More Moore: From Hell

From Hell graphic novel, Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore

This Oct. 19, 2001  will serve as this week’s “Retro Thursday” piece.   This article was published tying in with the release of the “From Hell” movie.

Also, with “Watchmen” nearing, I wanted to do a series pointing out additional works by Alan Moore that those who liked the “Watchmen” graphic novel can seek out.  Thus, “More Moore.”   My first suggestion is the unsettling classic, “From Hell.”

—-

“It is beginning, Netley. Only just beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century. I have delivered it.”

That quote, from the character revealed as Jack the Ripper, drives the central premise of “From Hell,” the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Moore postulates through his fictionalized narrative that the Ripper killings of 1888 launched the world forward, and not necessarily for the better. Jack the Ripper, the world’s most famous serial killer, is revealed as a man seeking mystical power, while at the same time trying to silence a secret that could shake England.

“From Hell,” which takes its title from a letter received claiming credit for the Ripper murders, is the basis of the film starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham.

The 500-plus page graphic novel, containing more than 60 pages of notes by Moore and Campbell, is published by Eddie Campbell Comics and represented in the United States by Top Shelf.