‘Ah, Lost Girls. Can you imagine anyone else being able to get a wonderfully accomplished artist to spend thirteen years drawing pornographic material for them, customised to demand; being able to declare himself a pornographer and have everyone take it as some bold new intellectual position; or even claiming against tax for high class scud-books like The Art of the Marquis Von Bayros as “reference material”? No. You can’t. This is why I am a genius. “What are you doing in that bathroom, young man?” “Mother, I am doing highly paid reference work.”‘
[comics] Mists of Time — Warren Ellis discusses Alan Moore’s out-of-print work … On Moore and Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light: ‘ It’s an absolute tour de force. Sienkiewicz produces mad images, political caricature via Ralph Steadman, slapping down anything that might work — photocopies, splatter, bits of metal, anything that might work. The Eagle, pissed out of his mind and coked to the tits, hunches there at the bar and vomits out the secret history of the American century — impeccably research documentary coming out of the beak of a fictional beard. Remember the best bit of the film JFK? Where Donald Sutherland lays out the whole thing in one long riveting monologue, and then concludes it with a sigh, and: “Well, I never thought things were the same after that.”? It’s like that, only funnier and scarier and more compelling. It demands it be read in one sitting, and it just sears with passion and commitment.’
[comics] Alan Moore in Egomania #2: ‘”Approaching forty […] I was also starting to become more and more fascinated by the big taboo question of creativity, which also leads on to the big taboo question of consciousness, namely, “What is it and how does it work?” And also, of course, “How can I profit from it, move to Peterborough and live like a king?”‘ [via WEF]
[comics] Alan Moore interviewed by Gary Groth — More audio interviews from the Comics Journal … ‘Moore, fresh off of his success with Watchmen (and subsequent break with DC Comics), had just embarked upon an experiment in self-publishing with the Bill Sienkiewicz-drawn mini-series Big Numbers. In these excerpts, conducted by telephone, Moore discusses some of the other projects he had been working on (Miracleman, A Small Killing and The Lost Girls) before settling into an extended dialogue concerning From Hell…’ [via Bugpowder]
[comics] This is Information — a page from Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 911 Tribute comic-strip …
‘This is what Entropy looks like. Not much Energy. Not much information. The Kinetic Energy bound up inside the structure is released with its collapse, a single Pulverising Burst. Complex information is reduced to dull simplicity. Rubble, for example contains little information it all looks the same. This could be London, New York, Baghdad, Belfast, or Kabul. Or Anywhere.’
[comics] Moore Morality — Dylan Horrocks on Alan Moore. ‘…he’d taken all his own grief and the lessons he’d learnt from it and had distilled them into this crazy little comic about superheroes and interdimensional travel. He’d given us a gift, carefully copied from the scars on his own heart. That’s what I mean when I say that what really makes Alan Moore’s work special is its morality. His work is pure and sincere. And utterly, deeply humane.’
[comics] Notes on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen v2 #1 — annotations to Alan Moore’s latest comic … ‘Gulliver Jones is greeting John Carter. Carter, as mentioned, was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and debuted in ?Under the Moons of Mars? in 1912. Carter was a Virginian (note his manner of speaking here) and a Civil War Veteran who was transported to Mars in 1866 through a zeta beam. (Well, okay, through astral projection.)’ [via Usenet]
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July 24, 2002
[comics] Interesting selection of MP3’s from musical collaborations between Alan Moore and Tim Perkins … [via Bugpowder]
[comics] Yahoo’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Movie preview page — ‘…I guess what we have to do is cross our fingers, hold our breaths, and hope that the film itself somehow captures some wink of the magic of Moore’s writing. Maybe. Can Stephen Norrington do it? His first film went direct-to-video, his third has yet to be picked up for distribution, which leaves us with Blade. Blade is a bloody, violent romp of a vampire movie, and while I did enjoy it for exactly what it was, I don’t get anything from it that yells to me “this guy would rock as the director of LoEG”.’ [via Cheesedip]
[comics] The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. II — Mini preview site for Alan Moore and Kev O’Neill’s new comic … ‘The adventurous proceedings immediately follow the explosive events in Volume One. The year is 1898, and there are strange rumblings in the sky. Flashing lights are dancing across the horizon. The Martians are coming?and our Earth will never be quite the same. The legendary Allan Quatermain, the unflappable Mina Harker, the stoic Captain Nemo, the abominable Mr. Hyde, and the grotesque Griffin Hawley once again are needed by the Empire to overcome the direst of odds. Some will live, some will die?all will be remembered.’ [via Barbelith]
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[comics] Leach Revisits Warpsmiths — Gary Leach to rework and complete his Warpsmiths comics written by Alan Moore … ‘…the decision was made to reprint the reprint the whole Warpsmiths story. One small problem though ? the original artwork no longer exists, and no reproducible copies were kept. “Garry gave away a lot of the artwork for the first two parts,” Elliot said. “He does have most of the artwork for the A1 story but feels some of it needs to redrawn. He’s a bit of a perfectionist – a perfect match for someone working with Alan.” So ? back to the drawing board. Literally.’ [via Barbelith]
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‘ROSS: Let me tap back into some more Alan Moore mythology. Are you married? Or are you living with Melinda?
