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For all of you true crime buffs, the ultimate cold case!

I had read Watchmen and found it to be genius; V for Vendetta I liked very much as well (a pretty powerful and angry political allegory, though much less complex), and have read others by The GOAT, or one of them, Alan Moore. But this is one of my favorite works of his. It is massive, incredibly ambitious, an erudite work of scholarship and passion, and yet it also feels like one of the most personal of his works I have read thus far. And yet it all took place a century and more ago: The Jack the Ripper story, in Moore's personal fictional view, highly influenced by his favorite theoretical Ripperologist, Stephen Knight, whose theory was largely dismissed and derided in the very process of Moore and Campbell's long construction of this remarkable tome.

Before we go too far we have to mention the amazing art by Eddie Campbell, matching the scope and passion of Moore's enthralling epic conception. So how could From Hell be amazing and enthralling, since the perspective it takes is now largely dismissed? Because it is a terrific story, told terrifically. Whether it is true or not, it is compelling. It may be a tad long, one of the Moby Dicks of graphic literature, but I was truly engaged with it throughout. And though in black and white, it is still graphic (that serial murder thing, envisioned throughout).

One reason it is interesting is that it is not a whodunnit, primarily; we know who Moore thinks did it from the beginning (as opposed to the terrible Hughes brothers film version, with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, which maybe would have been an okay flick if it weren't also called From Hell, which then makes a complete mockery of Moore's version of events and his literary/philosophical perspective on the world).

Most book versions of the Jack the Ripper story, non-fiction and fiction, make a case, propose a theory, and Moore does this, too, as I've said, but not in "true crime" fashion. Moore provides literally HUNDREDS of pages of footnotes to show he has been researching this from every possible angle for several years, but finally plot or whodunnit is only a part of his interest. He reaches far beyond that to what the Whitecastle Murders seem to portend for the twentieth century in terms of Evil, Mad Violence, Genocide, Catastrophic Wars, sort of the End of Modernism, of the Enlightenment Hope for the Future. And the occult, always, for Moore (so much of what he understood about that time was connected to the occult; see his Providence, about H. P. Lovecraft) and feminism (why the killing of all these women, by a man, as if it were an entree to a century of serial killing of women), and class, all backgrounds for him throughout and usually.

He even admits his own crazy obsession with such events is his way of trying to make meaning of life and death and culture and media and politics and history. Finally, he admits we will never know whodunnit and he admits that that is not the point, for any of the Ripperologists. The point is obsession. Or the desperate need to understand, to make meaning out of the shards of a single puzzling event. And cold cases are always the site of obsession. (A new tv series based on Michelle McNamara's I'll be Gone in the Dark: The Hunt for the Golden State Killer--0ver 50 rapes, more than a 100 burglaries, 13 murders, from 1974-86, came out in summer 2020; see my review of her book, it's just one of many studies of obsession over a serial killer).

From Hell is macabre. It is real life horror, an early serial killing to welcome us to an age of ever increasing serial killings and mass murders and multi-media obsessions with them. It takes a tale of murder and spins it into a rich work of art and historical meditation. Comics greatness, without question.