The From Hell Companion

The binding was a little messed up. It was coming apart a little bit on the inside and the outer top corner was smashed in. But, hey the book itself is a great read and I recommend you buy it if you like horror graphic novels. Just don't get it from this seller.

This is probably the single most accomplished thing I've ever read in comic form. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell offer up a dark, gritty re-imagining of late 19th century England caught in the grip of the Jack the Ripper killings.

But From Hell isn't simply Moore's tinfoil hat theory about who the Ripper really was...it's a staggering plunge into a long forgotten age, and of the tensions at all levels of late-victorian society. The class loyalties, the fraudulent mysticism, the need to protect the royal family at any cost, the grinding misery of the poor and, (explicitly in this case) of poor women, forced to sell their bodies on the streets each day in order to pay their nightly rent...it's a carnival of horror. And that's all before someone starts chopping those impoverished women into pieces.

This is the single most well-researched evocation of the Victorian age I've ever come across. Comics are often usually assumed by default to be flights of fancy, but I would wager that Moore has compressed an entire PHD dissertation's worth of sources into the creation of this book. As gruesome as From Hell is, it was obviously a labor of love for Moore to develop, and its interesting seeing him interacting with his own British background in such an explicit way. It's an intensely English sort of book.

From Hell is as dense as any novel or work of literary fiction as I've read in some time. It takes a gruesome act of murder and, much like in the darkest works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Roberto Bolano, uses those murders as a prism for understanding an entire age. I doubt I will read a more virtuoso comic for quite some time. Highly Recommended, if you can stomach it.

not bad, not great. Alan Moore always seems to be more highly rated by critics than he actually is. V for Vendetta, Watchmen- good reads sure, required classics- nope. Killing Joke was probably the best. Swamp thing- not MY thing at all. Although it was cool when Garth Ennis used him in Constantine to grow a pot plant.

Alan Moore, From Hell (Top Shelf, 2000)

From Hell, which was finally completed and released in book form in 1999, was snatched up by Hollywood almost overnight and delivered, after some tinkering by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, into the hands of Hollywood's latest (at the time) enfants terribles, the Hughes Brothers. It was an interesting, if doomed, project from the outset. The Hughes Brothers were at the time well-known as crime film directors (even their documentary American Pimp focuses on criminal behavior, in a sense), and Hayes (Dead Calm) and Yglesias (Death and the Maiden) were both bona fide mystery writers. (The film, ultimately, had more of the Hayes/Yglesias stamp than anything else; it is a straight mystery flick.) But the original source material, Alan Moore's huge graphic novel, is in no way a mystery, and it is only tangentially a crime novel, in that the Ripper murders are the connecting thread of all these lives. It is, instead, a psychogeography, or perhaps a holistic history. There's a great deal of talking, as Sir William Gull, aka Jack the Ripper, expounds to his associate Netley on why, exactly, he's doing the things he's doing in the way he's doing them. At one point after the final murder (which takes up an entire chapter on its own, as Gull enters an extended dream state during which he sees the future--there's a striking image of Gull holding the ravaged body of Mary Kelley with a seventies-style computer terminal outlined in the background), Gull remarks to Netley, "the Twentieth Century--I have just given birth to it." That line gives you a very good idea of what Moore was trying to accomplish here. Hayes and Ygleslias, and through them the Hughes Brothers, tossed all that out and made a mystery. I am one of the few media critics who actually thought it was a good mystery; in my original review I started off by revealing a predilection for both Johnny Depp and the Hughes Brothers, and hoped that neither of those things would sway me overly. It's almost ten years later now, and I still don't think they did; while the film bears almost no resemblance to the graphic novel, and I can certainly understand the resentment of those who were expecting a treatment even a little faithful to the book, there are some movies which have to be looked at as separate works of art rather than as adaptations to truly understand how good they are. The obvious example, and the one I use every time I bring this up, is Tobe Hooper's brilliant adaptation of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. It is as similar to the novel as is a pomegranate to a banana, but they both taste pretty darned good. In the same way, Alan Moore wrote a book, and the Hughes Brothers made a movie, and if you look at them as two entirely separate beasts, you can see the good qualities in both. (Hollywood couldn't; the Hughes Brothers did not make another film for nine years, and they left the crime world behind.)

There is no mystery to Alan Moore's graphic novel; we know almost from the outset (there are a couple of chapters of setup, and a prologue that will seem irrelevant until much later) that Jack the Ripper, in Moore's retelling of the tale, is Sir William Gull, the Royal Physician. We also find out why relatively soon. Prince Albert (here known as Eddy; if you're not up on your royal history, that may throw you like it did me), while under the tutelage of the artist Walter Sickert, meets and falls in love with a sweet-shop girl. They secretly marry and have a child together. When Albert's behavior is discovered, he is hauled back to Buckingham, and his wife is taken to an asylum, where Gull neutralizes her as a threat through the removal of her thyroid gland. (Moore notes that Gull was, in fact, the first person to put forth the theory of hypothyroidism.) The crown rests easy until four of her friends, in need of money to pay a protection gang, decide to blackmail the crown for the princely sum of ten pounds sterling, or they'll reveal the existence of Annie, the baby. Queen Victoria dispatches Gull to take care of the problem. The following chapter is the heart of the book, a walking-and-carriage psychogeographic tour of Whitechapel where Gull lays out his grand design to Netley. Soon after, he gets to work. The police have been notified, and told, basically, that they're not allowed to catch the killer. Thus, one of Gull's Masonic brothers is tagged to head the investigation (though he expresses his horror at the idea of the cover-up and goes off to holiday on the continent for a month), and the detective put on the case is perhaps the least suited for the job--Fred Abberline, who just the month before made Detective Sergeant and got transferred out of Whitechapel, at which point, he laments to his wife, "I thought I'd never have to go back." While he seems like the perfect guy for the job because he'd been a beat cop there for fourteen years, that refrain is repeated throughout; he doesn't want to be there. Godley, his second-in-command, is eager but green, and acts as a symbol for the incompetence of the investigation more than anything. The longer the investigation goes, the more it spirals out of control. The kicker, to Abberline, is the appearance on the scene of Richard Lees, psychic advisor to Victoria, who claims to have seen the killer in a series of visions. (It might be a minor spoiler, but I'll tell you anyway: pay very close attention to the prologue. If you're at all familiar with the case, you'll immediately know one of the two men reminiscing on the beach is Fred Abberline. I didn't realize until about 90% of the way through the book that the other is Richard Lees.)

The main piece of advice I offer you is this: don't go into From Hell expecting a crime novel. If you do that, you're bound to be disappointed. It's very good stuff, though not Moore's best work (I am now firmly convinced that he will never top Watchmen), and well worth your time. And I may be one of the few to think so, but so's the movie. *** ½

This "comic" dissects the most famous unsolved crimes in history, peeling away their layers of misogyny, class stratification, abject poverty, imperial machinations, conspiracy, magic, and madness like so much flesh and sinew. Each chapter approaches the topic from a different angle, focusing here on the hidden Masonic architecture of the British capital, looking there in detail at the lives of the Ripper's victims. The basic plot is that the Ripper is one Sir William Gull, royal physician and Masonic magician, who is killing these women to keep them from blackmailing the Queen's grandson, Prince Eddy. To reduce the story to this plot, though, is to miss its incredible richness and intelligence.

Those looking for the definitive Ripper "solution" need to continue their searches elsewhere. As author Alan Moore notes in the second appendix, "Jack is not Gull or Druitt. Jack is a super-position." Instead of presenting the typical cops and robbers version of a played-out murder story, Alan Moore uses the Ripper to reveal the banal horrors of everyday life for the poor women and children of Victorian England and to indict a male culture whose callousness and brutality was matched only by its religious and aristocratic hypocrisy. In Moore's novel, the Ripper is not merely a doctor conducting Masonic rituals whilst ostensibly ridding the Crown of a handful of blackmailing whores. Rather, the Ripper is the entire miasma of modernity, the calculated technological horrors of 20th century condensed into four murders, one year, one decade. Jack is the man who leaves his wife and two children to be with their midwife, he is the royal brat whose dalliances have disastrous consequences for the little people, he is the media bent on selling papers by peddling gore and hysteria.

