Book Review - Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell
From Hell: Master Edition by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Published by: Top Shelf Productions
Publication Date: 1999
Format: Kindle, 582 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
Queen Victoria's eldest son Eddy has been a bad boy. He's been slumming in the East End with his tutor Walter Sickert. There Eddy met and secretly married a shop girl, Annie Crook. This will not do for the future King of England and his mother decides to set it right. She separates the couple, bringing Eddy home and sending the wife to Bedlam, unaware that there was a child in the care of one Mary Kelly. This is when Sir William Withey Gull enters the picture. He is a respected doctor, an esteemed and high ranking freemason, who saved the Prince's life when he was ill years previously. For his services he was promoted to Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. The Queen calls on him to deal with her son's wife and he operates on Annie Crook's thyroid gland impairing her sanity. The Queen and her doctor believe the threat is past when Mary Kelly realizes that she and her friends have a meal ticket thanks to her knowledge of the marriage and the baby named Alice. Prostitutes Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, and Mary Kelly would never resort to blackmail if not for the fact their very lives are in danger by the Old Nichol Gang unless they pay up. So Mary sends Walter Sickert a letter. Walter goes to Princess Alix, Eddy's mother. After what happened previously she says this matter must be taken to Victoria immediately and Victoria calls in Sir William. Sir William has recently recovered from a stroke and approaches this undertaking in the name of the Queen as his great work. With the help of his driver Netley they identify the four women and Sir William goes about plotting their deaths. He has informed his fellow Masons at the police that murders are about to commence, but neither realize how significant they will be or how they will terrorize London. Sir William's knowledge of anatomy allows him to be brutal and precise with his work, though at least the first death is as painless as he can make it. The fear that grips London after the death of Polly Nichols means that all the prostitutes are steeped in terror. The newspapers make a sensation of the cases, dubbing the killer "Jack the Ripper." And Jack is here to usher in the future no matter the body count.
Alan Moore is the grand old wizard of graphic novels and it would not be an understatement to say that he created the genre as we know it today. But for all that he is divisive. You either love his work or you hate it, or you're one of those weird people who is really into Watchmen and when they released a totally credible and faithful adaptation you say it's not "your" Watchmen. I sometimes just don't get people. But I'm starting to get the Alan Moore fantascism, despite my hatred of Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, whose adaptation everyone should be complaining about. And I somehow saw that twice in theaters. For me From Hell is his magnum opus, his great work. And being an armchair Ripperologist I was able to enjoy it without believing anything that he wrote about the crimes. Because for all the theories out there on who Jack the Ripper is I have never once found it even slightly plausible that it was a Freemason cover-up at the behest of Queen Victoria. And no matter how fun they made the film Murder by Decree with a camp James Mason and a psychic Donald Sutherland flailing through the streets of London if they couldn't make me believe the theories spouted by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, I'm sorry, but Alan Moore didn't stand a chance. And while I could blame my dislike of the theory for avoiding the graphic novel for so many years, I didn't know that this was the theory espoused, the only knowledge I really had of the comic was that it was loosely, and I say very loosely, the inspiration for the 2001 Johnny Depp film. Which, well, the less said the better. Except for this, they tried to combine Abberline and Lees into one character to have a psychic cop. Yeah. They did that. So why did I finally decide to pick up the book after all this time? Honestly, I'm not sure. I was just feeling in a gloomy Victorian mood and was rewatching Penny Dreadful and just thought, you know what, now's the time. And here's the thing, if I had known it was more about the world the murders happened in I would have picked it up so much sooner, though I'm glad I didn't because the colorization by Eddie Campbell gave the artwork more depth and definition. The way that Sir William discusses the history of London reminded me of what I love so much about the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. There's a depth and richness to the history of London with it constantly building and reinventing itself on the remnants of history. Always moving forward into the future. And if this book shows one thing it's that these murders were a force that would move London inexorably forward into a whole new world.
Post a Comment