League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Classic or Dud?

O'Neill is a great artist, I'd say his art more cartoonish at the same time as Moore's script gets stupider, though I have no idea whether this was a conscious choice on O'Neill's part, or whether he just got more lazy. (The more cartoonish bits in Century remind me of his 80s style in Nemesis the Warlock, which looked great in that comic, but not necessarily in LoEG.) Still, there are parts of Century that are only carried by the art; for example, the final battle in 2009 is pretty meh, but O'Neill's rendition of SPOILER still looks awesome.

OK, it's true that I haven't seen much of his work before LOEG, but found it was adequate and workable for LOEG I & II and pretty amateur in Black Dossier and Century. There must be hundreds of other artists that can do a better job. Hell, what is Rick Veitch doing these days? John Totleben? Eddie Campbell? I guess O'Neill is just not to my taste...

I can't imagine any of those guys pulling of the more grotesque stuff in the comics, like the mutant animals of vol. 2, in the same sort "horrific yet sympathetic" way O'Neill did. Okay, maybe Veitch, but definitely not Campbell or Totleben, not even Gibbons. IMO O'Neill was the perfect artist for the series, he could do the detailed panels required for easter eggs and trainspotting, but he also has this horror comic style lineage of exaggeration and macabre, which was also required for the series, since it has plenty of pulpy stuff that calls for that sort of stylization. Campbell's dry line or Gibbon's mannered style wouldn't fit LoEG at all, there's a reason why Moore did it with O'Neill.

I'm saddened to see Kevin slagged off in this thread since he's been the only reason to even give it a vague glance since volume 1. Moore disappeared up his own ass crack and left O'Neill to try to do something interesting with whatever seeped out.

have you ever liked his art drawn for colour?

i remember seeing the originals for the first few issues of marshall law, and they were absolutely gorgeous - o'neil is a wonderful colourist of his own work, even if his peak (imho) remains the first series of nemesis, drawn and course in black and white.

Yeah, Nemesis was the series that was most perfectly fitted for his "detailed grotesque" style, it still looks gorgeous. After that, has he drawn any other series that would call for equally surreal art?

it's not really "grotesque", but have you read metalzoic?

Kev's terrific, but yeah I'd agree the Century books aren't up to his usual standard. The lettering too.

(Obvs he's no slouch even ia bad day, mind)

Ok I agree with Tuomas's statements re: Totleben, Gibbons, and Campbell; they would not have been optimal artists for LOEG. I'd like to know why indeed Moore chose O'Neill... He could just as easily chosen different artists for 1898, 1910, '58, '69, '77, 2009. Imagine the 1969 book in a Ditko or Sal Buscema style, or the 2009 done ironically 'superhero' by some new DC guy.... and I'm sure there's enough old Vertigo artists loafing around to cover the other years...

i love o'neill's art in the first loeg. i've never seen any of his other stuff, has he mostly done british comics?

he literally got banned by the Comics Code Authority because his art made them queasy

the vast majority of Marshall Law was published in America though

He could just as easily chosen different artists for

O'Neill is the co-creator and co-owner and a collaborative partner on LoEG

The final part of this interview has Moore discussing why he chose O'Neill for LOEG.
http://youtu.be/qtDphCDULeQ?t=4m12s
IMO the Hyde he does here is very slapdash and cartoonish, but, OK, I guess this is the style that Moore wanted, Victorian caricature

what's wrong w/ 'cartoonish'?

also, elephant in the room here is that the pool of ppl willing to work w/ alan moore, or who alan is prepared to work w/, has narrowed considerably over time...

is he hard to work with?

that's a difficult question to answer, really. i know some artists don't like or want the incredible level of detail that moore puts into his scripts - but many more would still leap at the chance to work w/ him. and most artists who have worked w/ alan have generally done well career-wise, finance-wise etc.

i think it's more that alan is a man of v strong principles and convictions, which of course don't always accord w/ those of his collaborators. i'm sure i'm not betraying any confidences when i say that the number of artists he has fallen out w/ - dave gibbons, david lloyd, steve bissette, alan davis etc - certainly gives one pause for thought, never mind all the publishers or editors. but again, i'm sure there are plenty of ppl who have worked w/ alan that would do so again, happily.

to be clear, in general i'm on alan moore's side when it comes to his battles w/ DC or Marvel or Hollywood, and think that his principles on the whole are worth defending and supporting.

i feel like i faintly remember an anecdote about the script for v for vendetta, there was a panel in which he describes v or maybe finch with their back to the reader, with a smile on their face - like as an example of how maddening his descriptions could be

yeah but

Despite Moore's detailed scripts, his panel descriptions would often end with the note "If that doesn't work for you, do what works best"

i'm sure i'm not betraying any confidences when i say that the number of artists he has fallen out w/ - dave gibbons, david lloyd, steve bissette, alan davis etc - certainly gives one pause for thought, never mind all the publishers or editors.

