Paul Neary

Paul Neary, born on 18 December 1949 in Britain, built a career that spanned nearly every corner of the English-language comics industry before his death on 10 February 2024. He broke into the field during the 1970s with work for Warren Publishing, the American horror-anthology house, before returning to British shores to collaborate with editor Dez Skinn at Marvel UK and contribute to the influential weekly anthology 2000 AD.

Over a career touching more than 500 issues, Neary worked across a remarkably broad range of titles — among them Captain America, Excalibur, Batman, JLA, and The Authority — demonstrating equal comfort with superhero action and darker genre material. He also took on editorial responsibilities, eventually rising to editor-in-chief of Marvel UK during the 1990s, a role that placed him at the center of British comics publishing during a turbulent period of expansion and contraction for the imprint.

In his later years, Neary found what many consider his most widely recognized work as the inker on Bryan Hitch's pencils for The Ultimates and Ultimates 2. That partnership helped define the hyper-detailed, cinematic visual language of Marvel's Ultimate line, leaving a clear mark on how superhero comics were drawn and read in the early 2000s. His contributions across so many creative roles — artist, inker, writer, and editor — make him a genuinely versatile figure in the medium's recent history.