Story: I’ll admit I was unprepared for this book. I was expecting something closer to, oh, Swamp Thing or Promethea. My previous experience: I’d heard of this book plenty, with high praise, but honestly didn’t know that it was about Jack the Ripper. It’s worth a read for sure.Ĭreators: Alan Moore wrote it, Eddie Campbell drew it. A lengthy appendix with annotations, history lessons, and final thoughts from the author was released in 1998 and is included in the back of the collected editions. The original serial story started in 1989 and wrapped in 1996. Publication dates: I pretty much covered it in the previous section. I have some thoughts on that in the Art section below. Note that Top Shelf is currently releasing a “master edition” of the comic that is in color (the original’s not) and moderately reworked by the artist himself, so know which edition you’re buying.
Collected editions have been put together by Eddie Campbell himself, and more recently by IDW’s Top Shelf Productions. When Tundra folded, it was bought out by Kitchen Sink Press and the book continued on to completion (1993-1998). After the final issue of the anthology, From Hell hopped over to Tundra Publishing, TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman’s doomed startup, and ran as a standalone series (1991-1993). The first few issues were published serially in the horror anthology comic Taboo (1989-1992), which was run by Moore’s Swamp Thing collaborator Steve Bissette through his Spiderbaby Grafix imprint. Published by: Like its female protagonists, this book gets around. Aside from all the murdered prostitutes, obviously. All told, it’s nearly 600 pages of good clean family fun. The book (collected edition) is divided into fourteen chapters, plus a prologue, an epilogue, and appendices. I’ll warn you up front, this one’s not for the faint of heart. That didn’t stop him, however, from taking a very deep dive into the legend and presenting it as a violent police procedural mixed with an occult horror. But do you know who actually did it? Of course not, and neither does Alan Moore. The skinny: You’ve heard of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders. Sit back and enjoy the gory tale of Jack the Ripper killing prostitutes in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell.
This time: Well this column got dark quickly. The comics may be old but my mind is still fresh, wrapped in plastic and sitting on the shelf, waiting to be opened. I’m on a mission to rectify my comics knowledge shortcomings and to provide a fresh take on classic stories that others have known for years. For me, those gaps are vast and constitute anything outside of DC Comics proper. We all have gaps in our pop culture knowledge, those omissions that elicit gasps from our fellow funnybook connoisseurs.
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