The erudition of the cultural commentary in the volume is staggering. A review of the 42 page monstrosity of an appendix reveals the manifold reasons behind each frame of each page of the story. It all boils down to this: "Five murdered paupers, and one anonymous assailant. This reality is dwarfed by the vast theme-park we've built around it. Truth is, this has never been about the murders, or the killer nor his victims. It's about us, our minds and how they dance. Jack mirrors our hysterias. Faceless, he is the receptacle for each new social panic."

This book is a work of literature, easily on par with such other classic graphic novels as Maus, Persepolis, or Fagin the Jew.

Like many, I knew the vague outlines of the Ripper murders. They occurred sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s in England, the victims were prostitutes, the crimes brutal beyond comprehension, and the perpetrator never caught or even identified. To this rather shallow appreciation, I applied Alan Moore's' "From Hell." I can now say definitively that I know much more about Victorian England - its mores and technology, its deference to royalty, its odd groups, its appearance and the way its lower classes struggled to survive. Whether I know more about the Ripper is another question.

From the scattered shards of the case, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell have put together a near-masterpiece. They weave a quasi-plausible tale that enmeshes royalty, Masonic orders, mad doctors, the easy women of the West End and grinding poverty. That the story is 90% supposition and 10% fact is no matter. Once inured to the gritty and gruesome story telling, the reader is propelled by the tale's drama and pathos. The book employs dozens of real-life characters, including William Gull, royal physician; Netley, his slow-witted coachman; William Sickert, the struggling painter; Abberline, the dogged investigator; Prince Eddy, weak-willed grandson of Victoria. But Moore and Campbell's most noble work is in limning the sordid lives of the victims. Constantly in debt to their landlords, they sell themselves for a few pence - either in a back alley up against a fence or in an out-of-the-way horse stall. The reader often encounters them -- the two Marys, Elizabeth, Annie and Catherine -- chatting with friends, enjoying a glass and fighting with their live-ins. No longer are they merely nameless victims of a brutal and fascinating (probably male) maniac, but women with histories, fears, aspirations and loves of their own. This willingness to acknowledge the personhood on the victims of crime is by itself a great contribution to the story.

Moore and Campbell pull no punches. Expect full nudity, turgid genitalia and sexual frankness where it is called for. Expect equally frank depictions of the savage butchery of the murders themselves. Also expect a conspiratorial approach that ought not to be taken as the final word on the story behind the murders in Whitechapel. The deluding rantings (whether of the authors or their characters) about Dionysian priests, sacred architecture and Masonic deities ought not to be taken seriously as historic. But they do give the book much of its creepy fascination.

The book's main limitation was in its artwork, whose often borderline artistic quality sometimes made the action hard to follow. Thankfully, the art was rendered in black and white. This made its goriness more tolerable, but made it difficult to determine what was going on - what was that black mass being pulled out of a body? The story, too, had its problems. Killing the women was easy to understand, but the mutilations, even under the aegis of being the ritualistic actions of a psychopath, made less and less sense as the horrors progressed and did not fit the facts very well. The perpetrator was mad, yes, but madness has a logic that was sometimes absent from this tale.

Toward the end of the book, a prose section allows Moore to provide the reader with a lens into his approach. He evidently took his information from the many books that have sprung up about the case, many of which sound pretty fringy, if you ask me. And that's before Moore applied his sinister magic to them. Moore is frank about inventing dialog and scenarios to fill in the gaps in the corpus of factual evidence. A little bit of research will show the determined reader that Moore bent many facts way out of shape to fit them into his thesis. This does violence to the truth, something I do not normally condone. But the flip side is that the reader becomes acquainted with the late Victorian era in a way whose verisimilitude (outside of the farfetched conspiracy) is shockingly persuasive.

Taken for what it is - a mostly imaginary retelling of an all too real tale of bloody murder, "From Hell" is enormously entertaining and compelling. Read it if you have the stomach for large doses of humanity at its most bestial and the ability to swallow conspiracy theories with a grain of salt.

After SWAMP THING and WATCHMEN brought fame and fortune to Alan Moore, the man who practically redefined the "comic book" medium and popularized the form for serious literature, he spent the better part of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s attempting to bring more "serious" works of graphic literature into existence. But because the comic book market is still dominated by superheroes, Moore's struggled through an uphill battle to succedully release even one of the various projects he attempted. "Big Numbers" and "Lost Girls" remain tantalizingly incomplete, with only the first few chapters of each being successfully published; and it took more than a decade for all ten books of "From Hell" (plus its appendix, "Dance of the Gull Catchers") to see the light of day.
It was worth the wait.
Studied Ripperologists have praised Moore for the obsessive, painstakingly detailed research he undertook into the subject of the Whitechapel murders, unearthing buried facts and exploring most if not all of the various conspiracy theories involving the Royal Family, the Freemasons, Scotland Yard, and just about anyone who was involved with the Victorian aristrocracy of the time. But Moore is first and foremost a storyteller, and "From Hell" earns the title "masterwork" by being more than merely a scholarly journal. It's a taut, horrific, mesmerizing journey into madness that is both a fascinating detective story worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and it's also a haunting, poetic journey reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. But Moore's mastery of the medium of graphic literature -- backed by the superb and appropriately sketchy artistry of Eddie Campbell -- weaves the various threads together into a fabric that conjures up images of the sights, smells, thoughts, and fears of the Victorian Era in a way that makes the reader glad that the world has changed since those days.
It has, rather, devolved into something far worse.
Our fascination with Jack the Ripper, Moore hypothesizes, is a reflection of ourselves, and the society that we have become. (These insights become especially clear during Chapter 10, "The Best Of All Tailors" -- as the Ripper chastises us for allowing ourselves to become numb and soulless, while engaging in one of the most horrifying and bloody murder scenes ever displayed in any graphic medium, anywhere.) But if the polluted, diseased world of Victorian London is not really much worse than our own, then we can at least thank Alan Moore for presenting us with a fascinating tale that gives us a glimpse into it...a view that has never been presented to us in this manner before, with all of its horrors laid bare for us to see. Even more so than "Watchmen," FROM HELL is a shining example of the very finest achievements of graphic literature. This, dear friends, is no comic book.

This book wasn't exactly what I expected...but then again, what Alan Moore novel ever is? In reading a comic book about Jack the Ripper, I was expecting a completely made-up story with fictional characters loosely hung onto the Ripper legend. Instead, what I found was a thoroughly researched, heavily annotated history of the Whitechappel murders. The book is pure conjecture however-yet another theory on who the Ripper was and what his motivations were. The conclusions drawn from this book aren't really original, but they aren't meant to be; Moore has added a large appendix where he footnotes almost every panel in the book. I wasn't able to make it through all the footnotes myself, but it's nice to have them there.
The book begins long before the killings take place and the identity of the killer is made plain long before he actually begins. This is NOT a whodunit. Anyone familiar with the Ripper story or any of the movies made about him will see which theory this fits into...but I won't spoil that for you here. The catch of the book however is to show Victorian England as it really might have been: the realities of chamber pots and infrequent bathing. This is not a Courier & Ives print. Whitechappel really does seem like hell on Earth: a place where almost all the women were prostitutes out of necessity, and where even police officers feared to go. The art is perfect for the story; it is drawn in stark black and white to emphasize the bleakness of the atmosphere. The lack of color almost makes it seem more creepy.
This is not the typical comic book...or even the typical Alan Moore book. It may be an acquired taste. If, however, you are looking to immerse yourself in the world and time of Jack the Ripper, this is the way to do it.

