Taboo 2: From Hell and Major Arcana

Art by Alan Moore

Above, Major Arcana: The Lovers and the Star, a great illustration by Alan Moore published on the inside back cover of Taboo n.2 (Spiderbaby Grafix, 1989).

Below, selected excerpts from From Hell - being a melodrama in sixteen parts intro written by Moore, also published in Taboo n.2, page 121-122.

[...] “From Hell” is a post-mortem of an historical occurrence, using fiction as a scalpel. All the characters who populate the story once existed. The motivations I have attributed to them and the words I have placed in their mouths are based whenever possible upon exacting historical research. I have also relied upon guesswork and conjecture which, if not accurate. is at least informed. So far as I know, none of the facts stated in the story contradict those previously reported, and no pertinent fact has been ignored. Theoretically, the events detailed in “From Hell” could have unfolded just the way we describe
them.

But it isn't history. It's fiction. [...]

Indeed, it's worth remembering that all history is to some degree fiction; that truth can no longer properly be spoken of once the bodies have grown cold. The side that wins the battle decides who were the heroes and who the villains; and since history is written by those who survive it, their biases often survive with them.
This is not to diminish the importance of traditional history: it is vital to the continued
well-being of both ourselves and our culture that we understand the events that have
shaped the world that in turn shapes us. [...]

There is no hanging at the climax of “From Hell.“ The verdict remains open, the history books silent, the noose empty. All we have been able to deduce is recorded in these sixteen installments. It is a fiction, a mosaic of tracings and jottings, an enciphered communication from another age. It is a scarcely-legible note of terrible significance.

From hell.

Alan Moore

Sir Gull by Olivier OB

From the dark London of Jack The Ripper, a dangerous portrait of Sir William Gull by French comic book artist and illustrator Olivier OB. 

For more info about the artist visit his Tumblr page, here.

Moore Great Comics

From The Men's Health Comic Book Omnibus article published this June:

Finding a great comic can be tough. So we asked 45 of the most legendary, visionary, and unique creators in the business to make it easier. 

I selected the Moore's entries: we have 3 votes for Watchmen, 2 votes for both From Hell and V for Vendetta. You can read the complete article HERE.

 

Gail Simone
Writer of DC's Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Marvel's Deadpool:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"To say this is a book about Jack The Ripper is like saying Moby Dick is about a guy who goes fishing. It’s comics wizard Alan Moore’s best, most compelling work, told from multiple points of view and containing worlds in its story of murder, corruption and class. Stunning visuals by Eddie Campbell carry it beyond."

 

Bruno Redondo
Artist of DC's Injustice and Nightwing:

V for Vendetta
by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

"This comic was the first that made me break into tears. It showed me how comics can be powerful, filled with emotions and ideas. Comics can change your mind, and V was this for me. Masterful and brave storytelling."

 

Nicola Scott
Artist of DC's Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, and Image Comics' Black Magik:

Watchmen

by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

"Because DUH. Infinitely re-readable."

Sina Grace
Writer of DC's Superman: The Harvest of Youth, Self-Obsessed and Not My Bag:

V for Vendetta

by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
"Look, someone else is gonna say Watchmen, but I find myself revisiting V for Vendetta a lot in my life, and every time the graphic novel slaps harder than ever. It’s so much fun to read Alan Moore buildma political and ever-poignant dystopian narrative from the ground up, and the Guy Fawkes design for V makes for one of the most elegant and startling characters in comics history."

Joe Hill
Co-creator of Locke & Key and author of NOS4A2 and The Black Phone:

From Hell
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
"If the graphic novel form has a Ulysses, this is it. Watchmen made Moore a legend, but From Hell is better, a knotty, salty, grand Guignol that paints the late 19th century so vividly, reading it is practically the same as time-travel."

Axel Alonso
Former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and founder and CCO of AWA Studios:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"Easily the most pivotal, influential graphic novel of all time, you see two Maestros of the craft deconstructing the superhero paradigms of the past with an eye fixed firmly on the future."

Mike Deodato, Jr.
Artist of AWA Studios's Bad Mother, The Resistance, Not All Robots, and more:

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
"My first pick goes to Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, for defining and changing the medium and what comics can achieve. One of the greatest comic books ever made."