I knew about the others, but what's the story with Moore and Lloyd? Did they have a feud over the V for Vendetta movie or something?

something like that:

"I'm not expecting to have very much to do with David Lloyd in the future."

iirc gene colan was going to draw an issue of swamp thing - which would've been a perfect fit - but only wanted to work marvel-style (ie from a brief plot outline), which is obv the antithesis of the moore method, so sadly it never happened.

Oh yeah, I've read that interview, I remembered the bit about Moore and Gibbons falling out, but I didn't remember the same thing had happened with Moore and Lloyd. (Apparently because Lloyd didn't call him and say thanks for the extra money he received from the V for Vendetta movie, due to Moore refusing to accept royalties from it?)

The story about DC and Warner Books using Steve Moore's sick brother as a way of blackmailing Alan Moore is pretty paranoid, especially since the only proof for it is some random comment by Gibbons. I do agree that Moore often has a point in his comments about the comics industry, but stories like this aren't exactly helping him shed the image of Crazy Ol' Man Who Hates Everybody.

Steve Bissette did a massive 6 part dissection on his website of Swamp Thing #20 a few years ago with actual script pages. There was a whole page preamble before two pages to describe a 5 panel sheet then another two pages to describe a splash.

I read one somewhere else for #23 (? Might have been later) that I think GMoz criticised that was about 4 pages describing three panels of a cockroach burrowing toward a coffin.

given that moore collaborates at a distance from his artists - as do most comics writers i guess - i expect his level of detail helps reduce the amount of followup questions that might arise from a simpler script.

well i guess it depends on how you (or the creators) want to define the process - or territory - of the collaboration - ie is the artist there to simply carry out the wishes of the writer, or do you get better comics when some of the storytelling decisions are left to the artist? You might even frame it as a wrinkle on the Barthesian 'readerly' vs 'writerly' text - the 'scripterly' comic vs the 'artisty' comic.

Kieron Gillen talking about this a while back.

moore did some crude storyboards for one of the Spawn miniseries he did, and i remember some of them being published in the back of an issue. i cant remember if it was in lieu of or in addition to his usual descriptions. the finished panels mimicked them pretty closely

Yeah, he didn't do the usual level of description for that stuff, as he doubted the ability of the artists to read it.

haha really?

I may be reading slightly into him saying he didn't think they'd bother

but not unfairly, I dare say

re-reading this most recent volume what irritates me most is the paper-thin plot machinations. why does Janni go to the south pole? bored. oh, okay, great central dramatic conflict there.

Bumped as the final, last ever, definitely no more issue is about to drop.

Tempest has been a fun exercise but little more. Some of the parts almost feel like reprints - there was a Gloriana play in a previous volume, I know - but I suppose the intent (?) of ripping 20c comics apart is pretty much achieved.

was re-reading the Traveller's Almanac from volume 2 and noticed a reference to Mina's visit to a certain beekeeper, which is depicted in the very last issue of the Tempest. The level of detail in the whole series is a big part of the appeal, even if it did feel like it was running on fumes for the last bits.

Diminishing returns after the first one. Still good through Black Dossier.

the only stuff I couldn't be bothered with were the standalone Janni books - the rest is great imo

Volume III is not good.

I like the 1969 volume quite a bit. Art, in general, goes downhill a bit.

the 1969 volume is okay. The last volume though... that's a mess.

def too much Harry Potter

imo Moore should’ve quit after the first two volumes: the first series is a fun ripping yarn; the second series is a creepy undercutting watchmen version of the first, and it all comes together for a rousing anticlimax.

Then all the subsequent volumes take the same “do you see?????” approach as vol 2, except less fun, and Iain fucking Sinclair turns up and it’s all “what if Harry Potter zapped James Bond with his penis in the style of 2000s Eightball” and shut up Alan

Agreed. Some of the post volume II stuff was decent enough, but volume III gradually became like a shallow parody of what was good about the earlier material, so I have no interest to even try volume IV.

What was the last truly great comic Moore wrote, anyway? The finished version of Lost Girls, which came out in 2006? Has he done any good comics since then?

I loved providence. It got wonky at the end (doesn’t he always?) but here’s some good stuff there.

Has he done any good comics since then?

he wrote and drew Astounding Weird Penises

(I thought the latest LOEG was the best use of the comic book format of any of them)

Providence has a rep but I won't give Christensen money, and from what I've seen the cartooning is bad and the lettering inept

I liked the art. The lettering was occasionally hard to read. Don't know who Christensen is. I see he's the publisher. What's the issue?

A bunch of stuff I've forgotten details of, but: once told a contracted artist his work wasn't good enough to pay for but printed it anyway (possibly clumsily photoshopping out big NOT PAID FOR YET or PREVIEW ONLY text the artist had cautiously superimposed?), then ineptly threatened to sue people on the internet who talked about the fact he'd done this. Various staff and freelancers who were able to walked at the time, including the entirety of his all-ages imprint.

yikes

Black Dossier better than first two volumes imo, stronger emotional core, more evocative and if you're gonna do metafiction you might as well have an axe to grind. Also suspicious of how so many ppl got off the LOEG train as soon as it started being critical of fanboy faves.