreciation as those of the Soviet austere style, Francis Bacon and H.R. Giger. The Nemesis the Warlock strip had scenes of pure body horror. In one of the two precursor strips that launched the character, Killerwatt, Nemesis and Torquemada chase each other down the teleport wires, in which people are transported electrically similar to the telephone. At one point they have to cross the Sea of Dead Souls, a nightmare morass caused when a gooney bird, a massive mechanical bird, sat on the wires. Those unfortunate enough to be there when it happened are turned into a mass of hugely distorted body parts, such as giant feet with eyes. It resembles the scene of the ‘shunt’ in the 80s horror movie, Society, where members of America’s elite class are portrayed as predators who can twist and distort their bodies into any shape whatsoever. The Shunt is an orgy in which they melt down into a similar morass of bodies to feed off tramps and other members of the lower orders. Society’s a great film if you like that kind of ‘orror, but came out a few years after Mills and O’Neill got there first.

There have been a number of great obituaries for him at Bleedingcool and on 2000 AD’s website. These give the reactions and messages of grief and appreciation from the other comics creators. The 2000 AD page gives a full potted biography and examples of his truly amazing artwork.

RIP great man. May your art continue to shock, amaze, amuse and inspire.

Kevin O’Neill 1953 – 2022

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/kevin-oneill-the-man-the-comics-code-tried-to-ban-has-died-at-69/

In Memoriam: Comic Artist Kevin O’Neill 1953 – 2022

Six Robot Animals from Festo Robotics

Here’s another fascinating little video about robots. It’s not just humanoid robots that the cybernetics companies are developing, quite apart from the machines that aren’t intended to resemble people, like the industrial robotic arms. They’ve also been developing robot animals. Boston Robotics did it with their ‘Big Dog’ robots, which were intended as carriers for the American army. The project eventually failed because the noise from the machines’ electric motors would have been too loud for the stealth needed on combat missions. The machines, however, do strongly resemble dogs. Festo Robotics have taken this further and developed robotic versions of various animals, as this video from Inventions World on YouTube shows. The machines are a flying fox; jellyfish; a wheelbot, that can curl up and roll along before uncurling itself to walk on crab-like feet, somewhat like the robots that Obi Wan Kenobi and his teacher first encounter aboard the Trade Federation’s craft in the first Star Wars prequel, the Phantom Menace; a bird; butterflies; and a kangaroo. Well, actually the last one is more like a wallaby. It’s not as large as an Australian kangaroo. But this one clearly has some intelligence, as the video shows a young woman telling it turn round and move to a different place by pointing. I think she’s able to control it through a device wrapped around one of her arms.

These are amazing machines, beautiful and graceful. I wonder what a whole ecology of such robots would be like. There have been attempts to depict such an environment. There was a short-lived strip in 2000 AD, ‘Metalzoic’, set in the far future when humanity had been ousted as the dominant creature on Earth by robots with the ability to reproduce. There was thus a whole ecology of robot animals, and the strip followed the adventures of a group of robot cave people as they sought out the God-Beast, a robot mammoth which contained the master programme controlling this mechanical world. And a few years before that, Valiant ran a story in their ‘Spider’ strip, in which the brooding genius and his minions were forced into fighting another evil genius, who had created his own synthetic robotic environment on his secret island. ‘The Spider’ was a British strip that had zilch to do with Marvel’s Spiderman. According to the Bronze Age of Blogs, now sadly closed down, ‘The Spider’ was a criminal mastermind, who had decided to fight other criminals because they were too stupid or otherwise beneath him. You wouldn’t know it from reading the strip, as until art robot Kevin O’Neil introduced it in 2000 AD, artists, writers and letterers weren’t credited in British comics, but the writer on the strip was Joe Siegel, one of the co-creators of Superman! These machines would also have delighted the Futurists, although I fear they had a darker, more violent purpose for them. One of their manifestoes called for the creation of biomechanical animals to train boys in war. I’d rather have such creatures made for the sheer delight of their invention and their graceful beauty. The bird in particular reminds me of one of the characters in M. John Harrison’s science fantasy novel, The Pastel City, who makes robot birds. As a result, his castle is surround by flocks of them. Perhaps as the technology advances we might expect similar robots along with the other robotic toys now available.

