LWiA 4.3 Act IV Omnibus
🕑 Added 2025-11-17 19:39:13 +0000 UTCThe From Hell Act IV omnibus. I'll get a full chapter post out in a bit and give it the tag so that it's findable with the other full chapters, but I don't wanna spam you all.
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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does” in 1989, Moore was exploring similar conceptual space here with another artist, namely David Bowie, who, just five months after the release of “The best of all tailors” in From Hell #7, released 1. Outside. This was his return, after sixteen years, to working with Moore’s longtime hero Brian Eno, and was billed as a concept album. As with most concept albums, this is a bit of a con—at least one track, the closing “Strangers When We Meet,” is recycled from his soundtrack album for The Buddha of Suburbia several years earlier—another dated all the way back to 1989 and his time with Tin Machine. Nevertheless, the alleged concept is striking: a world in which murder is legal if it can be justified as art.
Any potential priority dispute here is strained—1. Outside was recorded by February of 1995, two months before From Hell #7 came out, so mutual influence on that specific point is impossible. If one wanted to suggest that “The best of all tailors” sat plainly latent in From Hell from an earlier date then one could perhaps construct some sort of strained argument in which Bowie was inspired by the earlier installments, but there’s no reason to imagine he was hunting down copies of Taboo (although he was a fan of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, another literary descendent of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat). Besides, the underlying concept plainly stretches back to 1827 with Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.”
No, as with phalluses as power tools six years earlier, there was simply something in the air. The real tell comes in “The Diary of Nathan Adler, or The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-cycle,” a work of fiction first published in the January 1995 issue of Q before being recycled as the liner notes for 1. Outside. There the titular murder is positioned as taking place on the then-future date of New Year’s Eve, 1999. Bowie talked in interviews about the idea of some grandiose purging of the twentieth century’s bloodlust in order to make way for the millennium, with the titular art-ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue being a sort of ritual to end one century and commence the next. Not only is the parallel to Moore’s take on the Ripper murders obvious, the twentieth century that he imagines ending is tangibly the same one that Gull births.
Bowie, of course, had form with this sort of idea; like Moore he had stumbled into making art that had profound magical effects on the world, although Bowie’s were altogether more disastrous. In 1976, a few years after meeting Burroughs and embracing the cut-up method he had released “Station to Station,” a ten minute epic of a song born out of the paranoid depths of cocaine addiction, a blurred obsession with Crowley, Nietzche, and Kabbalah that saw him embodying the character of the Thin White Duke, a ghoulish aristocrat who dreamed of fascism as a kind of rock and roll apotheosis. Two years later, Donald Trump made his first entrance in the real estate business; forty years later he became President, with the house band at one point going so far as to play “Station to Station” at the Republican National Convention. This was notably the same year that Bowie died, his final music video seeing him wearing the same outfit he had on the back cover of Station to Station.
The timing here means that Bowie was unlikely to have ever entirely realized what he’d wrought; nevertheless, it’s not surprising to find him on the same wavelength as Moore. But the particulars of Bowie’s vision are nevertheless striking. Where Moore came to the idea of art-ritual murder from the starting point of looking at murder, Bowie got there through the art world, which he was by that point well-connected to, to the point of having joined the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine. Indeed, at the first recording sessions for the album Bowie greeted his bandmates with an array of paintbrushes and tools, declaring that they were going to redecorate the studio before they started. Once recordings started they consisted of unstructured jam sessions, with Eno assailing musicians with odd sounds or foreign radio broadcasts if he thought their playing became too conventional.
The culmination of this process came at a session in which Bowie arranged a table with various pages of books, magazines, and pre-generated cut-ups and began grabbing pages to produce lyrics, developing an entire setting, Oxford Town, New Jersey, characters to populate it, and the outlines of a story involving murder. The result, named Leon after a man falsely accused of the murder, was a three hour suite of rambling spoken word pieces over strange and dissonant backing. But, being comprised largely of cut-ups and improvisations, little about this plot was coherent—lyrics included things like “I was sitting there at the Laugh Hotel the other night looking for window demons and up comes this Leon in the jungle wing. He modeled a slouch unreal maybe a trip of the tongue from a slug male.” Perhaps understandably, record labels were skeptical, and Bowie, Eno, and the band regrouped and began reworking the project as a more conventional pop album with more traditionally structured songs, albeit ones rife with cut-up verbiage like “Poor dunce / He pushed back the pigmen / The Barbs laughed / The fool is dead” and “White boys falling on the fires of night / Flesh punks burning in their glue.” The result was, at a minimum, his best since Scary Monsters.
