First, jplatt@webspan.net says this is only the first part of From Hell. The pictured edition does, I believe, contain the entire story, although there are single comics containing single chapters and other trade paperbacks containing fewer chapters than the above pictured edition. If you buy the pictured edition, you are getting a complete story from beginning to end. I read the above edition and found nothing missing -- it goes from before the first murder to after the last.

Second, editor Rob Lightner says that Moore believes, and wants us to believe, that Jack the Ripper was the Queen's physician and part of a Masonic conspiracy to kill the mother of Queen Victoria's grandson. I think this misses the point. Moore loves to make connections between things (see, for instance, his ongoing series Promethea), and the Masonic conspiracy gives him a lot of room to weave in the various aspects of the Ripper legend. I don't know that he necessarily believes it any more than he believes, as shown in From Hell, that the killer was able to predict the future while he was gutting his victims. Moore is a storyteller and his story contains many fantastic elements. It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute to Moore all the opinions expressed in this fine work of fiction.


A masterwork that goes beyond "comic books"   March 2, 2000
 30 out of 31 found this review helpful

After SWAMP THING and WATCHMEN brought fame and fortune to Alan Moore, the man who practically redefined the "comic book" medium and popularized the form for serious literature, he spent the better part of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s attempting to bring more "serious" works of graphic literature into existence. But because the comic book market is still dominated by superheroes, Moore's struggled through an uphill battle to succedully release even one of the various projects he attempted. "Big Numbers" and "Lost Girls" remain tantalizingly incomplete, with only the first few chapters of each being successfully published; and it took more than a decade for all ten books of "From Hell" (plus its appendix, "Dance of the Gull Catchers") to see the light of day.

It was worth the wait.

Studied Ripperologists have praised Moore for the obsessive, painstakingly detailed research he undertook into the subject of the Whitechapel murders, unearthing buried facts and exploring most if not all of the various conspiracy theories involving the Royal Family, the Freemasons, Scotland Yard, and just about anyone who was involved with the Victorian aristrocracy of the time. But Moore is first and foremost a storyteller, and "From Hell" earns the title "masterwork" by being more than merely a scholarly journal. It's a taut, horrific, mesmerizing journey into madness that is both a fascinating detective story worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and it's also a haunting, poetic journey reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. But Moore's mastery of the medium of graphic literature -- backed by the superb and appropriately sketchy artistry of Eddie Campbell -- weaves the various threads together into a fabric that conjures up images of the sights, smells, thoughts, and fears of the Victorian Era in a way that makes the reader glad that the world has changed since those days.

It has, rather, devolved into something far worse.

Our fascination with Jack the Ripper, Moore hypothesizes, is a reflection of ourselves, and the society that we have become. (These insights become especially clear during Chapter 10, "The Best Of All Tailors" -- as the Ripper chastises us for allowing ourselves to become numb and soulless, while engaging in one of the most horrifying and bloody murder scenes ever displayed in any graphic medium, anywhere.) But if the polluted, diseased world of Victorian London is not really much worse than our own, then we can at least thank Alan Moore for presenting us with a fascinating tale that gives us a glimpse into it...a view that has never been presented to us in this manner before, with all of its horrors laid bare for us to see. Even more so than "Watchmen," FROM HELL is a shining example of the very finest achievements of graphic literature. This, dear friends, is no comic book.


Beautiful, Brilliant, Scholarly, Amazing, and Fun   November 12, 2001
 26 out of 27 found this review helpful

The most recent offering from Alan Moore, the author who, alongside Neil Gaiman, was responsible for bringing comic books to their fullest potential as art on par with novels, From Hell is a brilliant, moody, and well-researched re-telling of the Jack the Ripper story. Moore takes an interesting twist on the story - and one he himself admits that he believes is false - but the point of the book isn't so much a whodunit as a treatise on the combining of fact and fiction into myth, and the nature of sensationalism and crime in the 20th century.

From Hell features an amazing cast of characters and the story is told in sixteen chapters - two of which are a prologue and an epilogue. Moore weaves historical facts together to form a cohesive story, and draws on dozens of sources, both Ripper-related and otherwise. From Hell suggests that the Ripper was, in fact, William Gull, Physician Ordinary to the Royal Family and a member of the Freemasons (this fact is revealed very early on in the book, unlike the movie which IS a whodunit). Where high-level criminologists like FBI profiler John Douglas (inspiration for the Crawford character in Silence of the Lambs) seem to think that the crimes were motivated by a fear of women, Moore focuses on the calm, ritualistic nature of the murders, and the important connection between the victims - that they all knew each other.

Although in this book the crime itself was a Masonic ritual, I think it should be noted that Moore isn't trying to smear the Masons, and that should be obvious to anyone reading From Hell. His contention, one that more or less fits the 100-plus years worth of facts, is that William Gull was gradually going insane and had visions about Masonic deities - shreds of old ritual from Freemasonry's past that he blows out of proportion and begins to manifest, at least in his mind. There was nothing anti-Freemason in this book, but I realize people have to find something to get bent out of shape about.

