LWIA 4.3: The Origins of From Hell (Patreon)

Not quite the beginning of the chapter.

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Off the evidence of what was published in Taboo #2—“The Old Men on the Shore” prologue and the first chapter—it was not entirely clear what the comic was even about. Moore’s brief introduction talks around the matter, describing its subject only as “a notable and historic mystery,” and he was no clearer in interviews from the period. His cards are in fact played so close to the chest that, even as he talks about “the historical personage whose life is central to From Hell,” he doesn’t name him, and he doesn’t appear in the two chapters provided. Likewise, the chapters don’t point to anything clear—the prologue is cryptic about what its eponymous old men on the shore are talking about, and the first chapter is an otherwise contextless story about an illegitimate royal baby. It’s not even clear why this should be classified as a horror comic, although Moore is clear in the introduction that it is one. 

The puzzle is not hard to figure out for a reasonably informed or savvy reader. Particularly clued-in ones could undoubtedly identify the subject from the title alone. And although it was not quite a simple matter in the pre-Internet days of 1988, the list of names provided—Fred Abberline, Walter Sickert, a “Mr. Druitt,” and a dedication to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly—is more than enough to go on even without the prologue’s concluding line about Abberline’s house being “the house that Jack built.” But absent either a working knowledge of the subject or an afternoon in the library—which is to say for most readers—the matter was quite ambiguous. 

Moore, for his part, arrived at his subject obliquely. As he tells it, “the initial point of gestation came with Debbie Delano, who has always been very interested in murder—not as a way of life, but just something that she’s interested in.” Through conversations with her, he came to the conclusion that “A murder is an extreme and extraordinary human event that touches the lives of all the people around it in a number of different and often subtle ways. A murder has a structure of its own. It might be interesting to take a real life murder as a starting point for a graphic novel of some sort.” As with Big Numbers, which is in many ways From Hell’s stillborn twin, this idea stemmed out of Moore’s  disillusionment after Watchmen, and the question of “what the hell do I follow this with? This was so baroque, so complicated, and unfortunately it's all about superheroes. Is there anything I could do that would be as complex, as interesting, that was more rooted in the real world?”

The idea developed further when Moore saw an advertisement for Douglas Adams’s 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The book itself—which Moore cheerily notes he’s not actually read—is a lightweight thing, bodged together from a pair of Doctor Who scripts Adams had written a decade earlier, replacing Doctor Who as a protagonist with the eponymous Dirk Gently. In Adams’s book the notion of a holistic detective is deliberately silly, riffing on the word’s use in new age contexts. As Gently explains it, “the term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole.” This leads Gently to somewhat dubious practices like billing clients for a trip to the Bahamas on the grounds that he “plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations.” 

But Moore was taken by the title, reasoning that “holistic detective wouldn't have to just solve the whodunit of the crime, but they'd have to solve the entire culture, the entire world, the entire universe that that crime happened in.” Or, as he put it in the introduction in Taboo, “if you cut into a thing deeply enough, if your incisions are precise and persistent and conducted methodically, then you may reveal not only that thing’s inner workings, but also the meaning behind those workings… for my part, I am concerned with cutting into and examining the still-warm corpse of history itself.” The only thing to do was pick his murder. His first thoughts ran to “more obscure and unusual homicides, like the case of Dr. Buck Ruxton,” who he describes as “a kind of 1930s Lord Lucan figure who killed his wife and nanny but never managed to pull off the necessary subsequent disappearance.” 

But Moore was pondering this in 1988, and the world would soon impress an altogether more infamous option upon him in the form of the centenary of Jack the Ripper. This was less an idea that Moore had discarded than one that he’d skipped over entirely, “simply because I figured they were worn out, drained of any real vitality or meaning by the century of investigation and publicity attached to them.” But amidst the blur of Ripper retrospectives Moore found himself captivated, and what had initially seemed a flaw became an advantage. The Ripper murders were “something mythical, something about which dozens and dozens of separate legends and stories and lies and hoaxes and myths had been woven—which are almost as interesting as the murder itself.” Moreover, as per his thoughts on holistic detective work, Moore found himself compelled by the 1880s, where “there were all of these vectors in art, science, politics, and thought that formed a sort of vortex in the 1880s. At least in my readings of the situation, in symbolic terms, the Ripper murders—happening where they did and when they did—were almost like an apocalyptic summary of those times, of that entire Victorian age. Also, they prefigure a lot of the horrors of the 20th century. There was a little apocalypse in miniature there that prefigured the larger apocalypses to come.”

It’s notable that this quote from 1991—when only the Prologue through Chapter Two had been published, and work was still being done on Chapter Four—largely and accurately maps out the overall arc of where From Hell was going. Moore claims in the same interview that From Hell was mapped out “pretty well. Not so intensely as I have Big Numbers mapped out. I’ve had to leave myself a little more stretch with From Hell because there’s new information turning up all the time.” And indeed, a 1992 outline of the project shows that Moore did in fact have the broad outline in mind, right down to the “Dance of the Gull-Catchers” appendix that would not actually be completed for another seven years. The outline is imperfect—a chapter called “The Unfortunate Mr. Druitt” is listed as Chapter 8, when in fact it would be Chapter 11, and several chapters are either still untitled or have working titles—“The Ascension of Dr. Gull” instead of the more poetic “Gull, ascending,” for instance. But it’s clear that the basic structure of From Hell was in place early on, as the casual flex of its subtitle “being a melodrama in sixteen parts,” already in place when the Prologue and Chapter 1 came out.

Moore expanded on this process in his mammoth fax interview with Dave Sim in the backpages of Cerebus, describing how he “explored the landscape of the murders in terms of the literature surrounding the event. By this, I mean that I made a very broad reading and mapping, as if from a considerable altitude, a considerable distance from the event itself.” This is sensible enough, and sounds much like you’d imagine any writer talking about the initial stages of a complex and research-based project. Moore explains that he “could see what features of the narrative landscape seemed the most significant and promising, even if I couldn't provide a precise soil analysis at that point to say exactly why they seemed promising,” those details being something he figured out when he actually reached the requisite parts of his outline and got into the mucky details. As he put it, “if that first high-altitude mapping is perceptive and accurate enough, whatever tiny surface details are unearthed upon closer inspection are bound to fit right into it somewhere. That's how I work, anyway.”

And yet it is clear that Moore’s high level mapping was a far stranger process than just reading a bunch of books about Jack the Ripper.  He describes “some notes culled from a very old issue of The Fortean Times which deal with a group of alleged psychics being given photographs of cattle mutilations and asked to ‘read’ them Psychically. Phrases like ‘ears cut off...genitals mutilated...888...lines of force in the ground…’ seemed resonant to me, as did an article in another issue of Fortean Times in which one of their writers, possibly Matt Hoffman in his column of American arcana, drew parallels between a plotted graph of inexplicable cattle mutilations and a plotted graph of violent crimes against women during a similar period. Obviously, these snippets never found their way into the finished From Hell, but they formed a part of my high-altitude mental impression of the Whitechapel events: a kind of fuzzy, low definition map, as seen through cloud where nevertheless certain prominent features of the symbolic landscape could still be seen. Rivers of theory. High points of conjecture and ley-lines of association.” It’s clear from this that Moore’s map was not simply a compendium of Ripper trivia but something altogether more abstract, focused not simply on the five murders or his promising account of the prefigured twentieth century but on some larger notion of violence, symbol, and the hidden structures of the world.