Book Review - From Hell - Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell (Knockabout) ***** I know it has been out for ages, but P only gave me it last week. Have you seen the film ? Yes, sadly so did I. I realise that this is the worst possible way to start the review of the book but the film really was a shoddy and lazy bit of work when compared to Moore's detailed and twisting Jack the Ripper epic. Moore placed himself firmly at the top of the intellectual comic authors list with Watchmen, but even before that he brought us the wonderful Ballad of Halo Jones, and those gun toting, drug taking, mega-violent madmen DR & Quinch and V for Vendetta. Moore firmly places Sir William Gull as the Ripper from the outset, but the plot winds around the familiar characters of the Prince Regent and Walter Sickart, both of whom have been named as the serial killer in other works. Moore's Victorian London is dangerous and murky, the ruling classes intertwined with Masonic ritual, churches laid out as five pointed stars (this may well be true, I don't know the geography of London all that well), the streets rife with poverty and prostitution. The murdered girls are killed by Gull in his endeavour to preserve the good name of the Royal Family, and whatever the consequences, he succeeds in his own way. Campbells artwork is suitably dismal, London appears tired and dirty, without hope. My main problem with Campbell is his talent for capturing faces is not all that great, with new characters appearing thick and fast throughout the novel I was forced to read some passages time and again in order to understand who had just entered the frame, but his treatment of Moore's plot otherwise is exemplary, especially in the nighttime East End streets and the long and harrowing final murder sequence. Best of all, and this really shows the amount of research Moore has done for this project, is the Dance of the Gull Catchers sequence and the explanation of the theory of Koch's Snowflake, whereby conjecture becomes myth becomes accepted fact. Moore goes on to further explain that his work cannot be the end all definitive take on the Ripper, and gives reasons for this, and for those interested still further, a complete appendix for each chapter details what was truth in the saga, and which bits Moore created for dramatic purpose. All in all, another masterpiece from Alan Moore.