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Kevin O'Neill, the British artist behind Nemesis and Marshal Law, has teamed
up once again with Alan Moore for a third volume of their critically
acclaimed comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Century brings
together Allan Quatermain and Dracula's Mina Murray for another adventure,
one that begins in the shadows of London's occult past, takes in the
swinging Sixities and ends in present day Afghanistan. Here O'Neill talks
about the collaboration process with Moore, his search for the headquarters
of the Comics Code Authority and the stupidity of some Hollywood producers.
The Times You have a new volume of the League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen coming out. It's called Century - what's it about?
Kevin O'Neill It's basically three standalone stories. The first one is
set in 1910 and is called What Keeps Mankind Alive. It's essentially the
story of Captain Nemo's daughter arriving in London and her journey to
becoming captain of the Nautilus and the passing of her father. The parallel
plot is an occult story where Alan has ingeniously used many fictional
versions of Aleister Crowley. That plot, a Moonchild plot, runs parallel to
the plot with Nemo's daughter. Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain and Orlando
establish a new league after the ruinous effects of the Martian invasion
from the previous story.
The Times The volume moves about history quite a bit. It starts at the
beginning of the 20th century, then moves to the Sixties and ends up in the
present.
O'Neill That's right. The principal characters - Mina, Quatermain and
Orlando - run though Century, crossing in and out of each other's lives. The
story I'm working on now is set in 1969, but it's a 1969 informed by all the
fictional changes to the world which might have happened. So it's a kind of
curious 1969, in so much as the earlier periods are slightly askew as well -
with characters like Mina Murray and Captain Nemo existing and the Martians
invading. The third part of Century brings it right up to the present. I've
just got the first few pages of that from Alan and the opening is set in
Afghanistan.
It's fascinating because it's a parallel world. We have a rich circle of
fiction that we can weave in and out of the stories. You know it's just a
headline in the Black Dossier where we reference Scoop. It doesn't matter if
you don't recognise where it comes from but if you do, you'll realise that
there is something else going on as well and that there is other material to
be found.
The Times There's always something going on in The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen. The big spreads are packed with detail.
O'Neill Alan and I were born in the same year - 1953. We both read the
same comics as kids and we were both big fans of the Beano and the Dandy.
They were full of detail and full of background in a way the modern versions
are not. I also read Mad paperbacks. I went to a Catholic school and Mad was
banned. It was seen as pernicious. Pretty much all comics were frowned upon
but Mad was seen as the worst offender. But I laughed at Mad's stuff even
though I wasn't aware that it was Jewish satirical humour. There was a
richness, a depth to the jokes and I could kind of work out the Americanisms
if I saw enough of them. Mad had great guys working for them - Bill Elder,
Wallace Wally Wood - who would layer in so many other points of humour into
the background, so many things that you could go back and read and reread.
There was so much to soak up. You would want to try it yourself. Those early
influences did play a part. I gives me pleasure including those details.
When I look at the contemporary versions of the comics of my childhood, they
all seem very bare and basic and uninvolving, which wasn't so in the Fifties
and Sixties. Back then there was a rich British comics industry, not just
the humour stuff. There was a length and breadth of creative talent the like
of which will probably never be seen again. It was really quite astonishing.
Not that I'm comparing myself to those artists, but I would like to tap into
the effect they had.
The Times Even in the smaller, more intimate moments, you manage to
give the reader something extra. How did you cope with those scenes?
O'Neill. With the League I had real trouble at the start. I had just come off
doing bombastic violent material, and the League had many more quieter
moments before things exploded. I didn't want it to look like the characters
had gone to a Victorian dressing up box, I didn't want it to look like a
glossy TV movie, and neither did Alan. Whenever we had Dockland scenes, or
things like that, I'd put in the background drunks or kids or dogs. I'd put
in period details that seemed unusual or odd. It just gives more substance
to the material. With Alan Moore's scripts you could screw them up by just
coasting along on the words.
The Times. How did you get involved with the League? Did Alan cast you, as it
were?