“The Diary of Nathan Adler” was part of this effort to tame the unhinged sprawl of Leon into something with elements of coherence. Parts of it describe real artistic performances, such as Ron Athey’s self-injury performance art 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life. Others are plainly still cut-ups: “The caucasian suicide center, naked and grimy, silhouetted by fungus yellow street lamps female slashing way out saints for a dollar a time thrown downstairs if you can’t take any more.” Add a narrative that careens from 1970s Berlin to the millennium and you have one of the more bemusing efforts at rendering something more coherent ever taken. Bowie’s treatment of the actual murder within all of this reads like some kind of cyberpunk surrealist take on Mary Kelly’s autopsy report: “The limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transplant substances, revealing themselves as little clue haikus, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids.”
What is crucial about this approach to art-ritual murder is, in the end, Nathan Adler, the detective reimagined as a critic, with the solution to the mystery not strictly speaking being who did it but rather whether the murder was a provocative and avant-garde piece of art or just pretentious and blood-spattered nonsense. It will not escape attention that this parallels the underlying creative tension within the album—Bowie’s contradictory desires to do a quasi-coherent three hour spoken word piece and to record some halfway decent pop songs (of which, for all its strangeness, 1. Outside still has several), and, ultimately, his efforts to find a middle ground between the two. This was a complex and at times downright wild balancing act; at one point guitarist Reeves Gabrels had to stop Bowie from saddling “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”—an industrial-soaked stomper that ended up being the album’s first single—with a verse about English landscape paintrs. It also, of course, parallels the underlying discourse around the avant garde—the sneering “my five year old could have painted this” rejection on one side, the art world’s farcical embrace of childish pretension on the other.
Approaching from this direction Bowie finds a very different perspective on art-ritual murder. On the one hand, with much of the underlying content of his psychic landscape being cut-up pseudo-gibberish, Bowie was spared the harrowing effort of accounting for the fine technical points of mutilation; at no point did he have to instruct Eno to reposition a severed breast for aesthetic effect. On the other, however, Bowie saw an aspect of the topic that Moore did not: the fact that art-ritual murder necessarily implied a coherent aesthetics of the act, and more to the point that these aesthetics would derive most comfortably from the avant garde, a concept that is almost wholly absent in From Hell. Sure, he paid lip service to Burroughs, though this seems more for the grim joke of describing dismembering a woman as the cut-up method (a joke that Bowie is plainly nodding at as well) than a coherent description of Gull’s artistic epistemology. But for the most part, wading through the gore of Victorian Whitechapel, Moore has no need for the concept. His literary instincts always trended towards modernism, and with From Hell framed by a pair of scenes in 1923 that was more than sufficient for From Hell.
It is perhaps churlish to call this an oversight on Moore’s part. It is not a topic that flows directly from From Hell; Bowie did not so much hit on the avant garde as start there and work his way towards murder. And it is not as though Moore, blitzed by magical visions, personal upheavals, and a genuinely fearsome stack of research material, did not have other things to pay attention to. From Hell is not a comic about how to murder someone and make it art—that was merely a particularly thorny problem Moore had to solve for one of its sixteen chapters. He had no reason to go probing the aesthetic implications, little yet to think about how those implications might apply to mediums other than gruesome violence. But that fact did not make the questions less important, nor his failure to consider them less consequential.
At the end of “The best of all tailors,” as Gull returns to Netley’s carriage, he tells his coachman that “I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world before me. Now there is only descent.” As Moore explained it later, “your classic, textbook serial murderers will often seem to reach a point where whatever complex and iterative emotional equation they were working through has evidently been resolved.”[1] He cites the case of Ed Kemperer, who he also brought up in the annotations, noting that Kemperer, “after having killed his mother, seemed to feel that further murders ‘wouldn’t have a point’ (as if the rapes, decapitations, and other abuses heaped upon his previous victims did possess a point).” And in the chapters of From Hell that immediately follow “The best of all tailors,” it is easy to imagine that Moore was experiencing a similar sense of letdown.