Boston Dynamics’ Robotic Reindeer Pull a Santa Sleigh

This is a fascinating video from Boston Dynamics, the robotics division of Google. I found it through the over 18 site, 1000 Natural Shocks. It’s very seasonal, showing one of their young female employees driving around dressed as Santa Claus in a sleigh pulled by robotic reindeer.

The machines look like variations of the ‘Big Dog’ robot now being developed as pack creatures for the American military. I can remember way back in the 1980s 2000 AD ran a strip, Metalzoic, set in a far future Earth in which the entire ecology was dominated by machine animals. The few humans that survived did so as primitive tribesmen, dependent on cultivating the shape-shifting, carnivorous trafids. This displays brings robotic animals just a little bit closer.

And with the world currently in a dire ecological crisis with thousands of species already extinct or threatened with extinction, it also raises the spectre of the world of Philip D. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book on which the classic SF film, Blade Runner was based, where the people of a devastated future world keep robot animals as pets, because the real, organic creatures are either extinct or too rare, and hence too expensive.

I’ve got some misgivings and reservations about robot research, because of the way so many jobs are being automated out of extinction. The Beeb broadcast a programme earlier this year on the subject. It’s estimated that about 1/3 of the jobs in the retail sector will be lost, thanks to humans being replaced by machines. So such devices aren’t the unalloyed good they are frequently claimed to be. But this is fun, and the science behind it ingenious and impressive.

The World Moves Towards the Metalzoic: American Military Wants Robot Cheetahs

I found this interesting little snippet over on Youtube. It’s a CNN report on the US military’s programme to develop robot warriors and vehicles. DARPA has already produced the four-legged robot vehicle, Big Dog, to carry trooper’s equipment in the battlefield. It’s been commented that Big Dog moves remarkably like a real animal, and its attempts to right itself when someone attempts to knock it over is indeed very eerily like that of a biological creature.

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It reminded me very strongly of this creature, a robot sabre-toothed lion, from the 1980s 2000 AD strip, Metalzoic.

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Beginning in Prog 483, Metalzoic was a strip about a group of primitive robotic humanoids, the Mekaka, attempting to survive in a far future world dominated by robots. Written by that pillar of the British comics industry, Pat Mills, and drawn by Kevin O’Neill, the strip had originally been published by DC Comics across the Atlantic. It was set in the far future, after the collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field in the 24th century had wiped out most of the animal life on Earth. These had been replaced by their robot counterparts, who had been given the ability to reproduce, so that almost the planet’s entire ecology was robotic. The far-future world envisaged by the strip was very much like that of Earth’s prehistory. The robotic humanoids, the Robosapiens were the robot counterparts of early humans. Apart from robot sabre-toothed cats, there were also robotic sharks, giraffes and mammoths. These machine creatures were based on or shared features with contemporary machines. The robot sharks looked somewhat like submarines, the giraffes based on cranes and the robot mammoths bore more than a little similarity to trucks. The robosapiens’ leader was the violent and brutal Armageddon, who was leading them on a mission to find and kill the Godbeast. This was the leader of a herd of robot mammoths, which carried the master programme guiding and controlling robot evolution on Earth. Armageddon succeeded in killing the Godbeast, and taking from it the master programme. This allowed Armageddon and his tribe to become the dominant creatures on Earth.

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Following the geological time charts, Metalzoic had its own showing the evolutionary epochs leading up to and including the Metalzoic, including the Humanic, the Necromic, and the Robocene.

With Darpa’s proposed development of robot animals, and eventually, humanoid robot warriors, it seems we are not quite in the strip’s Humanic period. This was the period where humans were still dominant, but robots were commonplace and some, built to colonise other world, had been given the ability to reproduce themselves. Nevertheless, that may become a reality in the next few decades. Other documentaries have shown a robot factory in Japan, where the robots are busy making other robots. Nevertheless, the machine ecology of Metalzoic is still a long way off. It’s a disturbing thought that the robotic world Mills and O’Neill created for entertainment way back in the ’80s may become a reality due to humanity’s desire to find ever more efficient ways of murdering people.