MOORE: I was married when I was about twenty, and me and me wife split up in about 1989. I met Melinda a year later. Me and Melinda don’t live together because she’s an artist and I’m a writer, both of which are far too mental. But we see each other a lot. I met up wth her mainly because I wanted to do an erotic, a pornographic comic book, and the idea of doing it with guys?
[comics] Moore’s murderer — yet another profile / interview of Alan Moore … ‘Magic is now at the centre of his life, he admits, but he knows where all this can lead. He has heard of David Icke, and he’s aware that he’s already off most people’s scale when it comes to sanity. “I’m not a millionaire but I’m very comfortable doing what I do, and I’m more productive now than I was in my mid-20s. It’s all down to functionality eventually. If you’re functional it doesn’t matter if you’re mad.”‘ [via Robot Wisdom]
[film] Jack the Rip-Off — Iain Sinclair looks at the From Hell movie … ‘What Moore proposes, and what the film necessarily refutes, is the belief that the past is unknowable. ‘In all our efforts to describe the past, to list the simple facts of history,’ he wrote in his introduction to the From Hell scripts, ‘we are involved in fiction.’ There can be no anachronisms when time is a plural concept. Nobody knows, or will ever know, or should know, who Jack the Ripper was. Jack is. Sustained and incubated by tour guides, crocodiles of sombre or giggling pilgrims processing around the locations where the bodies were found, the Ripper lives on. An invisible earner. A waxwork vampire.’
[comics] Newsarama talks to Alan Moore about Marvel Comics, ABC and Watchmen 2. On Watchmen 2: ‘That wouldn’t be interesting at all. It would be really fucking boring. I’ve got no interest in re-creating the 1980s. […] With all respect to the fan audience, I’m sure that Charles Dickens never got people writing, asking when he was going to do A Tale of Three Cities. That’s not how I work. It may be how the industry works, but I’m not really interested in revisiting things that are fifteen years old.’