The real problem is the eleventh chapter, “The unfortunate Mr Druitt,” which sees Moore pulled down a relative blind alley of dealing with the case of Montague Druitt, a schoolteacher who drowned in the Thames in December 1888, and was theorized at the time as a likely Ripper suspect. This has no particular reason to recommend it over the dozens of other false theories about who Jack the Ripper was, but Moore, presumably driven by a combination of the completionist instinct that animated much of From Hell’s fastidious quasi-accuracy and the intriguing fact that Druitt lived two doors down from Oscar Wilde, decides to make him the main character of an issue.
The result, however, is a clear mess. Druitt provides the chapter’s spine—it opens with him overseeing a game of cricket at the school he works at, and closes with his drowning, which Moore, following from Stephen Knight, presents as a police murder made to look like suicide in order to create a scapegoat to blame for the murders. And yet the issue’s sense of focus gives way on the second page as the scene introducing Druitt is interrupted by one featuring the discovery of Mary Kelly’s body before returning to Druitt on page three. This sort of alternating narrative is, of course, a standard technique for Moore, but here it derails itself almost immediately, with the scene about Kelly’s body taking over entirely as of page four, and Druitt not showing up again until page nine. It’s sensible enough—the reader has never seen Druitt before, and the Kelly scene is clearly far more central to the book’s plot. But it highlights the perversity of trying to do an issue focused on a newly introduced side character at this point in the narrative, even as Moore ultimately does a good job of portraying Druitt, who he treats as a naive homosexual destroyed by something far bigger than he can possibly understand.
Chapters twelve and thirteen, on the other hand, have almost the opposite problem. Both are uncharacteristically brief—chapter twelve runs twenty-six pages, while chapter thirteen is a mere sixteen—such that they were published together in From Hell #9, and seem as though they exist purely to wrap up plot threads. Chapter twelve, “The apprehensions of Mr. Lees,” reintroduces its eponymous fraudster psychic, unseen since the prologue save for a one page appearance in chapter nine where he’s humiliated by Gull. This humiliation proves to be the motivation for his unexpectedly accurate bit of fabulism as he volunteers himself to Abberline to help catch the Ripper and proceeds to lead him to the house of William Gull, who, to both men’s shock, confesses. Gull is given a secret Masonic trial (a scene foreshadowed in his visions during “The best of all tailors”) and institutionalized under a false name, with the official story being that he died, and that’s that for the chapter. Thirteen, “A return to Cleveland Street,” is similarly efficient, with Abberline discovering the existence of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child and Gull’s true motivation and quitting the police in a rage. Both are necessary resolutions, but this is all either installment seeks to be. The impression both give is one of the fire running out—as if Moore, having reached the magical climax of the work, has lost interest and just wants to be done.
A more accurate reading, however, would be that Moore has come through the psychological ordeal of crafting “The best of all tailors” with a newfound sense of focus. “The apprehensions of Mr. Lees” and “A return to Cleveland Street” are short and direct because Moore has finally gotten away from the unwieldy sprawl of the middle chapters and is writing chapters with clear and singular purposes. Even the misguided “The unfortunate Mr Druitt,” for all its flaws, is still tremendously focused—twenty-seven of its forty-six pages are dedicated to Druitt’s story, and the other nineteen are dedicated fairly straightforwardly to Abberline. Moore hurries to get the Abberline material squared away early so that, as with “From Hell,” its denouement can be given over entirely to Druitt. Moore is undoubtedly aided by the material here—it’s easier to be focused as the story moves towards its conclusion and side plots begin to resolve themselves. But after eight years of wrestling with his unexpected magnum opus, Moore seems to finally have gotten a handle on what it is and what it’s doing.
Any lingering sense that Moore’s interest in From Hell was flagging towards the end is dispelled decisively with its fourteenth and final chapter, “Gull ascending”—perhaps the most formally ambitious chapter in the comic. It features Gull, in 1896, dying on the floor of his cell in the asylum where the Masons secretly dumped him. This, at least, is relatively straightforward—the occasion for the morbidly funny detail of Gull’s nurse and an orderly having sex in the corner of his cell while he dies, a detail borrowed from Moore’s experience with his mother’s terminal cancer (she died in August 1995), although there the nurse at least had the decency to use the staff room next to his mother’s. The formal ambition comes when the comic moves into Gull’s subjective experience of his death, which is a full-on mystical vision.
