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From Hell: History Written With A Scalpel March, 2000

When I started writing FBR, I stuck to what I knew: making people laugh. To this day, I feel vaguely guilty if I write a column that doesn't have a high enough ha-ha factor. But I do yearn to write seriously about serious things, and I was thrilled when I picked up the Onomatopoeia and saw my puffy analysis of From Hell accompanied with illustrations from the work. Did my poor ol' fanboy heart proud, it did.

Fanboy Rampage By Jeff Lester

To put it simply, From Hell is the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of Graphic Novels. There are those who like Alan Moore's formalist brilliance, and there are those who are fans of Eddie Campbell's winsome looping charms, but From Hell represents a decade long collaboration that gives us, like those janusian serrated hoo-has, two great tastes that taste great together. In case you can't tell, this is my clumsy way of declaring From Hell a masterpiece and well worth the time and effort to grab a copy off the CE shelves now, pronto, if you haven't done so, already.

Hamlet once said that "I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space." I firmly believe that Alan Moore could kick Hamlet's ass in that whole kooky "nutty space king" scenario; after all, Moore's Watchmen is a twelve issue superhero miniseries that's also the most precise psychological portrait of Reagan's America ever published.

Likewise, From Hell is a tale about Jack The Ripper, but it is also an examination of the fluidity of reality and history, and Moore decides to essentially show London in the 1880's as nothing less than the birthplace of the 20th Century. And, after deriding the sensibility that tries to put forward any historical context as more "real" than another, Moore goes on to construct a work that is impeccably cross-referenced with all existing facts about the Ripper case. It's hard to put down From Hell and not feel like one knows what happened in Whitechapel over a century ago.

Turning from the peanut butter to the chocolate, From Hell is also the work of Eddie Campbell, whose art brings to life Moore's story. For Campbell fans, From Hell can be a bit more frustrating, since Moore's script is heavily structured; it's like being a fan of Miles Davis and watching him play an entire concert of Bach without embellishment. As technically perfect as Campbell's work is, I wish there was more of a chance for his unique brand of storytelling to cut loose. I get the impression that Moore felt the same way; the 24 page appendix at the end, The Gull Catchers, is a piece more in Campbell's style, what with allegorical imagery, wacky characters, pub visits (always must there be pub visits) and an air of quietly bemused contemplation. To use a drinking man's metaphor, it's like a refreshing shot after a tall beer.

But even for solely fans of Campbell, From Hell is a delight. His London looks delightfully sketchy (pun intended), and you get a sense of peering at characters through omnipresent smoke and soot, or as if through faded photographs, or through the fog of a darknight in Whitechapel. "Can history be said to have an architecture, Hinton?" One of the characters asks. "The notion is most glorious and most horrible." In service to this notion, perhaps the centerpiece of From Hell, Campbell renders the story's characters from great distances or with an assured minimum of lines, whereas the backgrounds, the buildings, are rendered in high amounts of detail. Campell makes London a city of ghosts who have no idea that they're phantoms. They move through Moore's story, eating and arguing and screwing, with precise body language and mouthful of words, but they Campbell makes them as corporeal as suits the story's purposes. But always, behind them, the buildings possess a solidity and a strength, as dark and as ominous as the plans Jack the Ripper has for the future.

As for the Ripper himself, Moore makes him arguably the most complex character brought to life in American comix, and his voice continues to haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. The highlights of the book are when the Ripper takes center stage and holds forth. His walking tour of London in Chapter Four is a 38 page masterpiece, a meditation on history and magic and England that basically out-Vertigos Vertigo. (Anyone who's ever enjoyed an issue of Hellblazer should read From Hell for this chapter alone.) And the climax of the story, a minute by minute presentation of the Ripper's ultimate murder in Chapter Ten, allows us to glimpse our century through his eyes. "Am I like Saint John the Divine, vouchsafed a glimpse of those last times?" The Ripper asks, seemingly transported into our century. "It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos...Morose barbaric children, playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys." Like Milton's Satan, Moore's Ripper gets almost all the good lines, and his strength is basically the book's only weakness; it's sometimes hard to see what opposition his character really has, and the book has no real argument to contrast to his, other than the reader's innate sense of decency.

Although I don't remember Moore ever saying this, one of the reasons why From Hell would not work as well in any other medium is that there is such a direct line from Jack the Ripper to comix today. The superhero comix of today can be traced back to the pulps, which can be traced back to the penny dreadfuls, which arose from the serials of the newspapers, which needed to sell papers everyday. As surely as the birth of Jack The Ripper's myth lies at the feet of newspaper reporters and publishers, so too, in an odd and twisted way, does Image Comics. Also, our unstoppable superheroes are directly related to the pulp's unstoppable antiheroes (which is why, for me, Batman is the apex of the superhero) which in fact were descended from the unstoppable villains of the melodramas; Fantomas, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and Varney the Vampire. And behind all of those is Jack The Ripper, the original unstoppable killer who was never caught and slipped away into history. From Hell presents a Ripper who believes himself a hero, not a villain, fighting for, to put it glibly, "Truth, Justice and The Victorian Way." Everyone who shops CE should pick up a copy of From Hell not least because they're one of the few who will be able to actually get it (in both the material and slang senses of the word). Buried behind all of the secret histories in From Hell, there is still one more; the strange dark birth of the superhero, comix's strongest child.

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