From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts.

[polymorphikos]

Review - From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts.

Author: Alan Moore

Artist: Eddie Campbell

Genre: Crime/Drama/Historical

Rating: R 18+

Quality (Writing): 5

Quality (Art): 3.5


For those misguided few who still believe that comics are the realm of children and fat thirty-somethings with way too many videogames on the shelf, From Hell will probably come as something of a surprise.



This is an intricate reconstruction of the crimes of the murderer known as Jack the Ripper, as told by Alan Moore with dark, gritty artwork by Eddie Campbell. The comic, linking a swathe of seemingly-unconnected instances and events, postulates that the five women were murdered at the behest of Victoria Regina herself, to prevent them from revealing that her bisexual grandson Albert, or “Prince Eddie”, had married a shop girl and conceived a baby girl. The man enlisted to do this dirty work is one William Gull, a psychopathic mystic and Free Mason obsessed with the occult and convinced that he is carrying-out some dark magic by his actions. He enlists the help of a morally-ambiguous cabbie named Netley, and together they rapidly work their way through the women and through the last vestiges of William Gull’s sanity.



This book, whilst well-researched and reconstructed, is more about using this grisly period as a dark social commentary about misuse of power, the levels of corruption, and the ways in which entire strata of people were ignored and forced into amorality and the acceptance of daily horrors that many would do more than blanche at, and are to this day.



The most appealing aspect of this book is its egalitarian approach to narrators. The story is told through the eyes of the “lowest” characters, the whores of Whitechapel, the “Ripper”, the inspector in charge of the case, and through some of the highest, reaching into the circles of Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, the upper echelons of the free Masons and the like. The details are never spared, with everything from sex to gruesome evisceration to the sickening poverty of the district shown in unflattering line ink. This goes to especial effect when it is contrasted with soft watercolours to illustrate the lives of the wealthy and the stunning vistas of the most opulent areas of the most opulent portion of the Victorian era.



Whilst certainly not one for the squeamish, this comic is simply brilliant. Dark, intelligent, moving, cautionary, and with moments of almost Lovecraftian horror at the realisations which are forced upon some people by the mad physician, Gull. I can’t recommend it enough, and I sincerely doubt that this review has in any way done it justice.