[comics] Yet another long interview with Alan Moore covering pretty much all aspects of his career …. On writing From Hell: ‘Ten years wading through the material, the literature, not just Jack the Ripper but all of these fuckers. All these miserable little apologies for human beings. They’re not supermen. They’re not supermen at all. They’re not Hannibal Lecter. You know, they’re Peter Sutcliffe, they’re a bloke with a dodgy perm. And some horrible screw-up in his relationship with his mother or something. They’re little blokes.’ [via Ink Stains]
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January 5, 2002
[comics] The Rational Shaman — great interview with Alan Moore concentrating on magic and comics … ‘After Watchmen, I felt that I was perhaps coming to a limit as to what I could further understand about writing rationally. If I was going to go any further into writing, I had to take a step beyond the rational. Magic was the only area that offered floorboards after that step. And it also seemed to offer a new way of looking at things, a new set of tools to continue.’ [via I Love Everything]
[comics] Jack The Ripper: From Hell … a Master Mason comments on From Hell — the film and comic. ‘As unlikely as it may seem, From Hell is not simply a product of Hollywood greed or opportunism. It is based on a remarkable “graphic novel,” of the same name, by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell. Graphic novels, a fairly new phenomenon, are pricey novel-length comics, most often published in quality paperback format and usually aimed at a teen or adult audience. From Hell, an engrossing retelling of the Jack the Ripper chronology, is possibly the most prominent graphic novel yet published. It weighs in at over 500 pages of a detailed story, with an additional 42 pages of notes and annotations, where Moore explains some of the more obscure details of Ripper history and gives reasons for choosing among the dozens of competing theories of who did what when. This is important to note because, despite the reputation of comic books for shallow plots and characters, From Hell, the graphic novel, is a multi-layered story that is more akin to the complex novels of Thomas Pynchon than to the simple comics of Walt Disney.’ [via I Love Everything]
[comics] Two interviews with the Big Scary Hippy Magician Guy (who writes comics) …
Comic Book Resources interview with Moore ‘The thing that turned me towards magic was a panel in From Hell where William Gull was saying something to the effect that the human mind is one place where all of the gods and monsters in human mythology are arguably real, in all of their grandeur and monstrosity. And after writing I thought, oh shit, that’s true. Now I am going to have to rearrange my entire life around this. There is no way to disprove it. I thought I was writing this great piece of Gothic villain dialogue. The gods and monsters inarguably exist and they are real. Because if they don’t exist how many people died because of them, or how many history changing things have been done in the name of these Gods that don’t exist? If they don’t exist why do they kill so many of us in their name?’ [via WEF]
Massive Two Part Onion AV Club interview with Moore [Part 1 | Part 2] ‘I’ve got the whole of Big Numbers plotted. I’d got this enormous A1 sheet of paper the size of a tablecloth that had been divided into 40 rows down the side, and 12 columns along the top. One column for each of the 12 issues, 40 rows for each of the 40 characters. And then, in this grid in tiny, incomprehensibly small biro writing which looks like the work of a mental patient, and which gives you a migraine just to look at it, there is what happens to each of the 40 characters in every one of the 12 issues. It’s this map of the entire plot. I’ve never done it with any other work, because it is kind of an insane thing to do. I’ve kind of got all that stuff in my head anyway, so the only real reason for writing it down on paper is just to impress and frighten. But because I’d still got the plot, we were able to reconstruct the basis of a 12-episode TV drama series. Whether it’ll ever make it to TV or not, no idea.’ [thanks to Kenny]
[comics] Mad Man — MSNBC interview with Alan Moore … ‘[Interviewer] Are you planning on attending the “From Hell” premiere? [Moore] If left to my own devices, I wouldn’t. I’m not really a big cinema guy, and I don’t really like public appearances. I only signed up to be a writer. I didn’t really sign up to be a celebrity. When I became a comic writer there was no more obscure job in the world. But my daughters, they’ve got some sort of plan that involves kidnapping Johnny Depp and giving him roofies. So I’d probably better be there.’ [via Barbelith Underground]
[film] Interesting review of From Hell from the New York Press:‘…despite its surface slickness and baldfaced artistic pretensions, this is an angry, empathetic movie. It’s genuinely interested in the lives of the poor, and righteously angry at the rich ruling class that has used the poor as servants, whores, entertainers and guard dogs since civilization began. The second half spirals into a bizarre conspiracy that turns history into a slanderous comic book, then delivers an intelligent, downbeat, provocative ending that’s sure to alienate most viewers, and finishes up by reminding us that nothing we just saw can be taken at face value because it’s all the memory of an absinthe-pickled opium addict.’
Rorschach: ‘Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it’s true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper, “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a days work for a days pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers… and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.’
