Kevin O’Neill’s apartment in Chelsea, West London, is prim, show-home tidy and, really, not much how you’d expect the workplace of an acclaimed illustrator of graphic novels to look. As the man who gave life to the violent superhero satire of Marshal Law, the violent antihero escapades of Nemesis the Warlock and the (occasionally) violent Victorian-era fantasy ensemble The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you anticipate an anarchic studio of flecked colours, vivid half-finished sketches and maybe some wall-mounted medieval swords or prints of sexy cyborg warrior women. Instead, he works at a small wooden desk in his living room and a simple drawing board in the spare bedroom, which is spotless aside from the Kate Bush CD on the floor.

“People are surprised how tidy everything is,” he says softly. “But producing comics is the most elegantly simple way of working; they are effectively done the same way they were 100 years ago in terms of techniques. It’s not an especially messy business.”

Today, the 56-year-old is finishing a cover for The Comics Journal and working on the latest League . . . book. He’s 15 pages in, and a 72-page volume like this will take a year to illustrate. He doesn’t own a computer and works with the same basic art pens that I would have once used to crudely sketch impossibly muscle-bound superheroes on my geography textbook. In this latest adventure, scripted by the Watchmen writer Alan Moore, Dracula’s Mina Murray travels to 1969 (O’Neill is dreading working out how to illustrate a psychedelic rock concert with occult undertones).

“Never ask the readers what they want in this business because they always ask for the same things — superheroes and future war: they want what they’ve had,” he says. “But what they really want is what they’ve not been given.”

He will, sometimes, work through the night but won’t try to draw after an evening out (“Two beers and I wouldn’t touch a page — hand-eye co-ordination goes out the window”). Even his work-in- progress panels are so beautifully drawn it makes me nervous to be around them in case I somehow tarnish them. Does he ever worry about ballsing things up and having to start all over again?

“No. The worst thing is to work timidly, because then you get that juddery, insecure line of someone who’s worried about messing up,” he smiles. “And there’s nothing that can’t be repaired with a bit of white paint.”

Kevin O’Neill: The Graphic Novels, The Illustration Cupboard, London (www.illustration cupboard.com 020-7976 1727), July 14-Aug 8

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