The second appendix alone is worth the money. The author presents a very intelligent critique of the history and curiosity surrounding the Ripper murders.

This is to say nothing of the work itself, with is a well-crafted retelling of the Ripper story, told from a 'conspiratory' perspective, which involves a cover-up with the Crown and the Masons. The work also reaches toward the format of an epic, with several self-contained character spaces, including the world of the Elephant Man and the nightlife of intellectuals like Oscar Wilde. Overall, the work is an excellent introduction to Victorian England, complete with references to social and political contexts.

My one complaint is the artwork. I didn't care for it. Yes, it presents a grim vision of England, but it is also sometimes difficult to understand what images the artist is trying to render. Did the ripper send a heart or a liver or a kidney with his letters? I'm not sure I would have known if the dialogue hadn't spelled it out.

This criticism should not deter a reading of this work. It's truly worth your time.

FROM HELL is writer Alan Moore's and artist Eddie Campbell's stab (pun intended) at Jack The Ripper. But this isn't your usual story about the Whitechapel murders. Alan Moore doesn't conceal the killer's identity until the very last page, he reveals it in chapter two; FROM HELL is not about who the killer was. FROM HELL is a treaties (worthy of a ph.d) about why the killer did what he did, how he did it, and about all the people who knew about it; Mostly, it's about the latter. Alan Moore is a serious conspiracy theorist (respect...); His conclusion is of Royal connection, police corruption, and Freemason involvement. Everybody has got their hands dirty; London is presented as a decrepid and rotten society. I have not yet seen the filmadaptation of FROM HELL, but I've read that there is a shot in the film which "begins with the London skyline, pans down between towers and steam trains, and plunges into a subterranean crypt where a Masonic lodge is passing judgement on one of their members" (from Roger Ebert's filmreview). This is what the story is about; A society that is ruled by the few; By the men who hides in the shadows; By the true architects of history (as said in FROM HELL).
Alan Moore tells a story that sends you spiraling into madness, into the mind of the killer and the society of the killer; Into Hell. The sketchy black and white drawings of Eddie Campbell conjurs up a world of filth, and not the romantesized version of Victorian England that we have all grown accustomed to; "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained," (from Sir Arthur C. Doyle's A STUDY IN SCARLET). Both Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell have based their work on an impressive amount of research; FROM HELL is about as accurate as any other non-fiction book about Jack The Ripper. But this implies that FROM HELL demands that you're intrigued by the circumstances surrounding the case, and that you don't mind reading through hundreds of pages with long dialogues that are weighed down with facts; If you're only after a quick scare and a murder mystery, then you'll probably be disappointed with FROM HELL. Its audience are the numerous 'ripperologists'. If you fit into this latter category, then you'll relish FROM HELL.

Prostitutes are at the grimy bottom of the social ladder in almost any society. Their murders are neither uncommon nor usual causes for alarm, but in 1888, a string of slayings of this loathly population in Whitechapel, one of many atrocious slumps of Victorian London, shook England to its core. The vile acts of Jack the Ripper, the sickening surgery he performed on five whores, made proud English society question what kind of a monster could arise from its cracks. Jack's escapes from the police and an entire city searching for him forced London to question its competency. The wild curiosity the killer, the first tabloid star, drew made England question its taste. The savage and sick nature of his act, the boastful letters he sent to the press and police (one letter contains included a human kidney) caused many to question the entire human condition. In 1888, the first serial killer, that disturbing, shocking, sexually motivated type of killer was unleashed on the world.
Over one hundred years after the Ripper killings, Alan Moore, puts the events of autumn 1888 under his literary microscope with a comic book masterpiece, From Hell, and makes them as shocking, stomach-turning and frighteningly thought provoking as they were in 1888, in ever. Moore, a practical Ripper historian who fills forty-two pages of this volume with research notes, analyses the historical, intellectual, societal, psychological and metaphysical importance of the Ripper killings.
Moore, joined by appropriately sketchy art of Eddie Campbell, narrates the theory that the cadavers found laying in pieces in Whitechapel once belonged to a gang of prostitutes who bribed the crown with knowledge of a secret marriage between Queen Victoria's grandson and a Catholic commoner. Royal physician, Sir William Gull, disposed of the women and takes a few creative liberties.
All characters in From Hell are beyond compelling: Gull, a Freemason and Hannibal Lector-type intellectual who reaches the darkest regions of the human mind and spirit, which are revealed to also be the most profane. Mary Kelly, Gull's final victum, who is made brutally aware of the futility of her life's station and the harshness of her world as she watches her friends die one by one and waits for her turn. Frederick Abberline, the Scotland Yard inspector assigned to the Ripper case, whose traditional morals of merit are tested as he wades through the steaming dung of society.
In most comics, traditional morals are seen as a virtue, but From Hell is no ordinary comic book. It travels down the societal ladder in an attempt to step higher on the philosophical. It is a masterpiece, a gracefully narrated epic that splashes in the grime of history and moral netherworlds with a deep sense of poignancy.

In preparation for the opening of the film version of "From Hell" I have been rereading Alan Moore and Eddie Campell's sixteen-part melodrama/graphic novel. It is pretty clear to me from the trailers and commercials I have seen for the film that the Hughes brothers have played around as much with this story as Moore and Campbell have played around with the "facts" of the Jack the Ripper story. But since we will never know the "truth" about Jack--scholars cannot even agree on exactly who he killed, which you would think was a rather important starting point in constructing any sort of theory--all that really matters is whether "From Hell" tells a compelling story. By that standard, "From Hell" certainly succeeds.
In the Appendix to each chapter Moore careful details his sources, alterations and inventions for "From Hell" on a page-by-page basis. While such elaborations will only serve to infuriate most scholars of the Ripper, they are certainly of interest to us poor neophytes who cannot help but be fascinated by the details of the unsolvable mystery. Moore is working primarily off of Stephen Knight's "Jack the Riper: The Final Solution," which advances what Casebook: Jack the Ripper (the world's largest on-line public repository of Ripper-related information) labels the most controversial Ripper theory. Known as the Royal Conspiracy theory, it does have the delicious quality of involving virtually every person who has ever been a Ripper suspect. Despite its popularity, Ripperologists pretty much universally dismiss the theory (it ranks 8th on their list, mainly because one-third rated it 10 and another one-third rated it 1). But then the most popular suspect is currently James Maybrick, brought into prominence by the "Diary of Jack the Ripper" hoax (ah, but was it really?). Given everything that is out there, it is no wonder that the most "legitimate" suspect of the day, Francis Tumblety, gets lost. But all of this just reinforces the idea that "From Hell" is not history, but rather drama. Time and time again, it is the rationale of the STORY rather than the FACTS that drive Moore's narrative.
The artwork by Eddie Campbell, aided and abetted at various times by April Post and Pete Mullins, is certainly evocative of the tale. I even think there is a point at which the reader has to be grateful that the bloodier episodes are rendered in stark black and white drawings. Campbell presents various styles at different times in the narrative, altering it to match the narrative. But it is Moore's epic story that captivates throughout as he puts his giant jigsaw puzzle together from all the evidence and his own speculations. When Moore works in the conception of Adolf Hitler, which happened in Austria around the time of the murders, as an ironic counterpart to his narrative, it is hard not to be impressed, just as we are horrified by the clinical details of the Ripper's murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which takes up all of Chapter 10. Through deduction, induction and abduction, Moore creates a compelling story and the fact that it is not what really happens has little to do with how much we enjoy "From Hell."
Do I believe that Sir William Gull was indeed Jack the Ripper? No, I do not. I have heard many theories regarding his true identity that have been plausible, at least at face value, and I am more than willing to lead it to the knowledgeable experts to argue out their respective merits. But I was not reading "From Hell" to be convinced of the guilty or innocence of any one regarding the world's first infamous serial killer. I read it because as we have known ever since Alan Moore did his own take on the Swamp Thing, one of his greatest strengths as a writer is to make us look at old things in new ways. Now, if only the movie version can be half this good.