Moore’s script invited Campbell to “feel free to use whatever media you feel are appropriate. You can afford to be strange and experimental here, and aren’t even necessarily bound by techniques that seem appropriate to the Victorian time period.” Campbell, however, declined the invitation, reasoning that it was inappropriate to introduce new techniques so late in the comic. As he put it, “the challenge of storytelling is to form new compounds out of the elements already in play. Alan’s From Hell sets out with a full tank, enough fuel for the long haul. That’s the raw narrative material, the parameters of which are drawn in the prologue and opening chapters. Then in its last mile it is fast and refreshed, as though it has distilled a new kind of fuel out of the stuff that was on board at the start.”[2] And so he treats the vast and shattering magical experience of William Gull with the same straightforward realism he used in the previous fourteen installments.
This is, of course, unquestionably the correct decision. Sure, Campbell could have thrown it away and gone full Bill Sienkiewicz on the final stretch, and the nature of Gull’s experience could even have justified it. But not only is Campbell correct that this would have been disloyal to the formal grammar of From Hell, unadorned realism is also fundamentally faithful to mystical experiences as Alan Moore understood them. Consider the adage that inspired Moore to magical practice—a declaration that gods and demons were real only as mental phenomena. Moore remained an ardent materialist throughout his magical career, insisting that, as he put it in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, “all the extraordinary claims made on behalf of magic are entirely credible providing that one understands the magic to be taking place nowhere save in the mind.” Moore is, in this regard, following from Blake, who insisted from his earliest works that the capacity for visionary experiences extended from the human imagination. First you make it up, then it comes true anyway. And so Campbell’s decision to treat Gull’s mystical experiences no differently than he treated the most impoverished districts of London or the brutal murders of sex workers emphasizes that those experiences are in a fundamental sense still just ordinary human experiences.
Much of Gull’s vision is an extension of his earlier mystical experiences during the murders—his periodic flashes forward to the twenty-first century, and an elucidation of his claim to have delivered the twenty-first century. But there is a clear structure to the vision as well—it makes and develops an argument, building to a clear endpoint that serves as a final statement on Gull and his Great Work. The vision begins with a restaging of the opening of “A state of darkness,” complete with that chapter’s incessant refrain: “What is the fourth dimension?” But this time, as the barge emerges from its tunnel, instead of a small flock of ducks as in the original there is an explosion of gulls as the comic cuts to them flying over the sea. Gull’s narration—a necessary conceit to deal with the abstract and often cryptic nature of the issue’s imagery—explains that “A knowledge comes to me that I am high above the glittery Aegean and it is no longer 1896. It is instead the year of my achievement. It is 1888.” He realizes he lacks physical form, and attempts to focus himself, resulting in an explosion of blood that rains down upon a Greek fishing boat below. The underlying incident is real, or at least real enough to have made the pages of The Fortean Times, but is used here as a sort of moment of transformation—the point where Gull transforms from a mere man into some higher form, Or, as Gull explains it, “I sign my year of panics with appalling miracle.”
The scene shifts, and Gull finds that he has become Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. In this form Gull is in key ways unstuck from time—he sees apparitions of people passing by the monument, but they are a mishmash from all times. His vision pulls upward from here, and he is given to see the pentagram he plotted out for Netley, now a glowing pattern of light marked out against the city. This re-emphasizes the notion that Gull is no longer human—indeed, shortly thereafter he explains that these lines “are London’s veins that pulse and glisten with significance. That course with energy and meaning. And I am that meaning. And I am that energy,” before launching into a smattering of apparitions, past and present, along the lines of his awful design.
Between these two moments, however, is an altogether more curious scene that sees Gull manifest at the top of a flight of stairs, where he encounters William Blake (though he fails to recognize him), who, to his astonishment, can perceive him, and recoils in horror. As he does, Gull realizes that his hands have grown grotesque and are now covered with scales. This encounter is puzzling for several reasons. First, it is a plain interruption in the early progress of Gull’s vision. In some ways more remarkable than Gull’s hands being transformed is the fact that he has hands at all—the only moment in the early parts of this vision where he has anything like a human form, and an initially counterintuitive beat to include in a section that is otherwise about Gull’s ascension to something more, or perhaps less than human. But it serves to introduce what will ultimately be the key to understanding Gull’s larger vision: the fact that, as he explains it, he is “now but a thing of mind, and coloured by the minds that view me.”