The complete article is available HERE.

La Came From Hell

Art by La Came

Above, a gorgeous, sooty illustration by Italian comic book artist and illustrator Laura "La Came" Camelli. This homage to From Hell is included in Francesco Pelosi's essay, Alan Moore: Mappaterra del Mago.

For more info about La Came: Mammaiuto page - Instagram

La Mappaterra del Mago

La Mappaterra by Pelosi & Frongia

Italian musician, actor, comic book author and scholar Francesco Pelosi is writing a series of articles focused on Moore's works: he is tracing a map and he named it la Mappaterra del Mago... The Magician's Map-Land. I am really proud to call Francesco... a friend!

Below, I translated - with a little help from another friend of mine, the extraordinary Omar Martini - a short excerpt from one of Pelosi's articles which includes the map drawn by Francesco Pelosi & Francesco “Checco” Frongia.

You can read the complete set HERE. Of course they are in Italian.

From the corner where we are now, from the special and elevated point of view of Citadel Supreme, we can finally see the whole Map-Land: it spreads beneath us but, on a closer look, also above and all around us.
At the centre there is From Hell’s black city [...]. Watching it from here, you can notice that it is wrapped in the flames of the Voice of Fire and that there is a Hole at its centre: there is the same Hole also up here, in the Citadel Supreme, because the two cities are equal and opposite, one black and rooted to the earth, the other gold and floating. However, when they are watched from above, from a place outside the Map-Land, they occupy exactly the same space - the only difference is that to access Citadel Supreme you have to go through the door/outpost called 1963.

Around the city of From Hell, there is an area of barren and even darker countryside, with an unusual circular shape. If we could look at the Map-Land from below, we would see that those dark lands are nothing more than the foundations of Providence/Neonomicon, an upside-down city, whose roofs and buildings, like rotting and incomprehensible roots, plunge directly into the ground.
The dark circle of Providence is defined by a series of streets that form the sides of two equilateral triangles, crossing themselves to outline a six-pointed star.
One of the points, the one looking at the Map-Land from above, seems to point to the sky or the West: it is the place where the city of Promethea lies. On the other hand, on the opposite point which seems to indicate the ground or the East, lies the city of Tom Strong.

From here, heading south, we find the townlet of A Small Killing […], then the Top 10 metropolis and going westwards, just before arriving at Promethea, the Lost Girls hotel. Following this path, we can see that the outermost part of the Map-Land is circular and all the towns in this area are connected to each other by roads and, in the same way, each town is connected to the centre of From Hell.
Then, moving from Promethea and heading north, we find the old and crumbling city of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the five districts of Tomorrow Stories (which include the village of Jack B. Quick, the swamp of Splash Brannigan, the film-set city of First American and U.S. Agent and the metropolis of Indigo, also known, depending on which side you access it from, as Greyshirt or The Cobweb). Finally, closing the circle to the east, we arrive at the small town of Mirror of love […] and again at Tom Strong.

However, the most interesting thing you may notice from this high angle concerns the shape of the land. The Map-Land, as it has developed until now, looks like a two-dimensional rectangle. If you look at it closely, you can see four dotted lines rising perpendicularly towards the sky from the vertex of the rectangle corners, each touching the vertex of another dotted rectangle that closes the airspace as if it were a box. The Magician's Map-Land is therefore both a two-dimensional rectangle and a 3D rectangular parallelepiped. Ultimately - and how could it be otherwise - we find ourselves inside a Block-Universe/Idea-Space.
The name of this all-encompassing place is Jerusalem. 

Francesco Pelosi

Hayley Campbell on Death and From Hell

Excerpt from Hayley Campbell's excellent All the Living and the Dead book.

"[...] You aren't born knowing you will die. Someone has to break the news. I asked my dad if it was him, but he can't remember. [...] Maybe death came to you in the form of a goldfish or a grandparent. You might have processed mortality as much as you were able, or needed to, in the time it took for the fins to disappear in the swirl of a toilet bowl. I don't have one of those moments. I can't remember a time before death existed. Death was just there, everywhere, always. 