[comics] Don’t Ask the Writer — interview with Alan Moore concentrating on From Hell … ‘The land of suntanned starlets and chiseled action stars would be a strange fit with the 48-year-old Moore, who could be a character out of a Victorian melodrama, with his wild mess of long black hair, beard and ominous voice. “Having a deep voice and kind of being physically imposing, you tend to find that you can talk almost any old rubbish and can make it sound creepy,” he acknowledges.’ [Related:From Hell Movie Trailer, link via Comic Geek]
[comics] UltraMoore… tributes to Alan Moore (in Italian and English) from various notable comic creators… Barry Windsor-Smith, Eddie Campbell and Jay Stevens. Windsor-Smith: ‘The intelligence and perspicacity of Alan Moore’s MARVELMAN was responsible for bringing me back into the field of comics. For that, I’m torn between loving and hating him.’ [Related:Alan Moore Fan Site]
[comics] Side by side in the fantasy league — Roger Sabin reviews recent comics in the Observer including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill … ‘The ‘league’ is led by Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and consists of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and H.G.Wells’s Invisible Man, all brought together to combat an evil criminal mastermind from the East and his band of ‘sly Chinee’. Thus begins a penny-dreadful adventure that mimics modern superhero team-ups – Moore’s own Watchmen comes to mind – while retaining an all-important sense of humour. This is very postmodern humour, you understand – Quartermain is discovered in an opium den and the Invisible Man is caught hiding in a girls’ school. Yet it never threatens to overwhelm what is essentially a ripping yarn of a rather quaint kind: you feel that Moore and O’Neill really yearn for a bit of old-fashioned romance.’
[comics] Great interview with Eddie Campbell mainly about the From Hell movie at Ain’t it Cool News… ‘Alan said that, “We all know that serial murderers are not like this. They’re horrible nasty little men with bad hair-cuts!” So with Gull, we’ve created this colossal figure of evil. I hope we haven’t made him attractive. I actually have much admiration for the original Dr. Gull, who was the man who wrote the paper and gave the name to anorexia nervosa. And his name still pops up if you’re reading on thyroid conditions. He wrote the original medical papers on one or two subjects that are still very relevant today.’
[comics] Alan Moore and Marvel Comics build bridges… Moore’s version and Quesada’s version of what happened… Quesada:‘I flew over, and took the train to Northampton to meet Alan,” he said. “He lives up to his reputation as the comic book Merlin. He’s a big, tall guy with a beard and a walking staff. We walked through Northampton and he showed me where Princess Di is really buried. She’s not where everyone thinks she is.”‘ [via Seething Hatred]
[comics] Eddie Campbell discusses Finishing From Hell…. ‘Eight years! 500 pages. Must be the longest single work Alan’s done on both counts. The astonishing thing is that he had the whole thing planned from the beginning. All the reference photos for the epilogue were shot in 1988. When Alan phoned me to offer me the gig he gave me a rundown of all the chapter titles, including prologue and epilogue. I don’t think he changed any of them as we progressed, although for a brief time ‘Blackmail or Mrs Barrett’ almost became ‘The Harlot’s Curse’. Any extra material that came to mind was fitted within the existing chapters without changing the total pattern, or structure. That word ‘structure’ sums up what Alan does best in all his work. In From Hell the structural idea behind everything is the architecture of time’ [Related Links:On-Line Preview of From Hell, Buy From Hell]
[comics] Another long, fascinating Alan Moore interview this time from 1998 which was published in the Idler… ‘I can’t conceive of vapour culture. I might not survive it. But that is where we are heading. I don’t know quite what I mean by my own metaphor, but I have feeling, it may bring in an even greater, faster space of fluid transmission, where no structures, as we used to understand structure, will sustain itself – we will have to come up with new notions of structure where things can change by the moment. I’m talking about physical structures, political structures, I can’t see coherent political structures in the traditional sense lasting beyond the next twenty years, I don’t think that would be possible.’ [via BugPowder]
[big numbers] Alan Moore: ‘…with the world political situation as it is at the moment the political radical is put in a difficult position because, hum, how do you rebel against chaos? You know, much as political conspiracy theorists would like to think otherwise, the brutal truth of the thing is nobody’s in control, this is a runaway train. Nobody’s in control, there’s not some big conspiracy in control, whether it’s Jewish bankers or nazis or CIA spooks, the simple truth is that the world is a complex storm of mathematics, basically… Very complicated mathematics that is beyond human comprehension.’
