From Hell : : Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Comics & Graphic Novels / Horror / Moore, Alan	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024

"First printing collected edition November 1999" -- verso of t.p.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Alan Moore is intimidating. submitted by eknapp on August 22, 2020, 7:47pm The events surrounding the historical Jack the Ripper murders, "solved" by Alan Moore and told primarily from the Ripper's point of view.

**SOME SPOILERS AHEAD**

Plot
We learn pretty much right off the bat that the killer is Sir William Gull, a Freemason and notable surgeon. The prince fathers a child with a lowly shopgirl, a small group of desperate prostitutes attempts to blackmail the prince's friend with this information for 10 lousy pounds, and the Queen dispatches Dr. Gull to make the threat of blackmail go away.

Only, William Gull takes advantage of this charge to enact a gory Freemason ritual which he hopes will enable him to perceive all time simultaneously, as does Dr. Manhattan in Moore's masterpiece Watchmen. Surprise, it works, and his resulting perceptions are woven brilliantly into the nooks and crannies of the story from beginning to end.

Art
The simple black-and-white illustration is a frequent source of frustration. It's virtually impossible to reliably differentiate the sprawling cast of characters. What I think is intended to be texturing looks like what happens in a cheap b&w photocopy of a rich color image. Half the time it's unparsable. And the spindly, spidery lettering does the reader no favors.

As much as the art frustrates me, I confess to loving the way it shows light and dark: a sunrise gradually backlighting a rocky outcropping, the inside of a shadowy cathedral, silhouettes in the dark. I think the illustration's failings stem from the limitations of the chosen style and not of the artist's skill.

The final killing is rendered in such casually gory detail and at such great length--30 pages. THIRTY.--that it may justify the decision to forgo color illustration all on its own. The Crazy 88s battle sequence in the film KILL BILL was reportedly black and white for this reason.

Story
When I read From Hell some ten years ago, I found it incomprehensible and disappointing. This time through, it clicked (and I'm bumping my rating from 2 stars to 4). I loved the sly foreshadowing, as when a demented Bedlam patient keeps asking the man who would become the Ripper "Is that you, Jack? Are you my Jack?" I love the way he explores the lives of the doomed prostitutes. I love the background chapters on William Gull, which are both literally and figuratively told from his point of view.

Moore, via Gull, considers at length concepts of masculinity and femininity.
--The sun is masculine: light dispels shadow, it is therefore rational, and reason is male.
--The moon is feminine: the lunar cycle corresponds to the menstrual cycle, the moon is associated with madness and 'lunacy', hence irrationality must be female.
Humanity ran on a matriarchal system for 8 million years until it was overthrown by men a scant 6000 years ago...to what Gull sees as the betterment of mankind. He refers to "the tyranny of mother's milk." Suffrage, obviously, is a shameful resurgence of madness, social disorder, "socialism", and weakness that must be put down.

Gull's butchery of the prostitutes of Whitechapel are thus intended to not only end their pitiful blackmail scheme, but also to serve--in his mind--as blows of reason in the struggle against feminine lunacy. He believes he is accomplishing multiple goods.

The writing isn't all grand. Moore's lengthy ramblings about London's historical architecture and noteworthy poets did nothing for me beyond making me restless. At 500+ pages, there was fat that could have been trimmed.