From Hell

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The serialized story, presented in its entirety in this volume, has garnered widespread attention from critics and scholars, and has been adapted into a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. Sequences of related events can be seen as shapes in the fourth dimension: history can "be said to have an architecture", as Gull puts it. La operación quirúrgica de Moore y Campbell sobre el mito de Jack el Destripador dio lugar a una obra maestra inquietante y cautivadora.

Years later, and moments before his death, Gull has an extended mystical experience, where his spirit travels through time, observing the crimes of the London Monster, instigating or inspiring a number of other killers ( Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady), causing Netley's death, as well as serving as the inspiration for both Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and William Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea. Per anni, il mio modesto giudizio critico su questo capolavoro é stato più o meno ingiusto, complici i disegni che non mi attiravano per nulla, la mole del tomo, ed il prezzo non indifferente. If the story had followed the approach laid out in the afterward, I'd be writing a much different review today, one about the presentation of truths and untruths, of allowing the narrative to deconstruct itself, to fall apart while at the same time drawing ever closer to some fundamental truth about storytelling, about our need for stories, our urge to make patterns out of nonsense. What matters is that they recognize that their tale is nothing more than a tale told from their perspective.The press invents the bogey man Jack the Ripper, the police turn a blind eye, and five women are brutally killed. The sense of individual characters is simply not there--instead we tend to see the same faces and forms, over and over. The events of Watchmen are set into motion by the murder of The Comedian, a retired hero with a long list of enemies with plenty of reasons to toss him off a balcony. What matters is that Alan Moore's writing and Eddie Campbell's artistry uncover a deep emotional and philosophical truth about the reverberations of the smallest actions in the world. William Gull is acting on behalf of the crown to avoid embarrassment and hide the knowledge of an heir born to a commoner, but he also has grander reasons for his crimes.

And though in black and white, it is still graphic (that serial murder thing, envisioned throughout). The idea seems to be that Gull's acts are having an effect on the future, perhaps even giving birth to modern times. I think of Duncan Fegredo, the greatest living comic artist, and his work on Peter Milligan's remarkable Enigma: it was slipshod, loose, and fluid, refusing to be confined, yet it still managed to be forceful, impressionistic, and vividly alive. With From Hell, once again, I've seen the movie before having read the graphic novel and although the movie features Johnny Depp and a lot of opium, I liked that one better as well.It presents one theory (since discredited) about the Jack The Ripper killings, and in so doing presents us with the story from every conceivable angle. Moore and Campbell never forget for a moment that Gull’s ceremonial pawns are also real human women. For example, the character Johnny Depp plays in the movie version is in actuality an amalgam of three different characters from the original book -- a policeman, a psychic, and a crazed opium addict -- not to mention that in the book, these three characters are supposed to not like each other, with personalities that naturally clash against the other two. On the surface, From Hell presents, in the form of an illustrated narrative, the historical events of the 1888-1891 Whitechapel murders, adhering to the facts (as precisely indicated in an extensive series of notes), except for an occasional fictional invention (also scrupulously acknowledged in the notes).