From Hell

EAN:9780958578349 Label:Top Shelf Production Author:Alan Moore Binding:Paperback

From Hell is a literary tour de force, one of many from legendary comics scribe Alan Moore Alan Moore's most complex, challenging, and inventive work. From Hell tells the (deeply researched) story of Jack the Ripper, but it is so much more than that2008-09-30 Rating 5. Quite simply, it is a story of London--the city is the book's primary focus and it soon becomes a living, breathing character in the mind of the reader. The amount of thought, effort, and research put into this massive volume is quite astounding and a testament to Moore and artist Eddie Campbell's profound skill at their craft. From Hell, along with Watchmen, is Moore's greatest work and should be read by all. It is a wonder to behold, I'd even go so far as to call it life-changing. From Hell is kind of confusing for the first four or five chapters Jack the Ripper's story in a comic book. You really don't have too much of a clue what's going on and who every character is2008-01-22 Rating 5. 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. Like many, I knew the vague outlines of the Ripper murders A tour de force exposition of Victorian England and a fanciful take on the Ripper. 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 identified2007-11-05 Rating 4. 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. 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 Graphic SF Reader. 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 impressive2007-09-03 Rating 4. It's in black and white, a foot thick and will give you nightmares for a month The Best Graphic Novel written by Alan Moore. If I could sum it up in a few sentences I'd be doing it a disservice and be a liar2007-05-25 Rating 5. Buy it, read it and weep, for there will never be another book like it. Watchmen for grown ups. FROM HELL is the story of Jack the Ripper, perhaps the most infamous man in the annals of murder Detailing the events leading up to the Whitechapel killings and the cover-up that followed, FROM HELL is a meditation on the mind of a madman whose savagery and violence gave birth to the 20th century. The serialized story, presented in its entirety in this volume, has garnered widespread attention from critics and scholars