In preparation for the opening of the film version of "From Hell" I have been rereading Alan Moore and Eddie Campell's sixteen-part melodrama/graphic novel. It is pretty clear to me from the trailers and commercials I have seen for the film that the Hughes brothers have played around as much with this story as Moore and Campbell have played around with the "facts" of the Jack the Ripper story. But since we will never know the "truth" about Jack--scholars cannot even agree on exactly who he killed, which you would think was a rather important starting point in constructing any sort of theory--all that really matters is whether "From Hell" tells a compelling story. By that standard, "From Hell" certainly succeeds.In the Appendix to each chapter Moore careful details his sources, alterations and inventions for "From Hell" on a page-by-page basis. While such elaborations will only serve to infuriate most scholars of the Ripper, they are certainly of interest to us poor neophytes who cannot help but be fascinated by the details of the unsolvable mystery. Moore is working primarily off of Stephen Knight's "Jack the Riper: The Final Solution," which advances what Casebook: Jack the Ripper (the world's largest on-line public repository of Ripper-related information) labels the most controversial Ripper theory. Known as the Royal Conspiracy theory, it does have the delicious quality of involving virtually every person who has ever been a Ripper suspect. Despite its popularity, Ripperologists pretty much universally dismiss the theory (it ranks 8th on their list, mainly because one-third rated it 10 and another one-third rated it 1). But then the most popular suspect is currently James Maybrick, brought into prominence by the "Diary of Jack the Ripper" hoax (ah, but was it really?). Given everything that is out there, it is no wonder that the most "legitimate" suspect of the day, Francis Tumblety, gets lost. But all of this just reinforces the idea that "From Hell" is not history, but rather drama. Time and time again, it is the rationale of the STORY rather than the FACTS that drive Moore's narrative.The artwork by Eddie Campbell, aided and abetted at various times by April Post and Pete Mullins, is certainly evocative of the tale. I even think there is a point at which the reader has to be grateful that the bloodier episodes are rendered in stark black and white drawings. Campbell presents various styles at different times in the narrative, altering it to match the narrative. But it is Moore's epic story that captivates throughout as he puts his giant jigsaw puzzle together from all the evidence and his own speculations. When Moore works in the conception of Adolf Hitler, which happened in Austria around the time of the murders, as an ironic counterpart to his narrative, it is hard not to be impressed, just as we are horrified by the clinical details of the Ripper's murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which takes up all of Chapter 10. Through deduction, induction and abduction, Moore creates a compelling story and the fact that it is not what really happens has little to do with how much we enjoy "From Hell."Do I believe that Sir William Gull was indeed Jack the Ripper? No, I do not. I have heard many theories regarding his true identity that have been plausible, at least at face value, and I am more than willing to lead it to the knowledgeable experts to argue out their respective merits. But I was not reading "From Hell" to be convinced of the guilty or innocence of any one regarding the world's first infamous serial killer. I read it because as we have known ever since Alan Moore did his own take on the Swamp Thing, one of his greatest strengths as a writer is to make us look at old things in new ways. Now, if only the movie version can be half this good.
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