Maybe it began with the five dead women. Throughout my single digits, my dad - Eddie Campbell, a comic book artist - was working on a graphic novel called From Hell, written by Alan Moore. It's about Jack the Ripper and shows the full horror of his brutality in scratchy black and white. 'Jackarippy' was such a part of our lives that my tiny sister would wear the top hat to eat breakfast, and I would stand on tiptoes to study the crime scenes that were pinned to my dad's drawing board while trying to get him to agree to something Mum had said no to. There they were, the disembowelled women, the flesh torn from their faces and thighs. Next to them, the stark autopsy photographs, their sagging breasts and bellies, the pinched rugby-ball stitching from neck to groin. I remember looking up at them and feeling not shocked, but fascinated. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to see more. I wished the pictures were clearer, I wished they were in colour. Their situation was so removed from anything I knew of life that it was too other to be frightening - it was as alien to me there in tropical Brisbane, Australia, as the foggy London streets where they had lived. To look at those same photographs now is an entirely different thing - I see violence, the struggle and misogyny, the lost lives - but back then, I didn't have the emotional language to process something so terrible. [...]" - Hayley Campbell

Eddie Campbell about the Ripper

Excerpt from an Eddie Campbell interview by Chloe Maveal, published on NeoText Review site.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Eddie Campbell: Were you a fan of From Hell?

Maveal: I was! I think it’s one of Moore’s best works and I, of course, am always blown away by your artwork. It was very cool seeing it in color for the first time though. I — and I think a lot of other readers — have become so accustomed to seeing it in black and white and grey that seeing the addition of color is pretty wild.

Campbell: When I did the issues — the ten volumes — in the scene of Mary Kelly’s death, I had gone very light on the blood. When it printed in color, all the reds just disappeared! I looked at it and thought “I’ve had nosebleeds worse than this!” So I went in a added a lot more blood and red. I think it looks terrifying now.

Maveal: Hat’s off to you, seriously. The color of the blood alone is pretty harrowing. You got it to a nice, rich blue-red.

Campbell: Yeah, it was really nice. And I wanted to mention —and I had to fight for this really hard — that I had to argue to get the women put on the cover. I really had to fight for that. And they said “Nah, it’s too dark”, but I got my way in the end. I just wanted them walking in the street with the street-lamps and they said “Well can’t we have Jack the Ripper at the end of the street or something?” And I said no, just walking in the London street when they were happy and healthy and before it all went wrong.

Maveal: That’s a pretty hefty thing to fight for. That’s considerably darker than the original.

Campbell: Well when Alan [Moore] and I originally released it, we didn’t want people to know it was about Jack the Ripper. I put still life sketches on the cover back in the 1990s. Things like grapes or a melting candle and a cell phone [laughs]. The number on the dialed cell phone was the number for the publisher. It was Kitchen Sink Press and they noticed it right away. [laughs] But we wanted people to buy it thinking that it was a story about real life and the real world every. So often thing about jack the Ripper are horror stories in general. They take place in an environment that is designed to receive and produce horror. Horror…it just works at its best when it comes out of nowhere and you’re not prepared for it…

From Hell oil painting

Art by Eddie Campbell.

Above, via ComicArtFans, cover for the 1999 collected edition of From Hell. The image was also published in From Hell Companion (page 179), where Campbell remarks that the colors were not reproduced quite correctly in the published book.

DAILY MOORE [26]

Art by Eddie Campbell.

From: From Hell n. 5.
First edition: 1994, Kitchen Sink Press.

On movies: From Hell, V, LXG, Watchmen

Excerpt from Eroto-graphic mania interview by Peter Murphy, posted on laurahird.com in 2006.

The complete interview is available HERE.

So did he ever bother going to see the film version [of From Hell]?

“Nah, Melinda (Gebbie) went to see it and said, ‘Not a bad film. She found Johnny Depp’s performance a little bit tepid. She thought if they’d focused more upon Ian Holm it would’ve perhaps been a much better film. Me daughters thought it was okay. Nobody said it was actually a really bad film. Iain Sinclair gave the most succinct summing up of it when he said, ‘It’s not a bad film in it own right, but it does kind of represent this American colonization of the imagination.’ Without having seen it obviously I’m talking through me hat, but that sounds like a likely accurate verdict.

