FROM HELL

Rating:
Summary: Great for anyone who likes graphic novels
Review: Before starting this book I knew nothing about Jack the Ripper, nor was I ever interested in serial killer books. This book is genuinely fascinating. Moore presents a truly interesting hypothesis about the killings as well as provides the reader with a deluge of information to draw their own conclusions. It's a graphic novel in black and white with a complex storyline. If you aren't familiar with the format I wouldn't recommend this as a good "first graphic novel". If however you like graphic novels but are worried about the subject matter being tedious, I can attest that Moore manages to make this topic truly fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: meticulous brilliance
Review: I had no idea what this was going to be about when I picked it up. I didn't even read the back to find that it was about Jack The Ripper untill I was a couple chapters into it...
(gulp)
My slow paced readings over the next week had me fixed in a horrific exuberance. Rekindling my paranoid curiousity, I again allowed myself to question popular intentions and limitations of man. Not what I would call a joy, but then yes I would. I will never look at black ink the same way again.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME! The Best Graphic Novel I've ever read!!!
Review: A must for JTR Fans.

I have been a long time JTR fan. I have read all the books and taken the JTR tour in London. As for Ripper-lit, nothing can compare to FROM HELL for both pure enjoyment and quality of research.!

FROM HELL blends in all the favorite conspiracy theories about Jack, coupled with some sci-fi stuff a la Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch.

I can't wait for the film version with Johnny Depp, though I'm afraid it won't stand up to the novel since what makes it so good is the author's knowledge of historical details and Ripperania he displays in the narrative, coupled with how he uses them to craft a chilling, well-constructed convoluted tale of horror.

Clearly you will want to read this more than once

Rating:
Summary: A dark book of life
Review: This Byzantine epic of a graphic novel represents everything words can do in concert with pictures. Those familiar with Alan Moore's life and work know that this book led to his experiments with magic and his theories about "idea space," and one can see why. This book itself constructs an idea space around the London of 1888, demonstrating hauntingly the way in which the ideas germinating in that particular space blossomed bloodily into the facts of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the breakdown of pure reason as a working conceptual mode, the collapse of the British Empire. As abstract as that sounds, this book is an agonizingly visceral experience; Moore and Campbell painstakingly and tangibly evoke London life high and low, depicting squalid assignations in dark alleyways and dim rooms, bar talk and conversations in museums, monolithic Queen Victoria and ephemeral, endangered prostitutes. There are cameo appearances by William Morris, the Elephant Man, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Whistler, William Blake and the aforementioned queen. But most significantly the novel is punctuated by five murders ghastly, horrifying and visionary beyond belief, five murders which grant breathtaking access to wholly other realms of thought and existence. There is no reading experience like this book. If you enjoy comics such as "V for Vendetta" or "Watchmen" or "Sandman", you will appreciate this; however, if you love novels such as "Moby Dick" or "Anna Karenina" or "Ulysses", then "From Hell" is for you as well.

Rating:
Summary: Awful. Hands down the worst graphic novel I've ever read.
Review: I really like some of Alan Moore's other works, but he has TOTALLY missed the mark with From Hell. Despite having one of the most fascinating stories of the century (the Jack the Ripper murders) as a backdrop, he fails to convincingly develop any kind of story. I got the sense that he pieced together a lot of his own philosphical essays, inserted them into the mouths of various individuals involved with the murders, and packaged it as a graphic novel. Although Moore clearly is himself fascinated by Jack the Ripper, he fails to weave any coherent storyline around him.

Also, the graphics by Eddie Campbell are just terrible - many of the characters are indistinguishable from one another.

If you (like me) are a fan of Watchmen and The Killing Joke, you will be profoundly underwhelmed by From Hell.

Rating:
Summary: Mezmorizing
Review: In autumn of 1888, London was shocked by ghastly murders in its poorest section, Whitechapel. The murders and mutilations of five prostitutes as well as the mocking letters sent, presumably from the killer, to the police and newspapers would be forever be known as the Jack the Ripper's spree of terror. Ever since his crimes ended without the killer ever being caught, several theories have been proposed concerning the killer's motives and identity. From Hell narrates the theory exposed by one Joseph Sickert in the 1960s. Sickert claimed his mother was the product of a secret marriage between Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Edward and a Catholic commoner. Fearing the scandal that may erupt if the existence of a Catholic aire to the thrown were revealed, Sickert claims Victoria forcefully separated his grandparents, sending his maternal grandmother to a madhouse. Sickert continued that the fifth Ripper victim, Mary Kelly was his mother's nanny and she had attempted to use her knowledge of the union to blackmail the royal family with some of her friends, other eventual Ripper victims. Victoria then deployed royal physician Sir William Gull to exterminate the blackmailers. And thus the set-up for the horrific murders is laid out. Moore and the delightfully scratchy artwork of Eddie Campbell go on to paint a portrait of the miserable conditions of Whitechapel, the lives of desperation and hopelessness of the victims, the hysteria the murders generated, the fumbling police proceedings (led by Scotland Yard Inspector Fred Abberline, the closest the book has to a protagonist) and the conspiracy to protect Gull and the royal family's connections to the murders. From Hell is startling, compelling and horrifying. It is involving in every way. I doubt Moore told the story with Gull as Jack because he truly thought him the most likely of the slew of suspects but because Gull was a highbrow, educated, applauded Freemason, a man who many would thought to be incapable of the appalling Ripper killings. As Gull's task leads him through a path of inspiration, vision and Hannibal Lectur-style intellectualism one realizing that Moore is not writing about a single series of killings but the monster within all of us, hidden within society. "Soon, somebody will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and the recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion," he states in the second appendix. From Hell is ingenious and rereadable in every way.