Prostitutes are at the grimy bottom of the social ladder in almost any society. Their murders are neither uncommon nor usual causes for alarm, but in 1888, a string of slayings of this loathly population in Whitechapel, one of many atrocious slumps of Victorian London, shook England to its core. The vile acts of Jack the Ripper, the sickening surgery he performed on five whores, made proud English society question what kind of a monster could arise from its cracks. Jack's escapes from the police and an entire city searching for him forced London to question its competency. The wild curiosity the killer, the first tabloid star, drew made England question its taste. The savage and sick nature of his act, the boastful letters he sent to the press and police (one letter contains included a human kidney) caused many to question the entire human condition. In 1888, the first serial killer, that disturbing, shocking, sexually motivated type of killer was unleashed on the world.
Over one hundred years after the Ripper killings, Alan Moore, puts the events of autumn 1888 under his literary microscope with a comic book masterpiece, From Hell, and makes them as shocking, stomach-turning and frighteningly thought provoking as they were in 1888, in ever. Moore, a practical Ripper historian who fills forty-two pages of this volume with research notes, analyses the historical, intellectual, societal, psychological and metaphysical importance of the Ripper killings.
Moore, joined by appropriately sketchy art of Eddie Campbell, narrates the theory that the cadavers found laying in pieces in Whitechapel once belonged to a gang of prostitutes who bribed the crown with knowledge of a secret marriage between Queen Victoria's grandson and a Catholic commoner. Royal physician, Sir William Gull, disposed of the women and takes a few creative liberties.
All characters in From Hell are beyond compelling: Gull, a Freemason and Hannibal Lector-type intellectual who reaches the darkest regions of the human mind and spirit, which are revealed to also be the most profane. Mary Kelly, Gull's final victum, who is made brutally aware of the futility of her life's station and the harshness of her world as she watches her friends die one by one and waits for her turn. Frederick Abberline, the Scotland Yard inspector assigned to the Ripper case, whose traditional morals of merit are tested as he wades through the steaming dung of society.
In most comics, traditional morals are seen as a virtue, but From Hell is no ordinary comic book. It travels down the societal ladder in an attempt to step higher on the philosophical. It is a masterpiece, a gracefully narrated epic that splashes in the grime of history and moral netherworlds with a deep sense of poignancy.

In preparation for the opening of the film version of "From Hell" I have been rereading Alan Moore and Eddie Campell's sixteen-part melodrama/graphic novel. It is pretty clear to me from the trailers and commercials I have seen for the film that the Hughes brothers have played around as much with this story as Moore and Campbell have played around with the "facts" of the Jack the Ripper story. But since we will never know the "truth" about Jack--scholars cannot even agree on exactly who he killed, which you would think was a rather important starting point in constructing any sort of theory--all that really matters is whether "From Hell" tells a compelling story. By that standard, "From Hell" certainly succeeds.
In the Appendix to each chapter Moore careful details his sources, alterations and inventions for "From Hell" on a page-by-page basis. While such elaborations will only serve to infuriate most scholars of the Ripper, they are certainly of interest to us poor neophytes who cannot help but be fascinated by the details of the unsolvable mystery. Moore is working primarily off of Stephen Knight's "Jack the Riper: The Final Solution," which advances what Casebook: Jack the Ripper (the world's largest on-line public repository of Ripper-related information) labels the most controversial Ripper theory. Known as the Royal Conspiracy theory, it does have the delicious quality of involving virtually every person who has ever been a Ripper suspect. Despite its popularity, Ripperologists pretty much universally dismiss the theory (it ranks 8th on their list, mainly because one-third rated it 10 and another one-third rated it 1). But then the most popular suspect is currently James Maybrick, brought into prominence by the "Diary of Jack the Ripper" hoax (ah, but was it really?). Given everything that is out there, it is no wonder that the most "legitimate" suspect of the day, Francis Tumblety, gets lost. But all of this just reinforces the idea that "From Hell" is not history, but rather drama. Time and time again, it is the rationale of the STORY rather than the FACTS that drive Moore's narrative.
The artwork by Eddie Campbell, aided and abetted at various times by April Post and Pete Mullins, is certainly evocative of the tale. I even think there is a point at which the reader has to be grateful that the bloodier episodes are rendered in stark black and white drawings. Campbell presents various styles at different times in the narrative, altering it to match the narrative. But it is Moore's epic story that captivates throughout as he puts his giant jigsaw puzzle together from all the evidence and his own speculations. When Moore works in the conception of Adolf Hitler, which happened in Austria around the time of the murders, as an ironic counterpart to his narrative, it is hard not to be impressed, just as we are horrified by the clinical details of the Ripper's murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which takes up all of Chapter 10. Through deduction, induction and abduction, Moore creates a compelling story and the fact that it is not what really happens has little to do with how much we enjoy "From Hell."
Do I believe that Sir William Gull was indeed Jack the Ripper? No, I do not. I have heard many theories regarding his true identity that have been plausible, at least at face value, and I am more than willing to lead it to the knowledgeable experts to argue out their respective merits. But I was not reading "From Hell" to be convinced of the guilty or innocence of any one regarding the world's first infamous serial killer. I read it because as we have known ever since Alan Moore did his own take on the Swamp Thing, one of his greatest strengths as a writer is to make us look at old things in new ways. Now, if only the movie version can be half this good.

If you bother to read the extensive material contained at the end of this fine compilation, you will notice that Moore states many time that he doesn't really believe the Gull theory. He chose to go with it because it makes for a really good story, and let me tell you, this is a good one. Critisizing the story because it's an unlikely scenario given the facts is like slamming Superman because it's unlikely men can fly. It's fiction, so relax already.
Aside from Watchmen, this is my favorite Alan Moore story. Once again, Moore does groundbreaking work which transcends the medium of comics and creates a story that's good in any form. With a mammoth cast and cameos by everyone from the Queen of England to the Elephant Man, the twists and turns can become a bit confusing, but that just makes it ripe for multiple readings.
Eddie Cambells artwork adds a dark sooty element that is so necessary for the story that it's almost impossible to imagine anyone else doing the art at this point. It's easy to give Moore all the credit, but the incredible art, recreation of White-Chapel, and attention to detail sets the tone perfectly and makes this more than a novel and into an actual work of art. Campbell deserves much of this credit. My only problem with Campbells work is that it's often very difficult to tell one character from another. It's only a minor detail, but for those who don't normally read comics, it may be a bit more of a problem.
For those of you who've seen the movie, whether you liked it or not, do yourself a favor and try the book. Many of you that would have no problems with seeing the vastly inferior movie might find it awkward to read the comic, but if you can get over that, you'll be able to enjoy one of the best works of fiction in the past decade or so. This is really great stuff. I'd put it up against any modern novel of any modern author.

I was absolutely amazed by the depth and quality of Alan Moore's FROM HELL. I've been reading graphic novels for a little over a year now, and in terms of subtlety, nuance, and overall storytelling, FROM HELL is head and shoulders above anything else I've read. I'm currently reading Moore's WATCHMEN, which also seems to be of equal quality.

I've never experienced anything close to what FROM HELL delivers in the admittedly short time that I've been reading comics. Alan Moore writes with the ear of a novelist and the eye of a portraitist. He packs this well-researched story of the Jack the Ripper murders with a wide and observant representation of life.

This graphic novel isn't just a retelling of the facts of the Jack the Ripper case (though it does an extraordinary job of that). It takes it all to the next level, and examines the reasons for examining such things.

It's not so much a suspense story (you know who the killer is right from the beginning) but rather one of internal discovery. A fascinating work of art and work of literature that should be read by anyone who wants to see just what comics are capable of.