O'Neill He did, funnily enough. Alan is an unusual - he's risen very
fast and is very powerful. I'm pretty certain a regular American editor
wouldn't have thought of me for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen if he
had Alan's script. But Alan had very specific idea of what he wanted. He
wanted something very British, which I think my work is. I think he also saw
a sordid quality in my art.
The Times What is the collaboration process like on the League?
O'Neill Alan is famous for his densely detailed scripts - they are
formidable. His scene descriptions are incredibly exact. But we talk about
story before the script is finished. Some things come up in conversation.
For instance when we talked about Captain Nemo I happened to mention that
Jules Verne had changed his mind about Nemo's origin when he did Mysterious
Island [the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea] and made him an Indian
prince - and Alan said, "Oh, an Indian price. Let me pursue the Indian
angle." All the versions of Nemo in films and television - such as
James Mason's - are Caucasian; they forget his Indian background.
Another example is Florence Upton's Golliwogg. I mentioned to Alan what a
fantastic character he was, although much abused. Florence Upton did not
design him as a racially offensive character. Her Golliwogg is very powerful
in her books and popular, but she was ripped off because she didn't
trademark and copyright the image. People removed one "g" from the
spelling and suddenly the Golliwogg is this minstrel character. Reproducing
a character like that is a minefield but I thought Alan did it brilliantly.
And the relationship with the Dutch dolls, that really is there in the
original stories. It's kind of unsettling, these, frankly, naked dolls
wandering around the Golliwogg, but it's also amusing. It made us laugh.
Those came out of casual conversation, but in principle, Alan sends me these
very detailed scripts. Often he will say, "If you see a better way of
doing it, go ahead and do it", but mostly there isn't. The scripts are
like a blueprint for a house - you don't want a chimney out in a garden.
Working with [Marshal Law writer] Pat Mills is different. I worked with Pat in
IPC and on 2000AD and we're sort of best mates as well. We'd have these long
conversations and Marshal Law grew out of us talking backwards and forward
and making each other laugh. Really, the more excessive it became, the more
it made us laugh and the more we'd want to pursue that. And it'd always be
trouble, but it has been with the stuff I do with Alan as well. Trouble
seems to follow us. We seem to rub some folk up the wrong way. With Marshal
Law, there were plenty of people in Britain and America - professionals in
the business - who find [the character] incredibly hostile and nasty and
disrespectful to the superhero genre. But that just makes us worse and want
to push further the next time.
The Times Pat Mills’s loathing of superheroes is well-known. Do you
share that feeling?
O'Neill What's interesting is that when we pitched Marshal Law to
Marvel Epic in the Eighties it was much more of a Road Warrior, Mad Max type
of thing but we were kept waiting for a contract for so long - about a year
- that we had a chance to talk it over. At that time there was a restless
mood in comics - Alan Moore was doing Marvelman and Watchmen was just about
coming out as was Frank Miller's Dark Knight. People were looking at the
superhero stuff differently. Pat rang me up and said, "Why don't we
make him a superhero hunter?" and I said, "Don't you mean a
supervillain hunter?" "No, no, superheroes, because I f***ing hate
them." And I loved it.
I grew up with superhero comics as well as the Beano and Dandy. They were
available as imports, I remember buying the first issue of Spider-man off
the stands - but they were hard work to find, it was like hunting for
treasure. I was very familiar with all the characters, but I could certainly
get behind Pat's loathing of them, to see the funny side of superheroes, to
see them critically. But in so much as Watchmen was a deconstruction of the
genre, Marshal Law was an annihilation of it.
The Times Deconstructing superheroes is back in fashion now, as is
poking fun at them. There's a lot of Marshal Law in Garth Ennis's The Boys.
O'Neill It has been forgotten. It was successful in its day but not
with the people who wrote about comics. Top Shelf is going to be doing a big
collection of Marshal Law later this year. I've been looking at some my old
artwork and some of the stuff we were doing ...Jesus, the Secret Tribunal.
That was based something I hated. As a kid I always despised the legion of
superheroes. I hated the clubbishness of it, the wretched American middle
class [values], [the idea of] being vetted by Superboy and the others. There
was something I loathed about it. It seemed so preppy and awful. That
particular two-part story was possibly the meanest, the most sexual, the
most deviant one we did. The week that it came out I was taken off the DC
complimentary comics list. I never got free copies again.