Perhaps the biggest point of significance, however, is the scaly hands. The staircase in question—in Blake’s house at Hercules Buildings in Lambeth—were the site of two visions. One of these contains comparatively sparse documentation—a single anecdote in Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake in which Blake is asked by a friend if he’s ever seen a ghost. Gilchrist notes that Blake was in most cases dismissive of ghosts, suggesting that they are seen only by unimaginative men, but that he concedes that he’d seen one once, at the top of the stairs—“scaly, speckled, very awful,” and that he fled in terror (an unusual reaction for Blake). The other, meanwhile, was the vision that he would eventually capture in The Ancient of Days, the iconic depiction of Urizen that forms the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. By most standards it is this that would seem the obvious vision for Gull to inhabit. His bloody binding of female power into the cold stone of London is, after all, a pretty straightforward match for Urizen’s tyranny. And yet Moore decides instead to cast Gull as a mere ghost—perhaps more rawly terrifying than Urizen, but, crucially, nowhere near as majestic in his terror.
Gull’s inhabiting of his pentagram ends with another restaging of a scene from “A state of darkness,” this time Gull and Hinton’s conversation about the nature of time, specifically Hinton’s speech about “an invisible curve rising through the centuries.” This time, however, his chosen dates—1788, a century later, fifty years after that, twenty-five after that, and finally twelve and a half after that—are all unpacked as specific references, beginning with the London Monster in 1788—an attacker (or several attackers) who slashed at women’s buttocks throughout London, though did not kill them. A century later, of course, come Gull’s own murders, and then fifty after that the incident of the Halifax Slasher—a series of attacks in West Yorkshire that were ultimately determined to have been a bizarre mass hysteria in which people were slashing themselves. The final two incidents, meanwhile, are established as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
Moore pauses here to allow Gull to explain the metaphysical implications of this, having him note that there is “movement and yet there is no movement. There is not space. There is not time, and therefore nothing moves but only is.” This is largely a restatement of the younger Hinton’s theories of time, but by this point it was also a summary of Moore’s own magical revelations, and particularly his newfound belief that time was “a ‘solid’ in which past, present and future all happily co-exist,” describing a magical experience that “bore relevance to my previous work; especially to Watchmen (the Doctor Manhattan chapter) and a couple of the time-travel stories I wrote for 2000 AD. In the burning white heart of the experience, I thought I had a revelation that these stories were premonitions of the state that I exist in now—more accurately I can perceive them as memories of the state I exist in now. Time can be seen just as effectively one way as another.”[3]
The sequence also serves as a distinct transition within the larger vision—it’s followed by Gull ascending upwards towards the moon, “which is the world’s unconscious self. Which is all poetry and dream.” This sparks a sequence in which Gull is established as the inspiration for a variety of things—Robert Louis Stevenson’s conception of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance. He also includes a second Blake sequence. This one depicts an incident in 1819 in which Blake was paid a visit by his friend John Varley, and beheld a spirit, which he proceeded to draw for his friend, memorably pausing at one point to do a detailed study of the creature’s mouth because, as he explained, it had just opened its jaw and spoiled the pose of his initial sketch. (Moore explains this as Gull’s jaw dropping with astonishment at the realization that he’s seeing William Blake) This sketch was eventually worked into Blake’s famous painting The Ghost of a Flea. The historical record is not entirely clear on the claim that this vision was of the same creature he’d identified as a ghost back in Lambeth, although Blake is far from the first to make the suggestion. But it further confirms the quiet implication of the initial Blake scene. For all Gull’s horror, he is no grandiose tyrant in the mould of Urizen. He’s just a little flea feasting on the blood of humanity.
