Moore Alan - From Hell Companion

FROM HELL is the hugely successful graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. It was completed in 1998 and first published in a single volume in 1999. It is currently published by Top Shelf Productions in the USA, Knockabout in the UK, and has editions in many languages. It has won numerous comics industry awards, and in 2001 it was adapted into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, with Robbie Coltrane.

By the Same Authors:

A Disease of Language

published by Knockabout Comics.

By Eddie Campbell

Alec : The Years Have Pants

published by Top Shelf Productions.

THE FROM HELL COMPANION

Eddie Campbell presents Alan Moores scripts, sketches, notes and other miscellanies as well as contributions, artistic, anecdotal and scholarly, of his own.

With a foreword by Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer.

Foreword

I was unnerved and amazed by the amount of confirming evidence that turned up to support my theory, precisely because I knew it wasnt a theory: it was fiction. I really didnt want to put a toe into the inviting pool of the truth, because Truth is a well-documented pathological liar. Self-proclaimed fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honestit says Im a Liar right there on the dust jacket. If I read a biography of Tony Blair, at the end of it I still wouldnt know where I stood with him. I do, however, know where I stand with Hannibal Lecter and the Wizard of Oz.--

Alan Moore (interview, in What DVD , Oct 2002)

From Hell, a project of dizzying complexity and unflinching nerve, brought together two respected yet stubbornly idiosyncratic talents, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, and sent them on a ten-year journey of creation, through a mazy process spanning three countries and thousands of miles. It came to epitomize the collaborative Graphic Novel in all its too-rarely-achieved potential. Certainly From Hell has a spot on any serious list of the best graphic novels of the past twenty-five years, and indeed stands as a prototype of what the graphic novel can be. Its the proverbial landmark book, and dense in a way that few other comics have achieved.

Its easy enough to say that From Hell depicts the infamous Whitechapel slayings of 1888 the so-called Jack the Ripper murders as a conspiracy theorists dream.
Its easy to say that the conspiracy in question involves Freemasonry, esoterism, and a purposeful, sinister, occult vision of history. But the novel goes further, implicating the violent misogyny of all of Victorian society, from Queen Victoria on down and the misogyny of our own time. Moore and Campbell do propose a more humane and feminist view, but only after dragging us, without blinking, through unimaginable horrors.

Beyond these brief gestures toward explanation, From Hell is an achievement that defies summary, a book that warrants documentation and commentary. That is precisely what Eddie Campbell offers here, and abundantly: the archive of From Hell made public, along with his own ringside commentary as the artist who visualized the novels grand design.

Besides From Hells notoriety, the most obvious reason for a companion volume is the novels daunting complexity. In From Hells chapter nine, shortly before William Gulls final ritualistic murder, Mary Kelly describes the pervasive sense of predestination she felt immediately before the death of her first husband: It was like things had a pattern I couldnt quite see. Its like there was a kind of lace tyin things together. A kind of lace over everything. Our job as readers is to search for the hidden strands of lace the symbols, the motifs, the repetitions that knot the narrative together, and this companion is an indispensable guide to From Hells strands of meaning.

Moore and Campbell sew many of these strands into early chapters of the book, so that they can reappear and take on new meanings in new contexts, across the length of From Hell. Consider, for instance, the passages in the book that reference supernatural vision. On the second page of the prologue, Robert Lees confesses that he only pretended to have mystical visions (The attention, that was the thing), but his visions all came true anyway. From Hell is full of prophetic visions experienced, hallucinated, and/or faked by many other characters besides Lees, and the truth or falsehood of each is difficult to determine. Gull interprets his first vision, of the hybrid god Jahbulon, as a harbinger of his great service to Queen Victoria, but Jahbulon could also be a mirage produced by the stroke Gull suffers while walking up a steep hill. In chapter eight, after he triumphantly slaughters a prostitute he believes to be the last of the blackmailers he has been ordered to silence, Gull sees a phallic skyscraper a grandchild of the obelisks that, in his view, bind London in a circuit of patriarchal power and momentarily vanishes. Coachman Netley loses track of Gull for a minute, and panics. Despite all this magical fanfare, however, Gull has actually killed the wrong woman, and so his grand work remains incomplete. Are the skyscraper and Gulls disappearance symptoms of a madness shared between Gull and Netley, or are these supernatural signs somehow true? Did Gull make it up? Did it come true anyway?

Chapter fourteen of From Hell, the final chapter before the books epilogue, is one long cascade of weird visions that Gull experiences as his body dies in a Dickensian asylum for the mentally ill (fittingly, Gull has ended up in the same situation he consigned Annie Crook to in chapter two). Gulls visions include blood raining from the sky, ghosts with scales for skin, and assorted vignettes featuring notorious English murderers of the twentieth century, but in his footnotes Moore cites real-life eyewitness accounts of these Fortean events. Gulls ectoplasmic journey concludes with a trip to the clouds, where he meets such mythic beings as Thoth, Apollo and Jesus, who guide Gulls attention to a hill (another hill, a twin to Jahbulons hill) and a scene that presents the strongest strand of hope in all of From Hell. If we write off Gulls visions as the hallucinations of a dying madman, we lose the redemption too.

The visions and prophecies that spin throughout From Hell are only a small part of Moore and Campbells web. In chapter two, the sixteen-year-old Gull cuts open a wild mouse; much later, at a key moment in chapter sixteen, three young girls offer an alternative to Gulls we murder to dissect scientism as they speak of catching a frog and then letting it go. Also in chapter two, Campbell draws the arc of Gulls life in panels that never show the mans face; later, numerous scenes hide from us the face of another significant character, Emma, the logistics of which Campbell discusses here on pages 132-133.