Miming the Metalzoic: Amit Drori’s Savanna, A Possible Landscape

Back in January of this year (2013), the Independent covered Amit Drori’s Savanna, A Possible Landscape, a play about the adventures of a group of robot animals, shown as part of the London Mime Festival. These creatures include a tortoise, a springbok made of springs, whose legs are mounted in wheels so that it walks with just the right rhythm, a crane (the bird, not the machine), a mechanical moth, and a transistor radio that becomes an grasshopper by extending its aerials and tiny wheels. The main character is a mechanical elephant, created by Drori from the remains of his mother’s piano. In voiceover, Drori tells the audience how he resented the instrument, because it too up so much of his mother’s time, while being fascinated by its inner workings. To him, these were like the skeleton of an elephant or whale. The piano was in a poor condition and required much maintenance. When the piano finally became irreparable, Drori attempted to make an animal from its remains. The result was the play’s walking mechanical elephant. This too dies, laying on the ground to be covered in projections of leaves. A smaller elephant walks away from it.

This play is by no means the first time that artists and dramatists have attempted to explore the machine aesthetic on stage. One of the first modern art groups to do so were the Italian Futurists. They were founded by the poet, Marinetti, in 1909. Aggressively militaristic, they celebrated youth, speed, virility and violence, and the new, industrial machine age. In the group’s ‘Founding and Manifesto’, Marinetti declared that the motorcar was ‘more beautiful than the Battle of Samothrace’, and declared that his movement looked forward to ‘the union of man with machine’. In Russia, the poet Mayakovsky described the actors in his plays as ‘biomechanical performers’. Another of the Italian Futurists declared that in the new, Futurist order, they would be giant, biomechanical toys, built to train children for war. One of their operas was entitled ‘The Agony of the Machine’. Since then other artists with radically different political and social views have staged pieces in which the central performances are machines. I can remembers on some of the children’s programmes in the 1970s, such as Vision On, dances consisting of the choreographed performances of forklift trucks. More recently, adverts for certain types have car have featured them chasing around a city playing hide and seek, or formations of them whirling and spinning through the air, crossing through each other in lines like an airborne, automotive Busby Berekely routine. Unlike the Futurists, there is nothing Fascistic about these, but in their subject matter and performance, Marinetti would probably have been delighted.

Robots have been a staple of Science Fiction ever since the Steam Man, a mechanical, steam-driven robot, first appeared in American pulps in the 19th century. One of the few SF stories to feature mechanical animals as the heroes was the 1980’s comic strip, Metalzoic. Written by Pat Mills and drawn by Kevin O’Neill, Metalzoic was first published by DC in America before being reprinted in the page of the veteran British SF comic, 2000 AD. It was set in a far future Earth, where the biological world had been replaced by an artificial ecology of robot animals, evolved from machines created by humanity, that had then escaped and run wild. Humanity itself survived on Earth as a primitive, tribal culture farming the Traffids. These were giant, predatory alien plants, which trapped their food like Venus Flytraps. Unlike these plants, the Traffids took on the forms of artificial environments, such as houses complete with magazines, in order to trap their victims. The story itself centred around the adventures of a tribe of robotic proto-humans as they attempted to track down ‘the godbeast’, a mechanical mammoth shaped formed from a truck, which carried the master programme for all life on this robotic world. Savanna, A Possible Landscape, recalls Metalzoic through its cast of mechanical animals, designed by Drori himself and Noam Dover, though the two are otherwise completely different.

I have to say that despite robots appearing as the heroes and villains in film and theatre since Karel Capek’s RUR in the 1920s, there has been little use of genuine robots themselves as performers and the subject of films and plays. Some of this is changing as the technology has advanced to the point where producers and directors can use genuine machines to perform as the robot characters in plays and film. Star War’s R2D2, when not played by Kenny Baker, was operated by remote control. The giant ABC Warrior in the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film was a genuine robot, deliberately constructed so that it would definitely not be another man in a suit. There is a robot circus in America, and I’ve included on this blog videos of performance by a robotic Heavy Metal band. The technology exists for writers, artists and performers to create pieces using genuine robots. These could not just explore the aesthetic possibilities of the machines themselves, but also the wider issue of the organic, the human and the mechanical and how they increasingly interact in modern, technological culture. I’m sorry I never had a chance to see Drori’s Savanna, as it seems to have been a welcome and fascination addition and extension of genuine robotic theatre.