Fittingly, the next two moments of inspiration are altogether darker, with Moore appearing once again to both Ian Brady and Peter Sutcliffe. In the latter case he appears in the living room of Sutcliffe’s brother, where he astonishes and horrifies the people there by picking up and inspecting an ashtray, causing it to move around in the air. In the former, meanwhile, he appears to Brady as a disembodied head floating down the street—a vision Brady interpreted as being Death itself, who he subsequently felt compelled to appease by raping children and burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor. More than anything else in the issue, these sequences show why Campbell’s instinct to remain in a realist mode was so sound. His depiction of Sutcliffe’s “mean-spirited and ugly English room” is aggressively banal—a grotty living room where Gull sits on the edge of the sofa, distinct only because of his lack of clothes. (Writing in the From Hell Companion, Campbell wryly notes that “I’ve sat in too many English 1970s living rooms just like that one int he last panel. And I always felt ill at ease. Now I know it was because of the big fat naked bastard on the sofa.”)
Similarly, Campbell could have unleashed any number of fantastic techniques for Gull’s appearance to Brady, imbuing the scene with a deep sense of horror and unease. Instead, however, he just draws William Gull’s ordinary head, floating several feet above an equally ordinary Glasgow street. The result is absurd and more than faintly silly, and serves to undermine Gull’s Republic serial villain ranting a page earlier about how “I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart. I am a ran. I cannot be contained. Free of Life, how then shall I be shackled? Free of Time, how then shall history be made my cage? I am a wave, an influence. Who then shall be made safe from me?”
The vision makes a second transition here, with Gull turning from the lunar realm of Yesod to approach the sun. This is the lead-in to a very different moment of apparition, in which he appears, still in slightly ridiculous floating head form, to Netley in 1903, who panics, his horse rearing, and ends up thrown from his carriage to have his head dashed upon an obelisk—a grimly ironic resolution for one of the book’s most engaging minor characters. And from here Gull begins his final ascent, rising up into the sun where he is greeted by the gods, Osiris and Christ and others, and prepare to ascend fully. And yet the gods stop him, Osiris gesturing downwards once more, sending Gull to have one final revelation. Gull is faintly irritated—impatient at the delay, small as it is, but he obliges, descending to find himself looking at a small house in Ireland in the early years of the century he birthed.
There he encounters a woman, calling her daughters in: Anne, and Katey, and Lizzie, and Polly. Gull is confused. “I don’t know these people,” he protests. “I have never seen this woman in my life.” Which, indeed not. And yet Gull finds himself afraid of the strange woman, and the “terrible ferocity” in her eyes—a fear that’s justified when she unexpectedly turns to face him, plainly able to see him just as Blake had been. “As for you, ye auld divil,” she says. “I know that ye’re there, and ye’re not havin’ these. Clear off now wit ye. Clear off back to Hell and leave us be!” And Gull, baffled and confused, ascends, which Campbell depicts with a page turn on the line “I become” that reveals a stark white page in which the word “God” appears, small and plain in the middle, “and then I…” hanging about a quarter of the page further down before a final page of the nurse and orderly finishing up and seeing that Gull has passed.
Moore is ostentatiously cryptic about this final scene in the annotations, declaring that it “must go without an explanation for the moment. Work it out for yourself,” although he rather spoils the bit two paragraphs later with a hint regarding Marie Kelly’s various nicknames. Indeed, the woman clearly resembles her, and her children’s names are those of Gull’s other four victims. Campbell—who would presumably know—insists that Moore remained undecided on this reveal until the last moment. Perhaps, but it’s also clear he was working himself up to it, going to considerable lengths to leave Kelly a plausible escape in “From Hell” and having Abberline encounter a pair of witnesses insisting they saw Kelly after her supposed murder in “The unfortunate Mr Druitt” (which did, in fact, happen). Speaking about it after the fact, he explained that “I just wanted to give this poor woman a happy ending. I wanted to somehow—without actually going against what was possible, I wanted to sort of give her a way out,” and noting that the page is “one of the most powerful scenes in the book to me.”[4]
Moore is, obviously, quite sentimental about this beat—it would seem difficult not to be after spending as long as he did obsessing over the fine points of her mutilation. But there’s a clear literary purpose to the revelation as well, especially following on details like Gull being the inspiration for The Ghost of a Flea or Campbell’s underplaying of his visitation of the young Ian Brady. For all that the issue offers Gull’s final ascension, the key message that the gods want him to take from his vision is that he failed. The twentieth century he delivered was not the one he intended—a fact emphasized by his disdain whenever he’s shown it.