The Times Your first brush with controversy was during the mid-Eighties
when you were working on Green Lantern with Alan Moore. What was it about
your art that was so objectionable?
O'Neill During the Eighties DC started looking to employ British
artists. They were following 2000AD and were curious about it. They saw a
ground swell of new artists that they hadn't seen before. So they headhunted
them - Brian Bolland and then Dave Gibbons, who were huge fans of DC
characters and naturally fitted into that whole Green Lantern world. DC
dipped their toes a bit further into the British waters and saw me. They
were very very charming but there was no way they were going to give me
Superman to do. Even after a few years of working for them, they didn't want
me to do Batman, which is something I wanted to do at the time. They were
just giving back-up things. [Back then] Alan and I hadn't done much
together. He had this story called Tigers, which was about the temptation of
Abin Sur, [the man] who gave Hal Jordan the Green Lantern. It was a great
story, I sent the artwork in and a week later I got a call from the editor
saying, "You've got a big problem with the Comics Code." My first
thought was, "Does that still exist?" I mean this was like the
Eighties and this thing came from the 1950s' horror comic crisis. It was a
little measly stamp in the corner of a comic that shrank every few years. No
one took any notice of the damn thing - I'm sure retailers didn't. It was
ridiculous. So I said, "Do you want me to change something?" and
he said, "No, they called us up and said they can't pass this artwork."
He asked them, "Well, what could we change to make it better?" and
they said, "Nothing, it's the whole style." I called Alan Moore
and he was so jealous. DC kept the story on ice for about a year and then
ran it without a code sticker. But the world didn't fall apart, and, as far
as I know, there were never any complaints.
When I was in New York a couple of years later and I said to Archie Goodwin,
who working at DC at the time, "You know, I would love to visit the
Comics Code [office]. Perhaps you have a copy of the code. I presume you do."
And he went, "Oh, I don't know. I'll ask." So he went round and
round and in all the offices no one had a copy of the Comics Code, which is
this pamphlet thing, but he eventually found one in the bottom of someone's
desk and he gave it to me. And it's the most ridiculous thing ever. The
words you can't use when using vampires. It's almost anti-fiction in a way.
They had the [office] phone number on it, so I rang up and said that I was a
British artist and that I had always been fascinated by the Comics Code and
that I'd love to visit their office. And this woman on the other end of the
line said, "There's nothing to see here, there's nothing to see here"
and put the phone down. I never got to go there, but my vision is it's
filled with all these women who crochet, occasionally looking at World's
Finest and stamping the back.
Marshal Law has been in trouble a lot but it has only been censored twice. The
first was in first series where the Public Spirit and Celeste are having sex
while flying over the city. Apparently the women in the Marvel office
objected to that so I added a bit of cape over the Public Spirit. The other
one was a very odd one. It was in a Mask crossover we did. We always showed
the red light district as often as we could and I had Pussy Palace in neon
in the background [of one of panel]. It was completely innocuous, but for
some reason it was changed to Pushy Palace. You do occasionally see the
limits of what people's tolerances are and how easily offended some people
are.
The Times In Marshal Law you seemed to go all out. There are Nazis,
nuns with guns, gruesome deaths, and the more outlandish it got, the more I
liked it.
O'Neill It's funny, the people who like Marshal Law like it a lot and
the people who don't like it really don't like it. One film producer said to
me that he didn't want to meet me because he assumed I was fascist because
of Marshal Law. And I thought, "Where did that leap come from?"
How thick would you have to be to sit and read it and see it as a serious
polemic? Judge Dredd sometimes had that effect. People were uncomfortable
with his popularity because of what he represented. But if you don't see the
satire of him, then all you're left with is leather-clad people shooting
people a lot. When we did the Kingdom of the Blind Marshal Law book, which
was essentially a tearing down of Batman, one British writer got angry about
it. He said that we had taken down the character and put nothing in its
place. But that was kind of the point, there was nothing to put in its place.
