by Martin Wagner
From
Hell (Vol.s 1-8)
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Kitchen Sink Press/Mad Love Publishing,
$4.95 each, paper
Tis murderous crime,
crime, the nemesis of neglect!” So ran the caption beneath a spine-chilling
cartoon — depicting a wide-eyed, knife-wielding apparition floating past
shadowy doorways — in the September 29, 1888 issue of the London magazine
Punch. Victorian London was a city of disturbing contrasts, its West End
gleaming with the mansions and carriages of the wealthy and royally favored,
its East End a labyrinth of nightmarish slums in which 900,000 people lived
like animals in almost unimaginable squalor. In a book by Andrew Mearns
dramatically titled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, one indeed wonders
how anyone human could have existed in all this…
“Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often
two. In one cellar [lives] a father, mother, three children, and four pigs!
….Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead
child lying in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children,
and a child who had been dead thirteen days…. Where there are beds they are
simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings or straw, but for the most part these
miserable beings find rest only upon the filthy boards.”
Ugh! is right. And so it should come as no surprise that crime was so
commonplace in these dark alleys as to scarcely be noticed. But in the fall of
1888, an unprecedented series of crimes took place in the East End’s
Whitechapel district that electrified not only London, but the world. And over
100 years later these crimes continue to leave their mark on our society, from
the celluloid nightmares of Seven to the real-life rampages of
Berkowitz, Dahmer, and others. And they added a new term to the lexicon of the
20th century: “serial killer.” You know who it is. It’s Jack the Ripper. Damn
straight. Straight from hell.
Jack the Ripper is a legend because he was never caught. There have been
serial killers ten times as savage and depraved — Peter K�rten, the
Dusseldorf Ripper, made ol’ Jack look like Forrest Gump — but they were
caught, executed, and thus demythologized. (Quick, who’s Fritz Haarmann?) That
we can continue to speculate about Jack is what has created the legend.
Countless writers have done just that over the decades. But few have done so as
strikingly, and as unforgettably, as the acclaimed British comics writer Alan
Moore in From Hell.
Taking its title from the preamble to the only Jack the Ripper letter believed
to be genuine, From Hell is a graphic novel that shows Alan Moore — a
writer who has turned genre conventions so completely on ear that he has saved
entire publishing companies — taking on a historical drama with such surgical
precision that he all but redefines what comics as a literary form are capable
of communicating. Moore’s research into the Whitechapel crimes is so detailed
as to make James Michener blush; each issue of From Hell, in fact,
features several pages of reference notes and appendices.
But out of all of this technical brilliance has come a rich and thoroughly
human story. From Hell is no slasher/splatterfest; in fact, for all that
it is at times horrendously graphic, From Hell is probably the least
exploitative story about the Ripper crimes ever produced.
Moore takes the fictional premise of his tale from the somewhat absurd and
discredited theory that the Ripper murders were some sort of royal conspiracy
involving the police and Freemasons, as well as just about every London
celebrity alive at the time. It goes something like this: Queen Victoria’s
wayward, party-animal nephew Edward meets a poor East End shop girl, falls in
love, knocks her up, secretly marries her. This is bad enough, but wait — oh,
shit, she’s Catholic. The baby is born, Edward and his bride Annie Crook are
carried off by the queen’s agents, but the baby is secreted away by Edward’s
friend, the artist Walter Sickert and his friend, Mary Kelly, a Whitechapel
street-walker and incipient Ripper victim. As Mary Kelly and her friends (the
Ripper’s other soon-to-be-victims) owe lots of money to “protection gangs” and
the like, Mary decides to blackmail Sickert by threatening to go public with
the throne-toppling news of a royal bastard. But the blackmail letter finds its
way to Victoria herself, who charges her personal physician, Dr. William Withey
Gull, with silencing the blackmailers, which Gull apparently interprets as
“terminate with extreme prejudice.” So it goes.
If all this sounds kind of silly — after all, if four faceless East End
whores started gabbing about a royal baby, well, who’d believe them? — it
stands as a testament to Moore’s skill as a storyteller that he can take such
an outlandish premise and make it not merely believable, but profoundly
compelling and exciting. But even more than the premise, Moore’s story succeeds
because it is rooted squarely in character, and in an understanding of the
social and political conditions of the times.
