Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Eddie Campbell
Contributing Artist: Pete Mullins

“Worfipped”

Let me tell you about the best Graphic Novel that I’ve ever read. In fact at the time of reading it (June of 2001) it was the best horror work I’d read in five years.

A work of horror wherein horrible things actually happen.

How refreshing.

I had come to it late. From Hell was first, partially, serialised in the late eighties early nineties in the comic anthology Taboo.

Illustrated by Australia’s own Eddie Campbell, this is a work of wicked genius, from the haunted hedge maze, arcane mind of Mister Alan Moore. The best of British horror grounded in a very British subject. Ghoul Britannia!

We will not here dwell upon the unique weirdness of British writers of the macabre. Suffice it to say that a long and noble lineage has brought us the modern product of dark fantasists like Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Tanith Lee, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Iain Sinclair and, of course, Alan Moore.

"Dark Business"

This tome is the last word in the Ripper story. It incorporates almost every known facet of Ripperology, and then some. And that’s just in the appendix sections. The least of the organs therein.

From Hell takes fact and fiction and weaves them into an, at times, feverishly delirious extrapolation of the darkly fantastical.

From the very first frame the project’s excellence is obvious. The raw, often chiaroscuro, artwork perfectly suits the story that it wants to inform us of, in grimy greys, foreboding blacks and blanched whites. Campbell has loaded his pen with old English darkness, soot and blood. The words are matched skilfully with the images, the whole neatly presented.

The book has a large and rolling cast. Within its pages you will meet Scotland Yard men, prostitutes, rogues, a fake(?) psychic (who gets it right anyway), a tortured painter, murderers, madness, the mentally and the morally deranged. Mind the blood. John Merrick, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, Yeats, Black Elk, the spirit of Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Blake, Aleister (Alexander) Crowley are all there. Even Queen Victoria. And she is most definitely not amused.

The attractive idea of the Freemasons protecting (if nervously) one of their own, the brilliantly, disturbingly driven Sir William Withey Gull, Royal Physician in Extraordinary, hand in hand with royal motive and complicity is logical enough to be true, and Moore is not the first of us who have made a study of the Ripper to be led to that scenario.

But Dr. Gull has a grander plan than mere monarchic wet work.

"Something that flows like the ocean... something salt, and old"

The true brilliance of this dark piece is in the way the various strands of the work are woven together, and of course, the presentation.

It is an invitation to a state of darkness, a condition of need. The infernal machinery of desire, awe, worship and propitiation.

You will be privy to a guided tour, from Dr. Gull, of the grand plan’s sacred sites. You will behold the "earthbound constellation."

Some would mock, sneer – "it’s just a comic." No, friend. Not just. It is art. In word and image. Simple and pure and shiny-sharp.

And a devil’s listing of atrocities.

The possibilities of a fourth dimension. History as architecture. A man who wants to be one of history’s architects; sculpting, ordering, assembling in the basic, basest, elements of all. Transmuting meat into higher order, into more divine matter. To deny the dumb rule and break the bounds of mortality in flesh. To turn all to steam through white heat raptures of violence, so that it may rise to a divinity.

Gull will deliver the Twentieth Century, Liston knife induced, breach birthed through the opened body abattoirs of the fated ones.

So, subtlety along with the brutality. Several scenes of towering, magisterial terror. The cosmic elements take the story beyond one of the demented, misogynistic fantasies of a delusional maniac with a God complex, as Gull, in the midst of his foul work, has sudden visions of another reality (our modern one) impinging upon his own. Page 25 and 26 of Chapter Two and 39 and 40 of Chapter Eight particularly impressed me. These, along with pages 1 through 3 of Two, would make such good sequences in a film. But there are so many of those in this novel.

We are given glimpses, as well, of monstrous ancient altar Gods and the spectral radiating ley lines, sourced from, crossing through, the primary events of the story. And beyond. Normally unseen pieces of a mapped symbol path; signposted and ritually marked in iconic and adumbrating stone; architecture designed and built by those with occult information. A mighty pattern that we are as ants, as less than grains of sand, upon, that branches off into the dark of space and time and unknowable realms.

Vast, part comprehended designs and schemes unknowable. Glimpses of the titanically terrifying. Visionary Horror. Symbols and secrets.

But the subtlety inherent in this story is part of its great strength as well. The tiny details.

The repetitions. The poetry, of printed word and image.

Here, even a muttered change in tense (Chapter Eight, Page 33) holds sinister connotations.

"Grandeur and Monstrosity"

A few paragraphs here mentioned about the 2001 film version, a viewing of which might deter potential readers.

How unfortunate that the revival of Hammer Films some years back was more to do with the powers that be at Hammer wanting to capitalise further upon their, admittedly interesting, back catalogue. For what a fine resurrection opener a film of From Hell would have been for Hammer. (A faithful adaptation of The Damnation Game could have been another. Sigh.)

For a time the rumour was that David Fincher was to direct From Hell. Alas, the Hughes Brothers got it instead. And brought an almost complete lack of sensibility to the effort. Much as I liked Dead Presidents, the film of From Hell was a grand opportunity monumentally squandered. The film interpretation failed to include or even attempt to allude to any of the most powerful motives and sequences from the book. Combining two characters into one (the lead) and getting them both wrong. Minimal characterisation, but in ample evidence Hollywood’s love of hardware sharp and shiny. Add to the list of failures the old romance standby.

An early warning sign was the presence of Heather Graham in the cast. No disrespect to the actor but believable 1880’s East End prostitute she is not. Pre-release photos of the sets also did not bode well. We are given some flashy, lame killings and a cop-out ending, all neatly tied in a pretty bow as Hollywood producers like it.

Perhaps only an animated film could do the source material justice. A blown up, moving, version of the book. England certainly has the voice talents for the dialogue and any narration requirements.

"Terror and Magnificence"

The book is so beautifully "edited" and "directed." What they can do with nine panels, half a dozen, one... Sometimes nine panels of darkness. Sometimes darkness with word balloons.

Lyrical writing. Creative use of repetition. Sequences that are confronting, effecting, with the ability to stain the memory.

It is, most certainly, a "graphic" novel. The sexual and violent scenes are sometimes pornographic. Probably the sequence most destined for notoriety is the 34 pages concerning the good doctor’s time with his final victim. Yet, even there, story rules above the necessary, even incidental, gore and concise, brutally casual violence.

If you can get your hands on a copy of From Hell, whether you are, foremost, a fan of graphic novels, Alan Moore, have an interest in the Jack The Ripper phenomena, or are intrigued by all of those components, then do so. The work is a masterful one and will richly reward you. You need to see these sights, absorb the poetry, know these things. . . From Hell.