While Alan Moore will go down in comics history for Watchmen, his painstakingly researched synopsis of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders is almost as equally great. Moore teamed up with artist Eddie Campbell to show us the horrific dread and gloomy atmosphere of a city in terror of a killer. Thanks to Moore's great writing, the reader is drawn into this massive story from the first page on as we are introduced to the killer himself (his identity based on Moore's own research along with specualted opinions and hearsay) and Campbell's scrathy yet beautiful black & white art sustains the atmosphere of From Hell perfectly. Eventually it would be made into a film starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, and even though I liked that as well, this graphic novel beats it on every level (if you liked the film I strongly suggest checking this out, and I guarantee you'll love this). The characterizations, dialogue, art, and riveting storyline keep the reader interested up until the final panel, and whether you like comics or not this is an essential read no matter who you are.

As the old song goes, "Alan Moore knows the score".
If you've seen the movie, forget the psychic detective, forget the whodunnit story. If you wondered where the film's brains were -- well, they were left on the comics page.
The black-and-white graphic novel is an exploration of Jack the Ripper -- his crimes, conspiracy theories, the police investigation and a lot of insight into the mind of the Ripper (whose identity is not kept secret). This book goes off into so many wonderful tangents about philosophy, history, little period details, all kinds of stuff that you couldn't fit into a movie's length. Yet it keeps very human characters.
Alan Moore's writing is superb as ever. Eddie Campbell's art is a bit stratchy but perfectly sets the mood.
The book also contains an length collection of Endnotes that will show where Moore's getting this stuff from and suggestions for further reading. And there's the history of Ripper studies in comic book form too.
Not for the faint of heart ("Jack" murdered and maimed viciously) or those with a short attention span (lots of artsy and intellectual stuff here, not a slam-bang actioner). But for those who want smart, well-written, well-drawn, insanely well-researched comics, this is the collection to buy.

Alan Moore's incredible "From Hell" is wonderful for many reasons. The first is Alan Moore, who all of this can be blamed on. His great ear for the harsh dialogue of england is awe-inspiring, and as is his symbolic story-telling (which is oddly non-pretentious, considering how easily this stuff could become a preachy dissertation on human decency and madness and all sorts of other things; instead it stays true to its absolutely human roots and delivers its messages subtly enough that you can barely feel them penetrate, rather than have it be spoken by one of its characters in a heart-straining moment. He realizes that those moments rarely occur, and almost certainly wouldn't under these conditions. Hm, i should an end paretheses around here somewhere. Maybe i'll just hide it elsewhere in the review nad make you hunt for it. no, that would be rude. Damn you, ADD, i got off topic...again....). The second thing is Eddie Cambell. His gritty reaslism (a term used far too often in the description of comic art, but it certainly does apply here) and the feel of his scratchy (and professionally unfinished) linework perfectly carries out Moore's story. The third thing is the sense of how the story should be told that really endears itself to the reader. By that i mean that the amount of research and pure, unfiltered time and effort that went into this book shines on every page. Everything is perfectly in place and all, even if you don't agree with Moore's theory on the Ripper, it all seems to fit together. The last thing that makes this book great is the Ripper himself. The utterly believable characterization and the sense of self righteousness that flows from this terrifying man are amazing. His fanaticism and controlled madness are astounding. This is one of the greatest characters i have ever read, and his final scene, the end of the book, is positively breathtaking. With his final words of
"As I become
God
And then..."
resonate with the reader for months to come. This story is chilling, frightening, dark, bleak, funny, romantic, desperate, sickening, appalling, insomnia-inducing, morbid, original, classic, complex, confusing, simple, harsh, symbolic, entertaining, sad, hopeful, hopeless, unflinching, unwilling to pull punches, fictional and real. That and everything more. The book is one of the greatest books (not just comics) that i've ever read, and the entire overall story seems to come barrelling right into your chest the instant you've finished it, and despite its morbid, violent and sexist characters and events, you can't help but be glad it has. Buy it, read it, think about it, and read it again and again. You'll find it hard to put down.

This story is a masterpiece, and this collected edition is the only way to read it. Even if you're like me and have never had much of an interest in the Whitechapel murders, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Moore thoroughly researches all of his stories, as evidenced by his strong body of work over the past 20 years, and his inventiveness and attention to detail extend to this one. The thorough endnotes outline everything for you, giving more depth and understanding to the plot. Also, "From Hell" is not intended to be gospel, and Moore makes it clear that he has used fact, assumption, & outright fabrication in order to craft this story - and the endnotes let you know which is which.
Eddie Campbell's dark sketchy art is perfect for this story. It provides just the right mood, although sometimes it's hard to interpret what is going on, and many of the characters look a bit too similar. Picking up all the details in a few of the panels may take some time.
The last chapter, in particular, is a brilliant way to wrap up the story, bringing it into the present day, and the epilogue, "Dance of the Gull Catchers", offers a hilarious study of the Ripper phenonmenon.

Alan Moore might be famous for his Watchman series, but he outdoes himself with From Hell, his personal view on the Jack the Ripper murders. A dense read that is not for the squemish, From Hell depicts a London that is distinct but with suprisingly modern traits such as bumbling policeman, the power of the press and the public in the grip of terror. Alan Moore acts as history professor as well by offering an architectural overview of London filled with insightful analysis and insight that shows how much research he has put in this. He also gives the readers little bites of English history in the form of narration, quotes and footnotes that could inspire the reader to investigate some things himself. I only gave this four stars because although it is an interesting read, the dialogue and story do drag on at times. If you have some free time and are an Alan Moore fan, definitely pick this up, but be aware that this is definitely NC-17 material.

This is a brilliant book- dense, grotesque and intellectual. It'll probably be the last great work Alan Moore does. (Let's face it, his 21st century work has been underwhelming compared to his glory days in the 1980s.)

I've read Watchmen, Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, and Miracleman several times and will read them again someday. But I never want to read From Hell again (yes, it's that disturbing and disgusting).

Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's royal surgeon, is enlisted by the Crown to aid in the cover-up of a scandal that could jeopardize the public image of the Royal Family. Four prostitutes stood witness to the secret marriage of Prince Albert and his working-class sweetheart, Annie Crook, their fellow "Unfortunate." Those four witnesses must be eliminated. Gull takes the task to heart and commits the crimes in a way that will change the face of humanity itself as it teeters on the dawn of a new century. Terrified Whitechapel citizens call him the Knife, but history will know him as Jack the Ripper. Alan Moore bases his masterful work on one of the many theories that speculate on the identity of history's greatest unknown serial killer: what if the Ripper Killings were connected to the Royal Family? The pen and ink drawings are effective, if at times a bit crude. A helpful appendix includes author's notes and explanations. From Hell won the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards for Best Graphic Novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name, starring Johnny Depp. It's a truly fascinating blend of freemasonry and British history, a brilliantly executed story not to be missed. Recommended for mature readers, for explicit language, violence, and sexual content.

This astonishing graphic novel has the complexity and power of the best prose fiction, plus the visual impact of good art. "From Hell" is a mind-blowing mythic exploration of "the fourth dimension"--the hidden architecture of history. Ostensibly about Jack the Ripper, its about just him like "Moby-Dick" is just about whale-hunting. Moore's script is brilliant and bone-chilling. Campbell's artwork captures the feeling of "the past" in an immediately arresting way. It would take a TV miniseries to cover all the material on religion and history included here (the recent dumb movie version starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham didn't even try.) "From Hell" is already a classic of the horror genre, and a significant literary achievement besides.

