LDCOMICS ONLINE COMICS FAIR! With a title like Never Mind It’s Only the Fucking Apocalypse AJ O’Neill’s LDComics Fair offering immediately feels like it’s reflecting the kind of weary resignation we all feel about the state of the world around us in 2025. Subtitled ‘A Queer Fever Dream’ its starting point is a sleepless, heat-filled night as O’Neill struggles with insomnia. Apocalyptic visions haunt his waking dreams as he sees a London that lies in ruins after an undetermined apocalypse, one that blends the usual tropes of popular culture into one mega-cataclysm of zombified nuclear horror.
While Never Mind It’s Only the Fucking Apocalypse does indeed feel like a visual allegory for our age, the words that O’Neill illustrates here with such raw imagery were actually originally written in 2015. There’s something about this haunting nightmare dreamscape that embodies our every contemporary fear of societal collapse though, all filtered through a determinedly queer lens. This is a tour of a London in flames; of zombie clubbers trapped in a putrefying last party; where the Thames is a river of lava and Buckingham Palace has collapsed under the weight of the colonial plunder therein; and where the twinks of Soho were the first to disappear when the scavengers moved in.
Use of language here from O’Neill is horribly, disarmingly and richly poetic: “Boiled egg eyes still check the cracked remains of seared phones every twenty seconds for a Grindr message that will never come.” There is a darkness and a satirical edge but also a kind of stream-of-consciousness quality that asks the reader to simply allow themselves to be carried along on a procession of gory vignettes and hypnotic despondency; to surrender themselves to the devastation unquestioningly and absolutely.
O’Neill’s visuals are stifling and claustrophobic, the red and orange hues implying nuclear heat and the fever dream that the whole scenario springs from. When other colours seep in, like the Pride rainbow, it only serves to repaint that vibrancy in a new and oppressed form, perfectly echoing the thematic thrust of events. A final mention for O’Neill’s lettering here which is so effective in wrapping and weaving itself around the powerful images, making us stop and pause at key emotional beats, and consistently capturing the terror of what we are witnessing with an appropriately grim vision.
I have read a lot of the work on show at the LDComics Online Comics Fair for our associated coverage this month. Never Mind It’s Only the Fucking Apocalypse is undoubtedly one of the standout offerings from the event.
AJ O’Neill (W/A) • LDComics Online Fair, £6.00
Review by AndyOliver
The LDComics Online Comics Fair runs across the month of July. Read all our coverage of the comics on offer here at BF.
