Cosmic Comics

by Kevin O'Neill

68 pages of collection early 2000ad comic strips by Kevin O'Neil including Dash Decent.

Mostly Dash Decent strips in fact.

Hibernia Comics, who published the excellent ‘Beyond 2000AD’ a few years back, have a new release that taps into possibly the ultimate Thrill Powered nostalgia-fest yet – a miscellany of Kevin O’Neill artwork called Cosmic Comics. Collecting covers, short story illustrations, mock up adverts and full runs of his Captain Klep (first published in Tornado) and Dash Decent (from 2000AD).
A 68 page collection in full colour and black & white, we’re treated to Kev’s first forays into comic strip work, one-off cover stories and other oddities that don’t cross over into his ABC Warriors, Dredd or Nemesis work. Starting in the late 70s and progressing through to the late 80s (although mostly rooted in the earlier part of the decade) it’s dripping with detail and creativity as we witness the glory years where he made his reputation as one of the clutch of artists responsible for 2000AD’s first golden age.

68 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Disambiguated authors:
(1) Kevin O'Neill - Comic Illustrator (Current Profile)
(2) Kevin O'Neill - Irish journalist, Athlone, Football, Who Needs Cantona...
(3) Kevin O'Neill - American, Liberal Arts, Experiential Learning Int'l
(4) Kevin O'Neill - Rand, PRGS, Military Personnel
(5) Kevin O'Neill - KMO, IT, SharePoint, Quizzes, Trivia, Management
(6) Kevin O'Neill - Ph.D, U of Redlands, Death, Internet Afterlife
(7) Kevin O'Neill - André Gide, Roman d'Aventure, Literary Analysis
(8) Kevin O'Neill - Movie Franchises
(9) Kevin O'Neill - ISIS, Nuclear Weapon Program Assessment
(10) Kevin O'Neill - Boston College, Ireland, rural society, famine, Atlantic economy
(11) Kevin O'Neill - Co-author and husband of Mary O'Neill, Religious
(12) Kevin O'Neill - UXO, Engineering, Dartmouth, SPIE, IEEE, NSF
(13) Kevin O'Neill - Narrator

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

A collection of Kevin O'Neill obscurities, and even the earliest stuff here, the bits which least resemble the instantly recognisable look he'd soon develop, have definite seeds of his later work. Tornado's superhero spoof Captain Klep, for instance, is very much a gag strip, but in its vision of a metropolis embarrassingly overstuffed with superheroes more concerned for their own glory than actually helping anyone, you can easily detect Marshal Law's set-up in embryo (not to mention, in its more sitcom moments, a hint of what another frequent O'Neill collaborator would create in Top 10). That segues into, and crosses over with, some early 2000AD work, and I really do mean early, O'Neill being there from the comic's first uncertain year. The comic has been going so long now, and has had a pretty settled format for so much of that, that it's easy to forget some of the stuff they used to feature – prose stories inspired by reader's letters (included here for the accompanying O'Neill art), and again, one-page strips of outright piss-taking, as against the more indirect and fully narrative riffs of later years. In particular, the Flash Gordon pastiche Dash Decent starts out as a feast of corny gags I'd more expect to find in an outright comedy comic like Buster, complete with signposted visual puns and casual breaks of the fourth wall, but as it goes along it gets progressively stranger and more meta and, if I'm not sure I'd ever go so far as to say it gets good, you can definitely see everyone involved coming along in leaps and bounds as they go. Despite some really emphatic hammering of comics' favourite scandal spot, the injury to the eye motif, it never quite hits that sinister style which would later see O'Neill's work declared anathema in its entirety by the Comics Code Authority, but then there's the fanzine work, some of which prefigured that ban by earning a rejection from the printers. And once we reach the 7 Wonders Of The Galaxy pin-ups, which are at once lovely to behold and the product of a wonderfully arsey response to a creator rights dispute, the look which would go on to define everything from Nemesis and the ABC Warriors to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has taken form.

[Index Purga]

Índice pendiente. Tempranas historietas cortas de O'Neill para 2000AD.

[Biblioteca Lucien]

"Mostly Dash Decent strips in fact."...