It is perhaps easy to make too much of this. The issue’s primary focus is still plainly Gull’s transcendence, with the revelation of Kelly’s survival being one of a couple notes of pointed dissonance with that theme. And it was released alongside the epilogue, a return to “The old men on the shore” in which Abberline and Lees chat further about death and their sense that they’ve outlived their times and are in a century with no further place for them. The comic’s final note sees Lees describing a recurring dream he’s had. “I’m in London, by an old church in the Jewish quarter. It’s the eighteen-eighties. There’s this awful grunting, like an animal. It comes from everywhere. The church doors splinter open and there’s blood. Great gallons of it, washing everyone away.” This is a straightforward recap of the sequence at the start of chapter five about the conception of Hitler, and Lees’ conclusion from the dream—“I think there’s going to be another war,” form’s the comic’s final line (which Moore notes in his big interview with Dave Sim that he had in mind before he started). It’s a bleak closing note, and one that puts the emphasis firmly on the way in which Gull’s work did shape the twentieth century.
But then again, it would have been patently absurd to suggest that Marie Kelly’s escape might have prevented World War II, both because Marie Kelly was almost certainly actually murdered in her room on Miller’s Court in the early hours of November 9th, 1888 and, more to the point, because World War II happened along with, by the time From Hell #10 came out, some ninety-six percent of the twentieth century. Moore’s room to leave an escape route from the century’s horrors was definitionally narrow. Subtext was the only place such a thing could be placed. But inasmuch as From Hell is a grandiose and externally facing work of magic like Watchmen or “Station to Station” as opposed to an inward looking one whose consequences were mostly for its author, this final detail was it: the twentieth century could be escaped.
From Hell itself, however, was not quite done with its creators. Some two years later Kitchen Sink Press released an eleventh issue of from Hell entitled “The Dance of the Gull Catchers.” This was not a complete surprise—Moore first alluded to the possibility back in the annotations to Tundra’s first collection of the series back in 1991, where he raises the possibility that Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, the book from which Moore’s entire theory of the case is derived, might simply be a hoax before noting that “this will form much of the basis for a proposed appendix to appear after the completion of From Hell, titled ‘Dance of the Gull Catchers,’ in which we will try to document the interplay of the various ‘Ripperologists’ who have tried to solve the mystery since its inception.” In The From Hell Companion Campbell reprints several initial stabs at this chapter from Moore’s notebook at the time, the earliest of which is dated at the end of 1996 and starts with the extremely meta conceit of Moore at his typewriter composing a letter to Campbell in which he explains that “I’ve avoided starting this appendix quite long enough. It’s almost exactly eight years since we began From Hell. Time to get with the program. Partly, I suppose my reluctance stemmed from fear that this might get too personal for comfort. Eight years is a lot of water under the bridge.”
In fact it would take ten, with Moore not finishing the script until the year it was published. His difficulty seems to have been not so much with organizing the substantial amount of information that he had to cover as with figuring out the frame with which he would present it all. Ironically, his eventual solution was simply to lean into his long-mooted title, portraying the eponymous dance as a bunch of guys with nets trying to capture a bird hovering just off panel. “The quarry,” Moore explains of his gull catchers, “is elusive, unidentified and unidentifiable, a suspect archeopteryx. A fraud. Perhaps there’s no such bird.”
Moore uses this frame for what is in effect an essay in comic form. This was not completely uncharted territory—he’d done something like it with “The Mirror of Love,” although that has as much poetry to it as it does essay, and more straightforwardly with Brought to Light. As with that project, the primary challenge facing him is clearly the sheer amount of information he has to assemble—a century of mad theories and popular culture beginning with Walter Sickert’s obsession with the case and extending up through Joseph Gorman. Each is laid out with a kind of sardonic skepticism. One supposed suspect, Thomas Neil Cream, a serial poisoner who declared himself to be Jack the Ripper as the trap door opened for his hanging, is described as an “irritating bastard,” while another theory hinging on an elaborate theory about a Russian barber/cross-dresser/spy who happened to be an exact double of a surgeon/hairdresser in Whitechapel, gets depicted in several panels of increasingly goofy farce. Perhaps most memorably, Aleister Crowley’s various interventions are dismissed with a wry “but then, that’s Crowley.”
