Novel delves into psyche of infamous killer

By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor

“From Hell,” the new graphic novel, palpitates with
a life of its own as history.

Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Eddie Campbell,
“From Hell,” the graphic novel upon which the new film
of the same name is based, serves to slice with surgical precision.
It cuts deep into the soft and elusive tissue, into the blackest
heart that serves as the core of who Jack the Ripper was and why he
did what he did.

“From Hell,” serialized in individual comics
throughout the 1990s and now collected in a single edition, follows
fast on the heels of Moore’s previous success ““ the
acclaimed miniseries “Watchmen.”
“Watchmen,” along with Frank Miller’s Batman epic
“The Dark Knight Returns,” revolutionized comics in the
’80s and ushered in the grim ‘n’ gritty
’90s that cast the entire industry in a malicious shadow
where morality was grayed and the antihero became the
superhero.

But there are no superheroes in “From Hell.” There
are no vibrant colors that shake the pages in rapturous splashes of
coma-inducing brightness. There are no superheroines with
watermelon breasts and spray-painted latex costumes. And there is
no straightforward storytelling confined by the linear realms of
the slasher genre or even by space-time itself.

The fictional epic begins with an aging Inspector Abberline, who
worked the Ripper case, having a beachfront conversation with his
friend, the psychic Mr. Lees (in the film, Lees and Abberline were
combined into one character), whereby Lees admits that all of his
visions, which were manifested as seizures, were falsified.
Eventually Abberline and Lees retire to the former’s
sprawling Victorian house, rich but shadowed as if every corner
hides an insidious little secret that must be swallowed and kept,
like a purloined letter, hidden, not in plain sight, but pinched
and tucked into the nether regions of one’s sleeve.

There’s something sinister about why Abberline owns that
house as the ex-inspector cryptically implies, “This is the
house that Jack built.”

But the graphic novel isn’t as much about Abberline as it
is about Jack the Ripper himself, whose identity is made known by
Chapter 2, and who, in consideration for those who have not seen
the film, will remain unnamed.

It is the Ripper’s childhood and past, and not
Abberline’s, that are covered with the dark relish of a
morbid voyeur. Indeed, it is the Ripper’s psyche that
permeates and haunts, ghostlike, throughout the graphic novel.
Abberline seems to be more of a supporting character, one of the
many affected by the Ripper’s rampage. There is no love story
in here.

Yes, the episodes of the vast royal conspiracy pervade the plot
of Moore’s script. But these plot points are more of a
distraction, a central thread to contain the ideas that Moore
attaches to the storyline.

Moore plants ideas of time and permanence and history to make
the mind reel. Not all are immediately understandable. “From
Hell” is incredibly dense and, seen through the eyes of the
Ripper, seems to transgress the time barriers as episodes retreat
into the realm of urban legend. Strange enough?

Take the scene in which the Ripper, following his next victim,
encounters a man, shocked speechless and looking out of the window.
The man’s room seems cut from the ’50s and indeed, with
an old television set and a Marilyn Monroe poster, the man is in
fact a 20th century transplant. Flip to the copious appendix notes
supplied by Moore: the episode is revealed to be an urban legend in
which a man reported seeing, four times over an annual period, two
strange Victorian figures disappearing along an alley at the site
of the old murder.

The episode doesn’t exist for any structural purpose but
does keep with the ideas in the book. The Ripper’s actions
have transcended the narrow time frame in which he was most active
and have entered into ours, at the very least, through urban myths,
legends and spook stories.

Co-creating with Moore in this marvelously dense rendition of
the Ripper mythos is Campbell, who maliciously illustrates the
gritty London streets, alleys and buildings that compose the
setting for the murders. The panels are raw, scrawled with
chicken-scratch lines. Yet the illustrations of the buildings,
which are marvelously rendered, are drawn in a much tighter
fashion, possibly to suggest their permanence, or comparative
permanence, to those who occupy them.

Campbell’s illustration and storytelling, in panel after
panel, are subtle and atmospheric; he conveys everything from the
soot-stained fogs that blanket the gothic arches of London, to the
imposing and mythic structures that enrapture the Ripper, to the
subtle expressions of contempt in the eyes of London aristocrats.
What happens in “From Hell” is not always
clear””mdash;it is hard to distinguish faces and characters all the
time in black and white line drawings however accomplished such
drawings may be; but perhaps the disordered confusion, which is
slight, exists to the book’s credit. History is rarely
cut-and-dried anyway.

“From Hell” is a tough read. It elevates the form of
the comic book genre which, grossly generalizing, has been and
still is confined largely to the realms of basic heroes and
villains trapped in juvenile stories. Even if “From
Hell” is not always successful in its aim and in getting its
ideas across, the graphic novel presents a unique way in telling a
tale. Moore and Campbell take a story of a serial slasher that has
been sliced to death, splattered in all forms of fiction over
recent years, and recombines it into an entirely new, completely
unique, and darkly arousing saga.