The term graphic novel is ugly. As if this comics weren't comics but something else. Believe me its comics, not graphic novel, a term invented by some intellectuals unwilling, unable to accept the fact that comics are a media, an art form, not magazines about superheroes. Art Spiegelman himself rejects the idea of calling good comics "graphic novels". Distinctions like that don't do the world of comics any good. They just satisfy an urge some persons have, of feeling "mature" when they grab a comic book and read it.
This story is very good, up there with Cerebus and some others. It is very well built and connected. But it has flaws, like any other piece of art in history. Sickert accidentaly breaking his pencil while getting the terrible news, in chapter one, is melodramatic and exaggerated, as are the woman's comments: too perfect, too melodic, too exact. There are other flaws, and if you dislike the way Moore connects the whole story, the narrative tricks he uses in Watchmen, like combining separate actions in one panel, with words in another, like using recurring sentences to create links between atmpospheres and situations, and all the other things he likes... then you won't like this.
But I like the way he writes and specially all the little details that seememgly are not important, but recreate his view of a time, and make complete, compelling characters, out of words and ink.
Cambell's work on from Hell is fitting: horrible and sublime, all at once.

In autumn of 1888, London was shocked by ghastly murders in its poorest section, Whitechapel. The murders and mutilations of five prostitutes as well as the mocking letters sent, presumably from the killer, to the police and newspapers would be forever be known as the Jack the Ripper's spree of terror. Ever since his crimes ended without the killer ever being caught, several theories have been proposed concerning the killer's motives and identity. From Hell narrates the theory exposed by one Joseph Sickert in the 1960s. Sickert claimed his mother was the product of a secret marriage between Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Edward and a Catholic commoner. Fearing the scandal that may erupt if the existence of a Catholic aire to the thrown were revealed, Sickert claims Victoria forcefully separated his grandparents, sending his maternal grandmother to a madhouse. Sickert continued that the fifth Ripper victim, Mary Kelly was his mother's nanny and she had attempted to use her knowledge of the union to blackmail the royal family with some of her friends, other eventual Ripper victims. Victoria then deployed royal physician Sir William Gull to exterminate the blackmailers. And thus the set-up for the horrific murders is laid out. Moore and the delightfully scratchy artwork of Eddie Campbell go on to paint a portrait of the miserable conditions of Whitechapel, the lives of desperation and hopelessness of the victims, the hysteria the murders generated, the fumbling police proceedings (led by Scotland Yard Inspector Fred Abberline, the closest the book has to a protagonist) and the conspiracy to protect Gull and the royal family's connections to the murders. From Hell is startling, compelling and horrifying. It is involving in every way. I doubt Moore told the story with Gull as Jack because he truly thought him the most likely of the slew of suspects but because Gull was a highbrow, educated, applauded Freemason, a man who many would thought to be incapable of the appalling Ripper killings. As Gull's task leads him through a path of inspiration, vision and Hannibal Lectur-style intellectualism one realizing that Moore is not writing about a single series of killings but the monster within all of us, hidden within society. "Soon, somebody will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and the recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion," he states in the second appendix. From Hell is ingenious and rereadable in every way.

After his success with Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and half a dozen other projects, Alan Moore went into self-publishing, beginning Lost Girls, Big Numbers, and From Hell. Sadly, the first two remain unfinished (possibly indefinitely), but the third well makes up for it.
The exhausting amount of detail is the first thing one notices. From street philosophers, to royal courtesans and favorites to who had the most popular literature at the time, Moore has done everything humanly possible to make the book disturbingly accurate. His footnotes are almost a book in and of themselves.
The take on the Jack the Ripper murders, while off-putting to the weaker stomachs among us, is psychological horror coupled with intrigue, sordid love affairs, and human perversity in almost every form. If you want to feel novacaine-numb good after reading something, pick up a Superman. If you want to be disturbed, challenged, and perhaps educated a bit, read From Hell.

"Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution." Moore's solution is to map as many thinkable solutions as possible, whipping up conspiracies like a Masonic think-tank on crystal meth, unearthing a vast mausoleum of crank lit and urban legend to "analyze" (Moore is too much the fabulist for an un-romantic, un-hallucinogenic reworking of the JTR legend) this hoary wraith of a phenomenon, the bane of Victorian alienists.
The author's fidelity to historical sources (there are 42 pages of dense annotations) is both its strength and weakness. Moore earns his honorary doctorate in Ripperology, anthologizing existing theories in flights of relativist whimsy (an orthodox Nietzschean, he makes endless reference to the mythmaking undertow of history-writing). But the reader is bound to feel drained and irritated by this wild glut of snagged perspectives, the speeding tangents, the new-sprung personalities, the endless spectres and shibboleths, the unfinished quality of the episodes, the fragments of clues, the splintering truthfulness of it all. This to-and-froing is exacerbated by Campbell's artwork, which ranges from darkly brilliant and bracing to, well...scratchy, gossamer, and lax -- more like preliminary storyboards than finished art.
But what truly irks me about *From Hell* is Moore's knee-jerk conception of the serial killer as seer and visionary, Representative Man if you will, an agent of enlightenment who realizes (with Clive Barker) that everyone is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red. Authors have long struggled to identify a new syndrome for this faux-Ubermenschian criminal omnipath, and Moore's Saucy Jack is no passionate amateur. In *From Hell*, Moore dramatizes one of the more fetching JTR candidates, the royal physician (and vivisectionist) Dr. William Gull, who often convinces us that he is, after all, a real human being, stooped by the darkest forces history has to offer, inhaling from the vents of hell, weighted-down by a strangulating hernia of Masonic knowledge-quests and ritual letting.
Sadly, however, these epiphanies are all too fleeting, and much of the narrative sputters along in first gear.
Somewhat recklessly, Dr. Gull is hyped as an avatar to the 20th century, a Grendelian monster whose chosen morsels of streetwalker prey are intended to illuminate our age with stark blood-brightness. As physician-murderer, he is a deconstructionist in embryo, with all the happiness of the elect, dipping his beowulf-blade into the splayed carcass of history, exhuming gory relics of mankind's future as dispassionate war-machine, when killing-mentality will not be heat (e.g. recall that Hannibal Lecter's pulse-rate never rises above its median when attending to his victims). The murder-scenes where Gull finds himself traveling forward in time, commenting on the postindustrial landscape of tower blocks and dot.com office-space (I know this sounds hokey), are sublimely effective, and we should all take this man's commentary to heart.
But at the same time, it's a bad precedent. A dead end. I mean, Shakespeare's Hamlet was a serial killer of sorts, too self-absorbed in his own Gnostic reveries to lose sleep over the slaughter of Polonius, the drowning of Ophelia, the executions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and so on. But the Prince of Denmark was working towards a genuine apotheosis, a pivotal shift in mankind's perception of itself, anointing him as the intellectual's Christ. Dr. Gull, on the other hand, comes off as a morbid brute unable to distinguish between ritual homicide and deconstructionist fervor. More often than not, Moore scapegoats the good doctor's dementia for structural laziness and non sequitur flights of fancy, brilliant flashes rising up out of Whitechapel's gaslit grunge, the infested alleyways and corroding infrastructure reflecting Moore's fatigued, occasionally directionless narrative.
If it sounds like I don't admire *From Hell*, you're mistaken, since it's a truly ingenious work of art, yet one requiring a slew of disclaimers to qualify its requisite strengths, which are many. The book is a whopping showcase of ambition and energy, an exploratory probe at the outer limits of graphic storytelling, with wonderful moments throughout (watch for cameo appearances by Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Joseph Merrick, William Blake, and others). But Moore's overreaching fidelity to historical sources and grudging respect for serial killers in general (esp. those who have the gall to perceive themselves as Gnostic seekers, innocent blood glistening in the snakefolds of their pathology) makes the book an uneven read, to say the least, studded with brilliance yet stiff with the rigor mortis of self-flattering hubris. More often than not, the story simply drags.
"You're a naughty one, Saucy Jack / You're a haughty one, S---" Still waiting for that Spinal Tap musical....