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January 3, 2001
[comics] The Mirror of Love — A complete Alan Moore script. He does panel descriptions in caps?! ‘PAGE 1, (PANEL) 1. OKAY, THIS STRIP HAS FIVE PANELS IN EXACTLY THE SAME LAYOUT UPON EACH PAGE: THERE ARE FOUR HORIZONTAL PANELS DOWN THE LEFT HAND SIDE OF EACH PAGE AND A TALL VERTICAL ONE DOWN THE RIGHT. SINCE I’VE HAD TO FIT THE ENTIRE OF KNOWN GAY HISTORY FROM PREHISTORIC TIMES ONWARDS INTO EIGHT PAGES, THERE ARE ABOUT TWO HUNDRED AND TEN WORDS ON EACH PAGE AND SOME RATHER LARGE CAPTIONS. SINCE THERE ARE NO BALLOONS I FIGURE YOU’LL BE ABLE TO LAY OUT THE PANELS TO ACCOMODATE THESE. THE HORIZONTAL PANELS ALL RECOUNT SCENES AND EVENTS FROM GAY HISTORY, WHILE THE VERTICAL PANELS ARE DIFFERENT.’
[alan moore] Alan Moore on William Blake…. ‘Friday 2 February, 19.30 Tygers of Wrath. A spectacular finale to the exhibition, featuring music played by Alex James (Blur) and Simon Boswell, Jah Wobble, and Billy Bragg, and readings and performances by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore. This event takes place at the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly, W1. Tickets: £10 – £20’
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December 21, 2000
[comics] Alan Moore watches the K Foundation burn a million quid… ‘I think we’re moving towards some sort of paradigm shift, or massive collective mental breakdown some huge step of some kind; a basic change in our thinking. In politics, religions and the various structures we have built up, the world not the planet but the idea of the world we’ve created is likely, at least conceptually, to go up in flames the end of the world figuratively, but not apocalyptically not like a traditional notion of Armageddon. Maybe we’ve always imagined it’s going to collapse I’m not trying to be millennial about this I don’t see ‘the destruction and end of the world’, that chimera that we always seem to dangle over ourselves. Rather around this juncture of history when all of our systems are unstable and teetering towards this point of climax and collapse, we should consider the speed at which our culture is learning.’ [Related Links:Alan Moore: Magician, The K Foundation: Why We Burnt A Million Pounds]
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November 26, 2000
[comics] Eddie Campbell has published the first chapter of From Hell online. ‘Now, meself, I come from a working family. We vote Tory, always have done. The working class don’t WANT a revolution Mr. Lees: they just want more money.’ [via Lukelog]
[comics] Media Nugget of the Day covers Watchmen. ‘In this bleak vision of America, the influence of costumed crime-fighters has kept Nixon in office, whipped Vietnam into shape easily, and brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Writer Alan Moore began this novel as a reworking of the Charlton Comics heroes of his childhood, transformed it into an operatic dark-comedy of super-hero archetypes, and ended up with a chilling commentary on cold-war America.’ [Related Links: Alan Moore Fan Site]
[comics] The full script of Sam Hamm’s Watchmen movie adaptation is online. ‘EXT. LIBERTY ISLAND – THAT MOMENT – DAY — as a LUMINOUS BLUE-SKINNED GIANT, SIXTY FEET TALL, wades through the harbor and steps up onto the island. He stares in dismay at the demolished statue . . . like a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes wondering what the hell happened to his date. Meet the last — and most powerful — member of our happy band: DR. MANHATTAN. Down below, THE COMEDIAN and SILK SPECTRE — battered but intact — are crawling out of the wreckage. The COMEDIAN looks up at the huge blue figure looming over them, and shakes a gnat-sized fist. COMEDIAN: ASSHOLE! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!?’ [via Haddock]
[comics] Bugpower provides a link to a fantastic in-depth interview with Alan Moore. ‘Like, I’d have sworn that my interest in Jack the Ripper started in 1988 but then when my mum died and we went through her house, we found a big suitcase in which there was a load of old books and comics and things that I’d had when I was a kid, including two or three centrefolds from The Sunday Mirror, which were dealing with Jack the Ripper and I’d obviously clipped them for some reason. I didn’t remember doing it but obviously I’d had an interest in Jack the Ripper from the age of about twelve or thirteen. So I guess that these kind of themes, these ideas, they probably run all the way through our lives like a kind of developing music, that the basic kind of chord patterns are there right from the beginning, probably, but they just become more elaborate, or more penetrating or more deeper.’