“I was never sure why they actually bothered to buy the rights to ‘From Hell’, because you take away all of the ruminations upon architecture and history and mysticism and all the rest of it, you’re pretty much left with the original story done by Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, all of these people in various productions.” Still, at least ‘From Hell’ and ‘V For Vendetta’, while seriously flawed, were broadly sympathetic to the author’s vision. The way Moore tells it, it could have been much worse.

“I remember when ‘V For Vendetta’ was optioned,” he says. “The story is set in a near future bleak grim Britain, it’s after a limited nuclear war that happened elsewhere in the world, the weather’s been screwed up as a consequence, there’s been breakdowns of society everywhere, and there’s been a fascist takeover in Great Britain, and you’ve got this very romantic anarchist guy fighting against the forces of fascism.

“Now in the first screenplay that I got for ‘V For Vendetta’, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover.

“Eventually I think they realized that was a stupid idea. So I got the second draft of the script where I think to justify the special effects budget, they decided that having Britain taken over by fascists was just not exciting enough, and they’d used the fact that I mentioned a limited nuclear war to say, ‘Right, there’s mutants everywhere!’ So instead of it being fascist policemen that are patrolling the benighted streets of this enslaved London of the future, it’s half-goat mutant policemen. You’ve got these people that are policemen down to the waist and have goats’ legs. And as I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?!!

“But there’s something about the Hollywood thought process that I think will forever elude me. The reason that things are done or not done never seems to have any connection to any sort of reality that I recognize. That’s why I actively dissuade any contact with Hollywood. (Producer) Don Murphy is a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about, but I’ve never had any interest in actually writing for Hollywood. I had a brief fling when Malcolm McClaren asked me to a screenplay for one of these film properties that he’d got, and I did that to see if I could write a screenplay and also to hang out with Malcolm McClaren, who’s a great laugh, but that was it really.

“Of course they shot ‘League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ with Sean Connery, and to make it more acceptable to American audiences, which is of course a prime consideration, they had Tom Sawyer as one of the cast, so I imagine there was a completely riveting picket fence painting scene shoehorned into the story at some point.”

There wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Connery from clocking the director – or the film from being an absolute dog. Of course, the Holy Grail of un-filmed Moore stories is ‘Watchmen’, recently included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, a meta-masterpiece so epic in scale and fiendishly complex in construction, filmmaker Terry Gilliam famously described it as “the ‘War And Peace’ of comic books”. Is it true Moore once convinced Gilliam that Watchmen couldn’t be filmed?

“Well, I don’t know if I convinced him. I mean, we went to dinner and he asked me how I would go about making ‘Watchmen’ into a film, and I told him if anybody had bothered asking me earlier, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ Because I’d written ‘Watchmen’ to exploit aspects of comic book storytelling that couldn’t be duplicated by any other medium, to try and show off what comics are capable of. Which I think we kind of succeeded in doing. That was the last time I actually saw Terry – Terry as I call him, did you notice I just slipped that in there? Tel! – and I heard later that he seemed to have come to similar conclusions, that he wasn’t sure you could actually make a film of ‘Watchmen’ without taking out all the things that made the book work in the first place.

“But on the other hand, I do hear that at the end of every second or third Terry Gilliam interview he’ll sometimes have these little wistful moments where he’ll say that maybe his next film will be ‘Watchmen’, because he’s always felt sorry that he didn’t add that to his list of accomplishments.

“But I’m a great believer in the theory that the more work the audience has to actually do, the more they enjoy it ’cos the more they’ve invested. Cinema tends to be an immersive experience that just kind of rolls over the audience like a wave and they sit there and take it. That’s not to say that there can’t be good cinema, but for me there’s not much to beat a good book where you’re having to do all the work yourself. That’s my idea of interactive entertainment.”

The complete interview is available HERE.

1997: Word of Moore

Excerpt from an interview pubblished in 1997 on Feature Magazine Volume 3, Number 2.

FEATURE: Where do you see yourself moving as an artist?  What sort of legacy are you trying to build, what kind of body of work are you trying to create?