Can't say enough really.
A brilliant dissection of the Ripper story a piece at a time. Slow and plodding at times, but inherent to the flow of the story and wouldn't have it any other way. The best part of this is that we get a dissection of the killer's mind and actions as his crimes are being investigated. Incidentally, the omission of giving away the killer's identity in the movie is what dimmed my enthusiasm for the film. Had we been given a dissection of the Ripper's mind and actions along with the investigation (and his mind-boggling explanation of the street layout of London), it might have given the film more punch and stood out from standard Jack the Ripper murder mysteries (like "Time after Time" did).
Also invaluable is Moore's bibliography for each page and panel of the book (fabulous look into how much research went into this book and why it's so fabulous) and the story of the Ripper myths and evolution at the end.
Buy it, read it, love it!

From Hell is kind of confusing for the first four or five chapters. You really don't have too much of a clue what's going on and who every character is. However, after the first murder, it really starts to weave all of the confusing parts of the first few chapters together and make sense of them. Alan Moore does a great job of showing what the Jack the Ripper murders might have been like, and also showing what the man may have been like himself. The ending wraps everything up quite nicely, and is really profound. From Hell is just more proof of why Alan Moore is widely considered the best in the business.

You really don't realize just how amazing this book is until you get to the end and read the appendices. These go over in detail every page of the graphic novel and circumstantiates the aspects of each panel. This isn't just a comic book. It's Alan Moore's view of what and why the murders occured and who the ripper was. This version is a result of Moore's own extensive investigations into the Whitechapel murders and he provides thorough evidence for his version of the story, all bound together in a graphic chronicle of the world's most famous unsolved murders. Not just for Ripperologists and comic geeks.

What can i say about this graphic novel? Even though i have not many experience with Moore, after reading only Watchmen, i decided to buy all his next works. and From Hell was my next.
He recreates Victorian era in all its perfection, to every inch of detail, everything researched. In the end, it's a reconstituiton of 1888's London, from the West End to Whitechapel, where great part of the action takes place. After all, this is a book on Jack the Ripper, and Moore's theory is just brilliant.
Taken from Knight's novel, The Final Solution, Moore creates the tale around William Gull, Her Majesty's doctor, and how he had to avoid the scandal of a royal baby.
The story is long, thankfully, and involves so many historical figgures such as Oscar Wilde, the Elephant Man and even a young Aleister Crowley. There is also the Masons, conspiracies, detective work, and a plausible explanation to why the Ripper was never caught.
The art, in black and white, is superb, grim and gritty. The way the killing are done is excellent, though i don't find it that scaring.
Finally, after the main story, there is an appendix about every chapter, explaining each page. Perfect for anyone researching abouth the Ripper murders.
All in All, an interesting reading.

Sometimes when reading comix you are aware of the media you are reading in a way that you aren't when reading novels. But here Alan Moore's writing can carry you beyond that, out of words-and-pictures and into the stimulated world of your own imagination - and, very much, his. (In a way that, for me, his Swamp Thing comix, for example, cannot.)
This is Jack the Ripper still maintaining his grip on imaginations. Moore's research into the case means that his naming of the culprit is believable (as any) and his research into and knowledge of London adds a dark and magical structure that connects the 20th century and the 19th, the everyday and the underlay.
At first I wondered if Eddie Campbell's scratchy drawings could carry the book through, but there's something urgent about them which ultimately works. Between them they've concocted a truly dark London story. Forget Hollywood fogs and think "terror and magnificence" (to quote architect Hawksmoor from the book) in story, street, populace - and even church design. Add ley lines of connections, and, of course, murder from which you want to turn your face - but can't.

Being a literature teacher I have probably pooh-poohed comic books, but this was the perfect text to initiate me into the genre. It was like learning to "read" again and I really enjoyed the mixture of explicit and enigmatic panels throughout Moore and Campbell's work. I know, as other reviewers have pointed out, that Alan Moore scraped the material from many sources and that his theories are not new, but there is a real sense of intelligence and thoughtfulness behind his telling of the Whitechapel Murders. As a rampant feminist I also applaud the way Moore has politicised in some way the plight of women in the Victorian underclasses, without creating saints or cretins of the women. (I urge other readers to have a look at Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore which spends a chapter on underclass living in London. Fascinating stuff.)I loved the inclusion of details about Blake, Shaw, Wilde and Yeats, and Gull's "tour" of London given to Netley. I resist the criticism given by an earlier reviewer that Moore is pretentiously over-intellectualising the territory of occultism and phrenology in From Hell. I think it gives his work richness and raises it above the stereotypical "whodunnit" narrative. I so so so enjoyed Moore's apendices - I really loved the style and energy of his approach. I am ready for more of this comic book thang!

There could be no more better team than this one: Alan Moore's crazed genius for the story & Eddie Cambell's frenetic drawing for the images. This is a tremendously compelling graphic novel that manages to be about much more than a rash of London murders. It is a well researched book drawn with tremendous energy -- a must read for anyone interested in comics, Jack the Ripper, or, even more importantly, how history is constructed through texts. Don't forget to read the footnotes -- they're half the fun!

This Byzantine epic of a graphic novel represents everything words can do in concert with pictures. Those familiar with Alan Moore's life and work know that this book led to his experiments with magic and his theories about "idea space," and one can see why. This book itself constructs an idea space around the London of 1888, demonstrating hauntingly the way in which the ideas germinating in that particular space blossomed bloodily into the facts of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the breakdown of pure reason as a working conceptual mode, the collapse of the British Empire. As abstract as that sounds, this book is an agonizingly visceral experience; Moore and Campbell painstakingly and tangibly evoke London life high and low, depicting squalid assignations in dark alleyways and dim rooms, bar talk and conversations in museums, monolithic Queen Victoria and ephemeral, endangered prostitutes. There are cameo appearances by William Morris, the Elephant Man, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Whistler, William Blake and the aforementioned queen. But most significantly the novel is punctuated by five murders ghastly, horrifying and visionary beyond belief, five murders which grant breathtaking access to wholly other realms of thought and existence. There is no reading experience like this book. If you enjoy comics such as "V for Vendetta" or "Watchmen" or "Sandman", you will appreciate this; however, if you love novels such as "Moby Dick" or "Anna Karenina" or "Ulysses", then "From Hell" is for you as well.

This is a classic work, as dense and as demanding as any novel, and perhaps the closest to literature a graphic novel has ever come. It could only have flowed from the pen of the great Alan Moore, whose Swamp Thing and Watchmen revolutionized graphic storytelling. He and Eddie Campbell have done wonderful work here. I merely write to correct a couple of errors in other reviews.
First, [email protected] says this is only the first part of From Hell. The pictured edition does, I believe, contain the entire story, although there are single comics containing single chapters and other trade paperbacks containing fewer chapters than the above pictured edition. If you buy the pictured edition, you are getting a complete story from beginning to end. I read the above edition and found nothing missing -- it goes from before the first murder to after the last.
Second, editor Rob Lightner says that Moore believes, and wants us to believe, that Jack the Ripper was the Queen's physician and part of a Masonic conspiracy to kill the mother of Queen Victoria's grandson. I think this misses the point. Moore loves to make connections between things (see, for instance, his ongoing series Promethea), and the Masonic conspiracy gives him a lot of room to weave in the various aspects of the Ripper legend. I don't know that he necessarily believes it any more than he believes, as shown in From Hell, that the killer was able to predict the future while he was gutting his victims. Moore is a storyteller and his story contains many fantastic elements. It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute to Moore all the opinions expressed in this fine work of fiction.

One of the best comic book graphic novels ever written, From Hell mixes detailed historical research with a gripping story that originally appeared in 11 issues of the magazne complete with foot notes. This book edition contains the complete From Hell graphic novel from issues 1-10 but does not include From Hell 11 which contains a complete 20 page story by Moore- a brilliant piece on why we are interested in the Ripper phenomena at all as well as articles on the history of graphics used in the 1880's to create the ripper legend. From Hell 11 is out of print but available complete with autograph from myself who wrote several of the articles in it from the the store Auction section for $10 + postage.