Sixteen pages into their twenty-four page exegesis Moore and Campbell themselves step into the dance, Campbell amusingly wielding a mop instead of a butterfly net while Moore shusshes him to “be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting wippers.” Here Moore finally explains his real view on the matter, which is to reject the very idea of “solving” a murder by reducing it to a matter of murderer, motive, and means, noting that by this standard “the solution to the Second War is as follows: Hitler, the German economy, tanks.” The reality is that murder “a human event located in both space and time, [with] an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution,” citing the notion of quantum uncertainty, to declare that “Jack’s not Gull, or Druitt. Jack’s a super-position.” Later, in an uncanny echo of his fateful observation about gods and demons, he remarks that “the complex phantom we project. That alone, we know is real,” while “the actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed, might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it there?”
But of course, he doesn’t. And he’s aware of this, delving into the strange sense of obsession that seizes his fellow dancers. He notes one theorist, John Morrison, who succumbs to a particularly intensive version of the common drive to in some fashion save Marie Kelly (a drive Moore plainly shares), going so far as to get a headstone crafted for her, and describes an interview where he “speculates on traveling in time to alter Mary’s awful fate. ‘But there’d be no coming back. You’d be trapped… trapped in the past,’” this last line given its own panel of the dancing gull-catchers, one of them having sunk beneath the muddied playing field, a desperate hand trying to escape from the mire. Shortly thereafter he notes that “It isn’t getting drawn into Masonic Death Conspiracy that troubles me, you understand. It’s getting drawn into the vortex of a fiction.”
Subsequently he turns to the analogy of Koch’s Snowflake—a simple fractal that has an infinite perimeter but a finite area. “Likewise,” he explains, “each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. What have we to look forward to? Abberline’s school nickname, or the make of Mary Kelly’s shoes? Koch’s Snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver.” It’s a deft and stinging attack, but it’s also a very strange thing to say on page 575 of your 576-page magnum opus about Jack the Ripper.
It’s notable that Koch’s Snowflake was originally presented in terms of the coastline paradox, typically framed in terms of the question “how long is the coast of Britain,” this being the title of Benoit Mandelrot’s article on the matter. If one measures with sufficient precision, tracking the contours not simply of every little bay and peninsula but of every single grain of sand on a microscopic level, the length similarly approaches infinity. Is the conclusion thus that Albion is a similarly limiting subject? When every grain of sand on that infinite coastline contains an entire world? Indeed, there’s a real sense in which the whole point of From Hell is that the autumn of 1888 in Whitechapel is infinite—that William Morris and Aleister Crowley and Charles Howard Hinton are all contained within that supposedly limiting circle alongside the whole of the twentieth century. But therein lies the real danger that Moore’s Koch Snowflake analogy cautions against. It is, as Moore notes, trivial to get lost within infinity—to become mired in the minute details. One mustn’t get so wrapped up in the endlessly unfolding length of the British coast that the trip from Bournesmouth to Portsmouth becomes infinitely long. Blake’s maxim is not an invitation to write a twenty-six issue Who’s Who about every single grain of sand.
This, then, is Moore’s real accomplishment with From Hell. Its subject matter may be infinite. So too might its implications. But From Hell itself is finite; it contains five hundred and seventy-five pages, with no more than nine tiny boxes on each one. Moore has taken the infinite scope of Whitechapel and fit it down into the nine panel grid. This was not something he started the project knowing how to do. Indeed, he very nearly failed at it, just as he had in capturing the similarly infinite majesty he glimpsed in Big Numbers. The effort can fairly be described as having driven him mad. But in the end, by the grace of Glycon and Eddie Campbell, he finished his second great work. He’d not only gazed upon the infinite, but had figured out how to capture it accurately, without any loss of fidelity or detail, within the finite. Onwards to his next subject.
[1] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218
[2] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion
[3] D.M. Mitchell, “Moon and Serpent: The World of Alan Moore,” Rapid Eye #3, transcription provided privately
[4] Barry Kavanagh, “The Alan Moore Interview,” Blather, http://www.blather.net/projects/alan-moore-interview/
Comments
Tamsyn Lawrence
"His literary instincts always trended towards modernism, and with From Hell framed by a pair of scenes in 1923 that was more than sufficient for From Hell. " Repetition of From Hell here is probably unnecessary, can rework sentence to avoid it.