ALAN MOORE: I've never really thought much of a legacy. I suppose that I don't know, I'm just trusting the process. I look back at the early work that I did. I look at Watchmen, and I must admit I feel a certain amount of unworthy embarrassment.  It's nothing that I should feel, but just the fact that it was a superhero comic. I was trying to say something serious in a fairly lightweight form. Like I say, I wouldn't do that now.  I'm still very proud of Watchmen, but I'm prouder of stuff outside that genre like From Hell, like Lost Girls. There's a progression going on here. It's only a progression of ideas in my head, but they're following a kind of path. I'm on the path, I don't know where it's going, and I don't really have a destination in mind. There's no plan here, there's just a path which I am trying to uncover and interpret as I go along. My works are, I suppose, a series of communiqués from along the trail. My works will tell you more or less where I am at any given point along that trail. What lies further down the road... I mean, my list of things that I'm gonna be doing in the future, I suppose should be considered directions that look to me promising to head out in. I don't know what I'll find when I get there, and I don't know what path will lead from there. I don't know where I'll be going after that.

I have my own sort of preoccupations, they tend to veer towards getting further in to something. When dealing with mainstream comics, I'd perhaps try and look at the politics or the morals that informed the other situations in these books, trying to get under the surface of that. When I'd explored that for a bit, I'd try to get under the surface a bit further still. To talk about politics in a more general sense and just relating them to a funny book world. There's a point where you want to go further still. It's a sort of burrowing, I suppose. That's the best way that I can describe the process. I want to try and penetrate the different layers of meaning that there are in the world as deeply as possible. Whatever tools or whatever avenues seem to be most productive towards that end are the ones that I shall be taking. But this is a very subjective thing. It's a totally unpredictable process inside my head. I shall just have to see where it takes me. I try not to second guess that sort of stuff.

I guess when I finally drop dead over the typewriter, then, and only then, I'll be able to see what body of work I've left behind. I'm sure that eighty percent of it will be crap, but there'll probably be a couple of good things in there that will endure and they'll probably be the last things that I ever thought they'd be.

Moore on Aleister Crowley

Young Crowley. Art by Eddie Campbell. From From Hell chapter n.9.

Excerpt from "An authentic fake - A pubside chat with Alan Moore and Peter Whitehead" by R.F. Paul published in Esoterra n.6 in 1996.

Do you consider yourself a Thelemite?

Alan Moore: Not entirely. I have got a lot of sympathy with Crowley's vision. I think he was the 20th century's magickal equivalent of Einstein. But I think that the Thelemite ideal was probably true for Crowley at that time. It doesn't feel true for me at this time. I will still take a lot of his ideas, a lot of his thinking and work it into my own scheme of things. But it wouldn't be fair for me to say that I was a Thelemite because I have problems with some aspects of it.

What aspects?

AM: For example, the most famous of Thelemic utterances, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Now, I've got no problem with that nor with the definition of Magick as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." Except that it seems to place too much emphasis on the will. In my experience of Magick, it is often spontaneous, it has got nothing to do with the will of the person who is allegedly practicing it. Things sometimes just happen. Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes things happen that are completely different than those things you willed to happen or expected to happen, but its often a more satisfying magickal experience because of that. To me placing the will of the magician above the universe, although I'd expect Crowley to do that, is not the way that I feel about things. I feel its more my duty to bring my will into line with the universe rather than the other way around. Looking at the two factors involved in that equation - me and the universe - you know, I'm still in a position, perhaps unlike Crowley, where I think the universe is probably the senior partner in that relationship. I'm not dissing Crowley, I'm not knocking him. . .
Peter Whitehead: A sleeping partner?
AM: Well, no, it plays a very active role in the relationship actually. . .
PW: You put up the capital.
AM: (laughs) A certain amount of Crowley's stuff seems predicated on Crowley's personality. There is his thinking, which is often wonderful, illuminating and brilliant. There is also Crowley's ego, which was probably formulated by this strange Plymouth Brethren upbringing and the pressures which that must have put on him to assert himself. And I see Crowley's personality and aspects of it, which I probably wouldn't like if he were sitting opposite of me now. And there's a lot that I would like about the guy. But certain aspects I wouldn't like and I sometimes see those aspects coloring the doctrines of the Thelemites. For example, take the Book of the Law. I mean, its a beautiful piece of prose. I have no problem accepting that it was channeled from somewhere. However, I have to note some strong similarities between the world-view of the Angel Aiwaz and the world-view of Aleister Crowley himself. Now, I would say that to me, these entities are very often distinct, separate entities from us, and they also are us at the same time. Now, from that point of view, while Crowley is certainly the most important magician of the 20th Century there is stuff in his personality which he never managed to resolve. Looking at his life objectively, I'd have to say that, without trying to be judgemental. His last words were, "I am perplexed." It was not as smooth a ride as sometimes he tried to portray it as. And inasmuch as those elements of Crowley's personality do pervade his thinking, that's where I'd have to draw the line and part company with Thelema. Does that sound halfway reasonable to you?

