From Hell And Back!

The word I'd used to describe Alan Moore's and Eddie Campbell's From Hell is unrelenting. This bleak tale of the Jack the Ripper murders is presented with a rough-hewn realism that is simultaneously utterly symbolic. Campbell's style is rugged and rough but from those thin scratches comes a sense of the world as it is, not in any way romanticized. Moore's story is staggering in its detail, which seeks to put forth the theory that the Ripper killings were done to cover up the birth of a royal bastard by way of a local prostitute. The women killed were murdered to see that none of this truth came out. The murderer according to this story was Sir Willima Gull, the royal surgeon and he did his foul deeds under the direct orders of Queen Victoria herself and was assisted in covering up his crimes by the top men in the police force, who like Gull were Masons. 

Where From Hell succeeds most brilliantly is in its suggestion that the Ripper murders presage the 20th Century, a time when staggering violence in World Wars I and II will rip the common understanding of what it means to be civilized. We follow the mad Gull not only on his nighttime prowls to slay women, but we follow him into his mind where we get to share the bizarre visions which motivated him and all him to make some foul sense of his actions. He is a madman, and we are invited into his mad mind so that we can find meaning in these hellish acts, at least by his cracked terms. 

Moore and Campbell do an excellent job of humanizing the victims and many of the other various characters who populate the story. The women are seen in full view, not reduced to mere sex workers who prowl the night, but women who have had lives before the arrival of the Ripper. Many of those lives are tragic ones, the reason they find themselves isolated in the streets of London's Whitehall district. We also follow the policeman Aberline, who himself is a rich character beyond his search for the Ripper. He is a man of conflicting passions, though he seems to be an honest enough copper. 

The story of "Jack the Ripper" is told based on many sources, but also from Moore's and Campbell's imaginations. They make this story, which has been told and retold so many times that we all think we know it, come alive again with vivid details that elevate above the mere true crime or horror categories it often gets slammed into. This is a mythic tale of coming to terms with the modern world and in so many ways failing to do so. The story comes with copious notes that explain Moore's sources and his thinking in regard to certain sequences which are more speculative. 

The movie version starring Johnny Depp is not bad given the limits of the medium, but it fails to capture the bigness of this story, and truth told a single film cannot capture the complexity of this work regardless. Maybe a min-series would be the best way to bring this to the screen. 

Below are the covers of the series as they appeared in the 90's from Mad Love Publishing. 

It's a hefty tome to get the collected series from Top Shelf, but at forty bucks it's a relative bargain given the depth of this story. 

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