The crowning achievement of this volume isn't the way Moore creates a perfect fit for Gull as the Ripper, but the appendix at the end in which he details the painstaking amount of research that went into this work. He has a reference for nearly every factual detail, and readily admits when he makes things up or dramatizes certain events for the story. It's an excellent resource for Ripperologists and scholars interested in Moore's book, and its inclusion is what makes From Hell such a fascinating read.

I absolutely recommend From Hell, especially if you enjoyed the film - the book is far more detailed, and doesn't sacrifice any historical accuracies to make a better story, as the movie did. If the film is a starting point, this graphic novel is the logical conclusion. Get it today; you will not be sorry you did.


What Moore would be doing if he lived for free...   May 3, 2000
 20 out of 21 found this review helpful

After his success with Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and half a dozen other projects, Alan Moore went into self-publishing, beginning Lost Girls, Big Numbers, and From Hell. Sadly, the first two remain unfinished (possibly indefinitely), but the third well makes up for it.

The exhausting amount of detail is the first thing one notices. From street philosophers, to royal courtesans and favorites to who had the most popular literature at the time, Moore has done everything humanly possible to make the book disturbingly accurate. His footnotes are almost a book in and of themselves.

The take on the Jack the Ripper murders, while off-putting to the weaker stomachs among us, is psychological horror coupled with intrigue, sordid love affairs, and human perversity in almost every form. If you want to feel novacaine-numb good after reading something, pick up a Superman. If you want to be disturbed, challenged, and perhaps educated a bit, read From Hell.


Moore & Campbell's unique take on Jack the Ripper   October 17, 2001
 18 out of 18 found this review helpful

In preparation for the opening of the film version of "From Hell" I have been rereading Alan Moore and Eddie Campell's sixteen-part melodrama/graphic novel. It is pretty clear to me from the trailers and commercials I have seen for the film that the Hughes brothers have played around as much with this story as Moore and Campbell have played around with the "facts" of the Jack the Ripper story. But since we will never know the "truth" about Jack--scholars cannot even agree on exactly who he killed, which you would think was a rather important starting point in constructing any sort of theory--all that really matters is whether "From Hell" tells a compelling story. By that standard, "From Hell" certainly succeeds.

In the Appendix to each chapter Moore careful details his sources, alterations and inventions for "From Hell" on a page-by-page basis. While such elaborations will only serve to infuriate most scholars of the Ripper, they are certainly of interest to us poor neophytes who cannot help but be fascinated by the details of the unsolvable mystery. Moore is working primarily off of Stephen Knight's "Jack the Riper: The Final Solution," which advances what Casebook: Jack the Ripper (the world's largest on-line public repository of Ripper-related information) labels the most controversial Ripper theory. Known as the Royal Conspiracy theory, it does have the delicious quality of involving virtually every person who has ever been a Ripper suspect. Despite its popularity, Ripperologists pretty much universally dismiss the theory (it ranks 8th on their list, mainly because one-third rated it 10 and another one-third rated it 1). But then the most popular suspect is currently James Maybrick, brought into prominence by the "Diary of Jack the Ripper" hoax (ah, but was it really?). Given everything that is out there, it is no wonder that the most "legitimate" suspect of the day, Francis Tumblety, gets lost. But all of this just reinforces the idea that "From Hell" is not history, but rather drama. Time and time again, it is the rationale of the STORY rather than the FACTS that drive Moore's narrative.

The artwork by Eddie Campbell, aided and abetted at various times by April Post and Pete Mullins, is certainly evocative of the tale. I even think there is a point at which the reader has to be grateful that the bloodier episodes are rendered in stark black and white drawings. Campbell presents various styles at different times in the narrative, altering it to match the narrative. But it is Moore's epic story that captivates throughout as he puts his giant jigsaw puzzle together from all the evidence and his own speculations. When Moore works in the conception of Adolf Hitler, which happened in Austria around the time of the murders, as an ironic counterpart to his narrative, it is hard not to be impressed, just as we are horrified by the clinical details of the Ripper's murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which takes up all of Chapter 10. Through deduction, induction and abduction, Moore creates a compelling story and the fact that it is not what really happens has little to do with how much we enjoy "From Hell."

Do I believe that Sir William Gull was indeed Jack the Ripper? No, I do not. I have heard many theories regarding his true identity that have been plausible, at least at face value, and I am more than willing to lead it to the knowledgeable experts to argue out their respective merits. But I was not reading "From Hell" to be convinced of the guilty or innocence of any one regarding the world's first infamous serial killer. I read it because as we have known ever since Alan Moore did his own take on the Swamp Thing, one of his greatest strengths as a writer is to make us look at old things in new ways. Now, if only the movie version can be half this good.