Yes. Sure. Even though the "I am perplexed" quote is bullshit.

AM: Is that apocryphal?

Yeah. Apocryphal bunk.

AM: I wonder what he did say. "I am perfect", perhaps?

A message From Hell

Art by Eddie Campbell.

Excerpts from an unaired episode of Clive Barker's A-Z Of Horror, 1995. Text published in edited form in Clive Barker's A-Z Of Horror, 1997. The video is available HERE on YouTube.

MOORE: What From Hell can tell us about our own lives, is that those same ancient destructive forces, that same misogyny, that same darkness, is still with us, and for all of our veneer of technology, we've not managed to banish those shadows even slightly.

[...] As the century draws to its end, we find that our entire culture seems to be boiling and bubbling an' erupting into strange new forms. I think that it is the job of artists to help us to understand the new shapes that our world is blossoming into.

From Hell and... beyond

Excerpt from an interview published on EW.com on May 31, 2018.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Have you been in contact with Alan Moore at all about this?
Eddie Campbell: I’ve told Alan I’m doing it. I was like “Alan, if there’s anything you want to fix, you’ve gotta fix it now, this is your chance.” He hasn’t said anything so far. I might jog his memory by getting the stuff to him in the next week or two. If there’s any dialogue that’s wrong, now’s his time to fix it. He’s always talked about adding another appendix. When I spoke to him last month, he said “Eddie, maybe it’s time we do that other appendix, this is the only time we’ll be able to do it.” That’ll be a whole other dozen pages of illustration, but he wants to bring it up to date because in the last 30 years there’s been a lot of developments in Ripper-ology. Even though this was a crime that happened in 1888, every second year there’s a new book about it, where somebody’s found a new culprit. Five, six years ago, Patricia Cornwell went to huge expense buying Walter Sickert’s paintings to get DNA evidence from the paintings and compare it with DNA evidence from the murder site just to prove it was Walter Sickert. But since then somebody’s come out with another suspect. Everybody thinks they’ve got the last word on it. We did this 24-page appendix to the original From Hell called Dance of the Gull-Catchers, in which we ridiculed all the theories, including our own. It’s a grand piece of postmodernism, where you finish the book of “this is our theory, here’s why it’s right” by going “well no it isn’t, nobody’s right, it’s all baloney.” That was great fun doing that, we had a riot doing that in an almost comedic style. Alan wants to do another one where he brings it up to date. I’m not promising that, because we’ll probably have to beat him up to get it out. We’ll have to tie him to the computer and make him type it out. But we’ll see, it’s a possibility.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Read also Colourized From Hell.

Colourized From Hell

Below you can read an exclusive report by writer and comics journalist Koom Kankesan about his meeting with From Hell's artist and co-creator Eddie Campbell during the latest TCAF.

They talked about... the upcoming colourized From Hell edition!

You can also read Koom's coverage of the TCAF at Comicon.com site, HERE.

Grazie, Koom!

Koom Kankesan: "I was really thrilled to meet Eddie Campbell. He’s a unique and interesting talent. I don’t know that there’s anybody else that can quite do what he does with his Alec material. And of course… From Hell has remained my favourite graphic novel for a long time now – it is a remarkable achievement. In person, Eddie is charming and lively. He has a beautiful Steranko-like shock of white hair and is even more dapper than his semi-autobiographical renderings, if you can believe it. He’s a bit of a joker and I’ve told him a few times how much I love From Hell. So, when he replied that he’s in the process of colouring it, I wanted to do one of those cartoon things where the character is floored and his feet angle up into the air beside an exhaust of air.