When I first started reading graphic novels, which was about two years ago I thought that it was truly pointless because I was not familair with grpahic novels, I thought they were like comic books. I was wrong. The world of graphic novels is complex, and opens vast doorways into regions of the world that exist far beyond, and From Hell is one of those Graphic Novels that catches you by surprise and shakes you to the bone, I strongly recommend this work to any reader. The film adaptation was truly brilliant and compelling, rich with horrors and thrills and saturated with laughs and screams.

Alan Moore's "From Hell" is, quite simply, one of the finest literary achievements in years. It's a work of fiction - many fall into the trap of thinking that Moore has finally unmasked the real killer - but a fiction forged from theories that hold more water than most; when Moore "unmasks" Jack, he shows us our 20th Century - our moral-free modern cesspool - in all its Hellish glory. Campbell's drawings, all German Expressionistic flourishes and stark contrasts, evokes Victorian London brilliantly, and the mood created is just perfect for a story involving The Ripper, the occult, and the birth of a new century. Moore hasn't been this good since "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta".

After reading Alan Moore's "From Hell," all I have to say is---WOW! An action packed, and dynamic historical thriller about the events surrounding the mysterious "Jack the Ripper" case in London, England in the late 1800's.
The author displays a prolific knowledge of the various groups, (particularly the Masons), which shaped British life
during these tumultuous times. His dialog is terse and very effective. The artwork is a feast for the eyes. The only thing I wasn't able to verify is: "Was Sir Robert Anderson, a well known Dispensationalist/Evangelical scholar, and head of Scotland Yard at the height of the Ripper Case, a closet Mason as well?" Perhaps the author was being "tongue and check" in this matter. Who knows? In any event, two big thumbs up! I plan on reading more of Mr. Moore's works in the future. Reviewed by Brian Alexander, Author of: B005DSMYD0 The Mailman. My new horror novel is available as an eBook on this site. And it will be available as a trade paperback through the store.com in September, 2011.

The pages can get quite ugly; ink splotches, grotesque dissections et al. All this was very necessary, but the story, however, was homogenous- it was a dark and intelligent epic, and one that has numerous elements of realism, so this doesn't step in that "fantasy" category with truculent elves and other Dei ex Machina. In short, I loved the book. Here was a story which dared to stick it's thumb up at the comics establishment (published in the '80s, wot.) and it did it remarkably well.
Truly, this book told its tale like a movie, and the numerous mises-en-scene were deftly handled, and the royal chaps were masterfully portrayed. It had a fine start, and good closure too, quite unlike many money-churning comics you see on the shelf today with issues running into the hundreds. Definite start, definite end, definite masterpiece.
'Tis a shame pop culture so mangled the movie, and if you hated the film (as I did) and want to read the book nonetheless, please do.

Moore and Campbell have delved deeply into the story of Jack the Ripper, to present a version of what might have happened, based on what they knew and discovered in the research.

While odd looking to start with, the artwork seems to fit the squalor of the times once you start reading, and the density of the work is pretty impressive.

Moore's admiration of Michael Moorcock is evident, but unlike so many of Moorcock's imitators, Moore builds on the master's techniques, makes them his own, takes over London and makes THAT his own. Echoes of Gloriana and Jerry Cornelius amplify rather than diminish his themes. Still the most talented original in graphic fiction, Moore proves again that he stands head and shoulders above the rest. The miserable movie version of this is a sentimentalized, Hollywood echo of Moore's complex genius. If you enjoyed the movie, then you will find the substance in this edition! Moore is a true original.

Jack the Ripper turned out to have more staying power than most people thought. Moore combines a great idea with facts to create a fun read. Some interesting artwork turns this large volume into a portal to the fog covered streets of London. Graphic art for a graphic novel. Enjoy!

So funny how all the naysayers on this book either complain about the art, the ripper theory or the violence in the book. Hello! It's a book about Jack the Ripper expect some violence.

Eddie Campbells gritty art is perfect for the story. This isn't a good book to read if you brand new to comics, but if you're an experienced comics reader who can handle mature topics and (gasp) violence, pick up a fantastic book.

The most recent offering from Alan Moore, the author who, alongside Neil Gaiman, was responsible for bringing comic books to their fullest potential as art on par with novels, From Hell is a brilliant, moody, and well-researched re-telling of the Jack the Ripper story. Moore takes an interesting twist on the story - and one he himself admits that he believes is false - but the point of the book isn't so much a whodunit as a treatise on the combining of fact and fiction into myth, and the nature of sensationalism and crime in the 20th century.
From Hell features an amazing cast of characters and the story is told in sixteen chapters - two of which are a prologue and an epilogue. Moore weaves historical facts together to form a cohesive story, and draws on dozens of sources, both Ripper-related and otherwise. From Hell suggests that the Ripper was, in fact, William Gull, Physician Ordinary to the Royal Family and a member of the Freemasons (this fact is revealed very early on in the book, unlike the movie which IS a whodunit). Where high-level criminologists like FBI profiler John Douglas (inspiration for the Crawford character in Silence of the Lambs) seem to think that the crimes were motivated by a fear of women, Moore focuses on the calm, ritualistic nature of the murders, and the important connection between the victims - that they all knew each other.
Although in this book the crime itself was a Masonic ritual, I think it should be noted that Moore isn't trying to smear the Masons, and that should be obvious to anyone reading From Hell. His contention, one that more or less fits the 100-plus years worth of facts, is that William Gull was gradually going insane and had visions about Masonic deities - shreds of old ritual from Freemasonry's past that he blows out of proportion and begins to manifest, at least in his mind. There was nothing anti-Freemason in this book, but I realize people have to find something to get bent out of shape about.
The crowning achievement of this volume isn't the way Moore creates a perfect fit for Gull as the Ripper, but the appendix at the end in which he details the painstaking amount of research that went into this work. He has a reference for nearly every factual detail, and readily admits when he makes things up or dramatizes certain events for the story. It's an excellent resource for Ripperologists and scholars interested in Moore's book, and its inclusion is what makes From Hell such a fascinating read.
I absolutely recommend From Hell, especially if you enjoyed the film - the book is far more detailed, and doesn't sacrifice any historical accuracies to make a better story, as the movie did. If the film is a starting point, this graphic novel is the logical conclusion. Get it today; you will not be sorry you did.

Completely, utterly and totally amazing. Moore has crafted a graphic novel that is better than most true novels I have ever read. Sure, it didn't really happen this way back in 1888, but that doesn't matter; this is engaging reading at its best. Campbell's artwork takes about 10 pages to get used to, but once you do, you see how perfectly suited these two creators 9Moore and Campbell) are to each other. Calssic!

I love Alan Moore. Watchmen and V for Vendetta are two of my favorite books of all time and I am still reading all of his current titles. He is without a doubt the best writer of the genre today and in the last 20 years, with Frank Miller, Jeph Loeb, and Kurt Busiek following closely behind. However, just because he is the best doesn't mean he can't have a few misses every now and then. From Hell is good, but not great. The art is good, the story is good, the concepts are good, but nothing is extraordinary. The only thing I really liked about this was how much Moore knew about the subject, and his theory (which is what this book is) is an interesting one, filled with intrigue and corruption, but not much guessing, although that's not the point. I am not a comic reader who only reads superhero books, and I wasn't expecting that, but this book is about 150 pages too long. Some art sequences are clearly supposed to be tense and thrilling, but they go on for many pages at a time. Moore fills the page with meaningless dialogue at times, also, as if this entire book were just proof he could do serious material. It's being made into a movie, and that could be good provided they cut much of the proverbial fat, as if they keep it even remotely in tact it will run 5 or 6 hours, with maybe 2 that you really enjoy. Oh well, buy it, read it, it's still a good book.