[comics] Warren Ellis reports that Australian Customs haved banned the import of From Hell. ‘Where does this leave Eddie? Attempting to use due process to convince Australian Customs – and, presumably, the OFLC — to unban one of the most acclaimed works in the medium, translated into six languages (Eddie mentioned this, and got the response “I don’t care what goes on in the rest of the world, this is Australia.”). Will they be reasonable? Evidently one Michael Dean, writer for The Comics Journal, has already been on the phone to Australian Customs. I’ll give Eddie Campbell the last word. “The Customs Chappie said that if Mr Dean quoted him in print that I would find no good will there from here on.”‘ [Related Links:TCJ on the story, Eddie Campbell Comics, Alan Moore Fan Site]
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September 30, 2000
[comics] The Twilight Gallery — Alan Moore’s epic Twilight of the Superheroes is brought to life as various comics artists take a passage from the proposal and sketch it out… John Totleben: ‘Y’know, when I started doing [the Doll Man sketch] I realized that what Alan was probably after was something like The Fly (the one with Jeff Goldblum). Around the time the Twilight proposal was being conceived, I had a conversation with Alan about that movie. He liked it quite a bit, but was especially amused by the part where Brundlefly was interviewing himself and talking about how he’d like to become an insect-politician. Somehow, I think that must have worked its way into his design for the Doll Man character, either intentionally or subconciously. I just played off of that’ [Related Link: Earlier Post On LMG]
[comics] Alan Moore and Dave Sim discuss Life, Magic, Religion, Comics and pretty much everything in between… [Click the four links for different parts of the conversation] ‘As so, too, From Hell: the Whitechapel murders took place over a finite period of time and claimed a finite number of victims. Looked at in terms of the area of information covered, this appears at first glance to be a containable task with clearly defined limits. The problem is all in the surface detail. As more detail becomes apparent with closer and closer examination, so too does the “surface” of the narrative become more crinkly, prickly, and fractal. The perimeter of the story starts to extend towards infinity.’ [Related Link:The Alan Moore Magic Site]
[[comics] Fandom reports that there is no sign of any detente between Alan Moore and DC Comics in the light of a 15th Anniversary edition of Watchmen. ‘”Regarding the Watchmen products, any renewed relationship with DC is not anything that people should be placing any hope in at all,” Moore told Newsarama. “I can tell you that right now, I’m having nothing to do with the Watchmen project – I completely disown it. I’m not at all interested if there are any more toys or anything at all comes out, and I shall not be cooperating with the project in any way.’
[comics] upcomingmovies and comics2film cover Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. ‘Inspired by “Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution” by the late Stephen Knight, “From Hell” suggests that Prince Albert “Eddy” Victor had fathered an illegitimate child, and when four Whitechapel prostitutes attempted to exploit this information, they were executed (the fifth victim was allegedly a case of mistaken identity). Complicit parties include Scotland Yard, the Freemasons and Victoria herself, while such London notables as Oscar Wilde and John “Elephant Man” Merrick make cameo appearances.’
[comics] Alan Moore interview in The Independent. ‘I was glad to have been forewarned as to his appearance. Draped in black, well over six feet tall, with feral eyes, unfashionably and unfeasibly long hair and beard, and fingers aswarm with silver scorpion rings, Moore looks like the kind of man who might have been thrown out of Black Sabbath for being too weird.’ [via C-Log]
[reading] Buy this comic: From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Here’s a review from Salon. ‘As ambitious and affecting as anything ever rendered in pictures and word balloons, “From Hell” combines an intricate mystery, insightful social criticism and unflinching brutality capable of unnerving the most desensitized pop audience. It’s publication as a book promises to give it a new lease on life. That’s what happened with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning “Maus,” which was originally published in installments in the arty comic “Raw.” “From Hell” is the only graphic novel since “Maus” to rival its ambition and historical depth.’
[comics] newsUnlimited talks to Alan Moore. “‘I can remember the exact panel during the writing of From Hell when I became interested in magic,’ he says. ‘Gull says that one place that gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. I wrote that sentence, and noticed the word ‘inarguable’, which is quite a big word, and that was the beginning of the end. I thought, ‘I can’t see why that isn’t true. And if it is true, then I’m probably going to have to change the whole of my life to fit around it.'”