I’ve always thought of the black and white renderings as unique to From Hell. I had assumed that the fine line work and the moody atmosphere evoking London Victoriana were rendered that way on purpose, as if in imitation of engravings or illustrations in Victorian tabloid newspapers. Eddie found this observation interesting but I don’t think he agreed. I objected that colouring it would ruin the feel of the work and I think I might have been so passionate in my initial views that it perhaps even made him wince. Lovable and charming as Eddie is, the last thing you want to do is make him wince. He showed me some of the coloured pages on his laptop and the colours were lovely – he’s always had a great facility for paint and colour – but it did change the mood and atmosphere of some of the scenes. I said it’s like colourizing black and white films and asked him which he preferred – the black and white version of ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ or the colourized version. He said that he hadn’t seen the colourized version of that film but he had seen the colourized version of ‘Key Largo’ and quite enjoyed it. I mentioned Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux. Those were the kinds of reservations I had.

Eddie also said he wanted to fix the continuity. I was trying to figure out what that meant because I couldn’t really remember any continuity problems in the plot or writing. He grabbed my collected edition of From Hell and flipped to the early, quite remarkable chapter where Netley and Gull are driving around London and Gull discourses on all the historical resonance. He pointed out that the chapter takes place in August and therefore it made no sense for Netley to wear a scarf. He also pointed out that they were atop a very elaborate coach, one that was more like a limousine, and would thus draw a lot of attention. Later on in the book, I think they’re on a hansom cab instead. He also pointed out a panel with a church where the perspective of the foreground and background don’t match. These were the things he wanted to address: more of an issue of accuracy and fidelity rather than continuity. Please see the following photos:

 

 

From Hell, selected pages. Art by Eddie Campbell.

The first volume of the colourized version is planned for September [by Top Shelf] and Eddie and I talked about possibly doing a phone interview then to discuss it in detail once it's out."

From Hell by Massimo Semerano

Art by Massimo Semerano.

Above, from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press, page 71), a creepy illustration by Italian artist MASSIMO SEMERANO paying homage to Moore and Campbell's masterpiece From Hell.

Adam Hines and From Hell

From Hell cover.

Excerpt from an interview with Duncan The Wonder Dog's creator Adam Hines conducted by Marco Apostoli, originally published in Italian on Fumettologica site.

Adam Hines: From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell [is] my favorite “graphic novel” I’ve yet read. I could put another three or four more Alan Moore stories and another two or three Eddie Campbell books on here, but this, to me, is my favorite work by both of them, and what I consider their best. Still chilling.

The complete interview, in Italian, can be read here.

Special thanks to Marco Apostoli for the support.

Moore characters in watercolour

Art by Hannah Buena.

Above, some characters co-created by Alan Moore drawn and painted in watercolour by Filipino artist Hannah Buena.

More info about Hannah Buena at her blog: here.

Jack the Ripper... is coming back!

Art by Eddie Campbell

In March 2013, Top Shelf will publish From Hell Companion, a 288 page volume put together by Eddie Campbell with never-before-seen sketches, scripts, photos and anecdotes from the making-of the graphic novel. A book that promises to be the likes of which we haven’t seen before

A bit more can be read here.

AM Portrait: The League of Extraordinary Characters

Art by Matt Kindt

From the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (2003, Abiogenesis Press), a funny 2page strip - titled The Animated Adventure of The League of Extraordinary Characters of Alan Moore - featuring a lot of Moore's characters written and drawn by the great MATT KINDT. It was originally printed at page 294 and 295 of the original volume. Posted on this blog with the kind permission of the author. Thanks Matt!

Art by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt is the Harvey Award winning writer and artist of the comics and graphic novels MIND MGMT, Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Revolver, 3 Story, Super Spy, 2 Sisters, and Pistolwhip. He has been nominated for 4 Eisner and 3 Harvey Awards (and won once). His work has been published in French, Spanish, Italian, and German.