The Times The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is unusual in that the
main character, Mina Murray, is female and, as much as a character can be in
a comic universe, quite believable. She's not just breasts in spandex.
O'Neill Yes, that's right. In the film they weren't content to leave
her as a woman, a strong woman. She had to be a vampire - of course, that
would explain everything. But the fact is she's just a woman, a woman strong
enough to sit with Mr Hyde when he's on the verge of losing it, which was
this fantastic scene that Alan had written for the second volume. She's
absolutely fearless, fearless in a way that Quatermain isn't. He's the great
white hunter, is scarred and battle-hardened, but he's much more cautious
than she is. She is an incredibly powerful woman, but she hasn't got a
power. There's never the revelation that she's a vampire. She's not a
vampire. She's faced Dracula, and that's it, but even then that's only
alluded to. She brings in this incredible female audience, which is unusual.
I get the feeling that the League is bought by people who don't buy comics
or who stopped a long time ago. The League touches people, the appeal is
quite different to that of Marshal Law. Marshal Law is operatic, it's so
extreme, and it has a very specific audience.
The Times What's next for the League?
O'Neill Alan and I are talking about doing more. We haven't got any
specific outline yet but we've got all of history and fiction to mine. We
can go into the distant future because we have Mina, Quatermain and Orlando
who are continuous characters and remarkably well preserved. The joy is we
can jump into history when the mood takes us - such as do another Sixties
story or do the earlier League with Gulliver and so on.
We have a new publisher as well in Top Shelf. Getting The Black Dossier out
was a nightmare, an absolute year of misery. At the point when it was
completed and ready for publication, Alan had the V for Vendetta movie
coming out and he had had enough of the mainstream publishing world. Alan is
the most charming of men, the most patient, but if you keep prodding and
poking and angering him ... everyone has a breaking point. I don't know why
these big publishers do it - they can, I suppose - but we were getting tired
of feeling that there was always going to be someone upstairs who was going
to [interfere], who would pulp an issue because of one word they didn't
like. It's an infantile way to be treated.
The Times Strange as well because you and Alan Moore are big names in
the comic world and your titles are very successful.
O'Neill They [publishers] do like chess pieces that they can move about
the board. They use incredibly famous artists. But I suppose if you take the
King's shilling and do the company characters, then you're treated as a
company pawn really. Alan made it very plain when Jim Lee sold [League
publisher] Wildstorm to DC comics that his stuff was ring-fenced, but they
gradually crept in. They just couldn't keep their hands off. 2000AD used to
get flak all the time. It grew out of Action being taken off the stands [in
1977]. It's hard to believe in those days that some of the press had nothing
better to do than write about comics. I can remember the headline "Sevenpenny
dreadful" describing Action - I think it was in the Sun. This was the
pre-video age. There were no video nasties and there was a fear of
pernicious bad crap corrupting kids in playgrounds.
The Times While we're on the theme of creativity being strangled, I
want to talk about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film. Alan Moore
has clearly defined views on films of his comics - he doesn't watch them, he
doesn't want anything to do with them and believes that the comic is
separate and has a life of its own. What was your experience of the film?
And what do you think of the current mining of superhero comics by
Hollywood?
O'Neill When I was at 2000AD I used to write a fanzine which had
nothing to with comics. As a kid I was a huge fan of Willis O'Brien's work
on King Kong and Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation and special effects
in general. I always wanted to know more but there was nothing out there on
this stuff that you could read, so I started this fanzine called Just
Imagine. Really it was an excuse to ring up Ray Harryhausen, who I knew
lived in London - in fact his name was in the telephone book. I rang him up
and he was this most charming man. He invited me over and I met his wife and
he showed me his collection of models. It was incredible to interview him. I
had this crappy Dixons tape recorder and took a Polaroid of him. He was very
patient.
I got to meet other people [in special effects] and I ended up at a point
where I knew the people who were working on the first Superman movie, the
Richard Donner movie, and I saw what they were doing and saw the screenplay.
There are things wrong with the first Superman movie - Lex Luthor, I think,
is ludicrous - but it captured the wonderful mythology of the character.