Central to the tale is Dr. Gull himself, a wealthy and respected physician who
from childhood has felt he will one day be called upon to perform a “special
task.” Inducted into Freemasonry as a young man, Gull becomes absorbed by
Masonic ritual, an absorption which leads to, among other things, a study of
the work of architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose unique, obelisk-spired churches
dot the London skyline. In Hawksmoor’s work Gull sees something of a physical
confirmation of Masonic myths and magic, an endorsement of his “special task;”
in one startling scene, Gull has his coachman, Netley, connect all of
Hawksmoor’s churches on a London map with a pencil, a shape which forms a
pentagram. When Gull undertakes what will become the Whitechapel killings,
another aspect of Masonic ritual comes into play: the murder of Masonic
myth-figure Hiram Abiff. As Gull sinks deeper into his madness, the murders of
the five prostitutes follow a pattern of ritual disembowelment central to the
Abiff myth.
It’s all pretty complex and very unpleasant, but Gull is such a fully
fleshed-out character that it’s impossible not to be entranced by him even as
his crimes become ghastlier. But Moore has not neglected the other characters.
In fact, From Hell may be the only work of Ripper fiction to humanize or
even give a damn about the women the Ripper murdered (Moore has dedicated the
story to them, in fact). In some of the story’s most compelling scenes, we are
privy not only to the final hours in each of the victim’s lives, but we know of
them as people, overall. These women aren’t the burned-out sleazy strumpets or
the sexpot/victim-icons commonly depicted in Ripper tales. They are ordinary
women who must deal with daily life in a society that has allowed them only one
means of survival. A few of these couplings are depicted with appropriate
coldness and detachment, utterly unerotic encounters that sum up the bleak
nonexistence of thousands of East End women of the day.
Likewise, the murders themselves are displayed with a remoteness that
accentuates their horror. Most horror fiction, whether it thinks so or not,
either glamorizes acts of violence or makes them so larger than life and unreal
that the most graphic gore is little more than ludicrous. Moore makes a
surprising decision by devoting the entire seventh issue of From Hell to
the murder and mutilation of Mary Kelly, but as it should be, there’s nothing
titillating about it. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a security camera video of a
crime in action, the parts that the evening news cut out, you’ll have some idea
of the revulsion and helplessness you are forced to feel. Only when much of the
ghoulish work is done does Moore allow you to come close to what is
taking place, to allow a bit of emotion to take the stage. The single panel
where Gull, now hopelessly lost to madness, tenderly places a pillow underneath
the head of the butchered Kelly; or the panel following the first murder, where
the body of Polly Nicholls lies cooling in the gutter, no longer merely a
victim but a symbol, an archetype for every victim of sexual violence to come
before or after. In its quietest moments does Moore’s story have the
profoundest effect.
Eddie Campbell is a Scots artist known for his work on such outr�
alternative comics as Bacchus and The Eyeball Kid, and for his
magnificent autobiographical tales The Complete Alec and The Dance of
Lifey Death. His sketchy illustrations for From Hell are technically
coarse but bursting with atmosphere and the dark elegance of Victorian
nightmares. Campbell’s pen and inks are in perfect sympathy with the emotional
nuances, both warm, but most often cold, in Alan Moore’s script. Rarely have an
artist or writer been so perfectly matched on so ambitious a project.
So what, ultimately, is the point of From Hell? Not merely to bring
comics foursquare into the realm of adult literature, to be sure, though
From Hell does that with as much success as Art Spiegelman’s famed
Maus. It’s not really possible to say yet, since Moore and Campbell
still have a few chapters yet to go on this award-winning tale. I think,
though, that what Moore is really after is a firmer understanding of how our
society has been molded by the Ripper crimes; Gull himself says, after
murdering Kelly, “For better or worse, I have delivered it. The twentieth
century.” One critic has described Moore as using fiction as a scalpel. Perhaps
that’s true: with From Hell, Alan Moore is dissecting society as a
whole. Because if the Ripper murders truly are what delivered us, then it’s a
disease we need to cut away as fast as we can. n (From Hell can be found at Tower Records, Austin Books, Blast Comics, Dragon’s
Lair, Funny Papers, and any good purveyor of alternative comics the author
forgot to mention.)
Hepcats creator Martin Wagner has been busy with the release of his graphic
novel, Snowblind, Part One, and the creation of his Hepcats Web Page at
http://www.mcs.net/~dvoskuil/hepcats/.
This article appears in November 17 • 1995 and November 17 • 1995 (Cover).