Rating:
Summary: virgin comic reader comes up trumps
Review: Being a literature teacher I have probably pooh-poohed comic books, but this was the perfect text to initiate me into the genre. It was like learning to "read" again and I really enjoyed the mixture of explicit and enigmatic panels throughout Moore and Campbell's work. I know, as other reviewers have pointed out, that Alan Moore scraped the material from many sources and that his theories are not new, but there is a real sense of intelligence and thoughtfulness behind his telling of the Whitechapel Murders. As a rampant feminist I also applaud the way Moore has politicised in some way the plight of women in the Victorian underclasses, without creating saints or cretins of the women. (I urge other readers to have a look at Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore which spends a chapter on underclass living in London. Fascinating stuff.)I loved the inclusion of details about Blake, Shaw, Wilde and Yeats, and Gull's "tour" of London given to Netley. I resist the criticism given by an earlier reviewer that Moore is pretentiously over-intellectualising the territory of occultism and phrenology in From Hell. I think it gives his work richness and raises it above the stereotypical "whodunnit" narrative. I so so so enjoyed Moore's apendices - I really loved the style and energy of his approach. I am ready for more of this comic book thang!

Rating:
Summary: jack the ripper meets the elephant man in a funnybook
Review: Moore is a very readable prose writer, but then again so is Stephen King, and he does't have anything to say either. I can't speak to his Jack the Ripper theories since I know very little about the case, but I can say with assurance that Moore's "ideas" about brain hemispheres and turn-of-the century occultism are deeply uninformed; in fact, any time he tries to write about even semi-serious subjects he comes off sounding like the B-grade sci-fi writer he is at heart. I guess that's why he finally gave up and went back to writing superhero drivel illustrated by artists more technically competent but less visually interesting than guys like Eddie Campbell.

Rating:
Summary: A couple of caveats
Review: This is a classic work, as dense and as demanding as any novel, and perhaps the closest to literature a graphic novel has ever come. It could only have flowed from the pen of the great Alan Moore, whose Swamp Thing and Watchmen revolutionized graphic storytelling. He and Eddie Campbell have done wonderful work here. I merely write to correct a couple of errors in other reviews.

First, [e-mail] says this is only the first part of From Hell. The pictured edition does, I believe, contain the entire story, although there are single comics containing single chapters and other trade paperbacks containing fewer chapters than the above pictured edition. If you buy the pictured edition, you are getting a complete story from beginning to end. I read the above edition and found nothing missing -- it goes from before the first murder to after the last.

Second, editor Rob Lightner says that Moore believes, and wants us to believe, that Jack the Ripper was the Queen's physician and part of a Masonic conspiracy to kill the mother of Queen Victoria's grandson. I think this misses the point. Moore loves to make connections between things (see, for instance, his ongoing series Promethea), and the Masonic conspiracy gives him a lot of room to weave in the various aspects of the Ripper legend. I don't know that he necessarily believes it any more than he believes, as shown in From Hell, that the killer was able to predict the future while he was gutting his victims. Moore is a storyteller and his story contains many fantastic elements. It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute to Moore all the opinions expressed in this fine work of fiction.

Rating:
Summary: dark script, darker art
Review: When it comes to serial killers, Jack the Ripper has always been the name brand. He was a pioneer in many ways --- on the twin forefronts of mutilation and mocking letters sent to the police (even discounting the numerous crackpot letters) he seems to have established a highwater mark for gruesome violence. Ultimately he has come to inhabit the popular consciousness from comic books to STAR TREK. (I wouldn't be surprised to see a Ripper plush toy offered somewhere for sale; in a world that contains an Ed Gein fan club, ANYTHING is possible.) Now Alan Moore has crafted an endlessly fascinating,often infuriating and extremely rewarding story about madness and the abuse of high position. This complex tale takes its time unfolding, but everything ultimately is relevant, although the reader may not think so for a couple of chapters. My only (minor) complaint is that Campbell's art is somewhat lacking in characterization, making individuals occasionaly difficult to

tell apart, but ultimately this is an essential read for those who find the shadowy figure of Springheels Jack an ever-potent icon of dread.