I've got no objection in principle to comics being turned into films or
television series or animation, but it comes down to respect for the
material. I think Richard Donner respected the material he was mining. He
recognised that it was not just Americana, that there was whole mythology to
it. But the later stuff, post him, a lot of it seems plain weird.
On League ... Alan wants nothing to do with films - he's simply not interested
- so the producers got in touch with me and sent me a screenplay. I read the
first few pages and I thought, "I've got the wrong one. I don't
recognise any of this - the Bank of England, Venice." The character
names were similar, but they added Tom Sawyer. It was a bit of an odd thing
and I didn't think much more of it but then I got invited to the set. I got
on really well with the effects people, the creative people. I met Stephen
Norrington, the director. He seemed to be under a huge amount of pressure.
The problems he was having with Sean Connery were common knowledge by then.
It was a very frosty set.
When the film came out I watched it and all I can say is that they made the
film they set out to make. That was what they saw League as. It's nothing to
do with our [League] and I'm not sure if Alan has ever seen anything more
than a clip from it. It's not respectful to the source material and frankly
if Sean Connery is going to end his career playing Allan Quatermain, then
Alan Moore's Quatermain is an infinitely better part.
They changed the whole balance by marginalising Mina and making her a vampire.
I mean, what the hell is she doing there, why is she there? - Quatermain is
in charge. The whole thing falls apart and lacks cohesiveness. But God
knows, there are worse comic book movie adaptations out there.
The worst thing about that experience was the repercussions afterwards were
far greater than a not very faithful movie coming out. There was a law suit
[click here to read full details of the suit], there were all kinds of other
crap that had nothing to do with comics or us but which we got tangled up
in. An Alan doesn't want to - he doesn't want to be associated with the
movie, he doesn't want to be associated with a bloody lawsuit. It turned out
to be a bit of a nightmare and frankly the publishers didn't help. I think a
lot of people in the comic industry don't understand why someone like Alan
would give back the money, even when, God knows, he could use it. They don't
understand his resolve, they find it baffling. It seems to make people angry
- I don't know why.
The Times Hollywood's approach to adaptations of comic books seems to
have shifted in the last couple of years, with producers making more of a
concerted effort to get the creators on side.
O'Neill I think they possibly realise that fidelity to source material
is no bad thing. I did hear the stories that at almost the 11th hour on the
Spider-man movie they were asking, "Why does he have to wear a costume?"
I mean, if you're uncomfortable with the costume, then the whole running up
the wall and swinging around buildings thing is going to cause you
discomfort as well. We hear these stories all the time and think, "These
people are idiots." It reminds me of that Alan Alda film where he plays
a novelist whose book about the American Revolution is being turned into a
film. He's talking to the director, who doesn't know why he's there, and is
pointing out that there are historical inaccuracies in the film. He says, "I'm
the author, I must be consulted." And he's told, "You've been
consulted, now f*** off!" You need the power of JK Rowling to derail
some people.
The Times What is the status of the Marshal Law movie? Ever since I
started reading the comic there's been rumours of one. Is it something that
you and Pat Mills would even want?
O'Neill In the last few months there was a flurry of activity on
Marshal Law, ending with me finding myself in the bizarre position of being
in the Warner Brothers presidential boardroom with Dan Lin who produced The
Departed and McG who had just finished filming Terminator Salvation. And it
was all go go go and then that weird Hollywood thing happened where
something's boiling hot and then freezing cold. McG is now doing, oddly
enough, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are people interested - the Rock
wanted to play Marshall Law.
We've no objection to a Marshal Law movie. I personally would like, and I'm
Pat would too, an absolute R-rated, ultra-violent, ultra-sexual Marshal Law
- the Marshal Law of the comics. But if you strip it back all the way, you
end up with a lukewarm Punisher, a man with a gun doing a bit of revenge.
There are some people who are even uncomfortable with him hunting
superheroes. There are always problems with these things.
But I liked McG. I liked him a lot. He got it, and he would have done
something interesting, but it might be another couple of years before
something happens.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century is out in April. A collected
volume of Marshal Law will appear later this year.
