LWiA 4.3 Act 3 Omnibus (Patreon)

Beat Silksong. Back to work with me.

This was, however, a relatively slow process, especially if one dates its beginning to writing “What doth the Lord require of thee?” sometime in 1990. The two subsequent chapters published in Taboo are relatively tame. Chapter Five, “The Nemesis of neglect,” opens with a kind of glorious weirdness in the form of a three page scene of an unnamed couple in Braunau, Austria having sex, with the moment of orgasm being coupled with a vision of the doors of Hawksmoor’s Christ’s Church, Spitalfields bursting open with a torrent of blood. The dialogue is rendered in untranslated German, leaving the scene profoundly obscure unless one happens to recognize Braunau as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler some nine months after the scene is set.

After this endearing barminess, however, the issue settles into an altogether more normal flow, alternating between depictions of William Gull and Polly Nichols in the lead-up to her murder. Campbell—unusually—creates a new formalist conceit for the sequence, rendering Nichols’s sequences in his usual dense black linework while rendering Gull’s scenes (at least those in which he’s alone) in a soft inkwash. It’s a good issue, and Moore does an excellent job of painting the grim circumstances of an East End sex worker in the Victorian era—particularly memorable scene in which Nichols is shown sleeping on a bench, held up against a wall by a taut rope, and ultimately woken up when the lodging-house keeper simply unhooks the rope and lets her and her fellow homeless women simply fall forward onto the floor. But opening scene aside, it has nothing of the crazed and over-intense vigor of “What doth the Lord Require of thee?”

The final chapter published in Taboo, simply titled “September,” is similarly prosaic. Its purpose is to introduce—or reintroduce after the prologue published four years earlier—Inspector Abberline, who appears on every page as he begins his investigation of Nichols’s murder. Nor was the seventh chapter, “A torn envelope“—written and drawn for Taboo but never published there and instead left sitting for over a year—anything more than a functional advancement of Moore’s plot and themes. This is, of course, far from nothing; Moore’s plot and themes for From Hell were vast and towering things. More to the point, by the 90s Moore was a skilled enough writer that even his “get high and bash out a script in a night for fifty grand” comics were pretty good; his merely functional still towered above most people’s ambition. And the issue is indeed full of compelling beats, most notably a sequence where Gull, leading Annie Chapman, the second of the Ripper murders, down an alley is transfixed by an open window through which he sees a man standing in front of a television. The scene is unexplained, although the annotations establish that Moore was working from a documented ghost story about the location—it’s simply an escalation of Gull’s hallucination after the murder of Polly Nichols, where he perceives her as “full of light.” But it’s nevertheless a clear and compelling escalation of the story’s conceptual stakes in an otherwise comparatively placid issue.

But beneath the surface, things were plainly spiralling. Moore’s long dead “eight page chapters” plan was by now off by a factor of five, with both “The Nemesis of neglect” and “A torn envelope” ballooning to forty pages each. But it is perhaps more instructive to compare the two issues. “The Nemesis of neglect” is long in no small part because of decadences like a six page sequence of three-panel pages. But despite its length, its focus is acute; opening sequence aside, every scene focuses either on Gull or Nichols. “A torn envelope,” meanwhile, features the murder of Annie Chapman, but has nothing like the singular focus of “The Nemesis of neglect.” The chapter moves around freely, with numerous subplots, and Chapman’s murder isn’t even the climax—it takes place on page twenty-five, and though it lingers in the aftermath for several pages the chapter has moved on entirely by the final scene, which is Abberline reading the letter from which the “Jack the Ripper” sobriquet came (which Moore presents as a fake penned by a journalist in order to tart up the story). There’s a clear sense of the story threatening to spiral out of control, thrashing like a pissed off octopus in Moore’s increasingly desperate grip.

And then it broke free, at least momentarily. Taboo folded and Moore coasted into 1993 with little to do but desperately grab hold of some Image work—the only work he put out in what was otherwise a complete wash of a year for him. And even that was fraught, with Moore falling unexpectedly behind in his work on 1963, much to the dismay of his collaborators. Rick Veitch has described how Moore would “disappear for a week, two weeks at a time” suggesting this was in part because he was “getting into magic and he was exploring magic using psychedelics, and he had a mini nervous breakdown,”[1] although he declined to share this information with his collaborators at the time. Meanwhile things got even more vexed for From Hell. Tundra managed a second issue of reprints in the middle of the year before going under entirely. Its assets were ultimately acquired by Kitchen Sink Press, a by then longstanding underground publisher run by Dennis Kitchen, which moved its operations to Massachusetts to take over the cratering wreckage of the company. Recognizing From Hell as one of the actually commercially viable projects coming out of Tundra, Kitchen Sink worked to get things back on the rails, putting out a third issue in December of 1993 containing the last of the Taboo material.

By this time the dam had finally broken in full. On November 23rd, at his fortieth birthday party, Alan Moore declared that he would become a magician. As noted, this is no more of a lightswitch moment than the “grandeur and monstrosity” line. Indeed, in at least one telling of the story Moore says that “on that birthday I stated that I had become a magician,”[2] making it clear that this was a public acknowledgment of something that was already true. He’s also suggested that his motivation in this was simply that he was concerned about his own mental state, noting that he “told friends they ought to be keeping an eye on me.”[3] Mind, he’s also said he did it because he’d “started to run out of ways of worrying people. You should have seen the looks on their faces,”[4] so perhaps one is best advised to go with his eventual claim in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic that he did it “for reasons which were no more clear to him than those of his associate’s magic sword experiment of nearly twenty years before.”

Whatever the reason, though, his decision plainly shifted the course of his previously disorganized and seemingly quite worrisome explorations. As he put it in one of his faltering attempts to account for himself, his declaration was made “so I couldn’t back out of it.”[5] But he knew the score, as Clint Mansell would put it. Speak a thing into existence like that and it’ll soon come true anyway. And sure enough, it did. A month and a half later, in the early days of 1994, Moore had his own version of William Gull’s encounter with Jahbulon, thankfully spurred by psilocybin instead of a stroke. In what he would identify as his first visionary experience, Alan Moore looked upon the golden face of what would henceforth be his god.

A short time later, in February of 1994, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell took a meeting that would be crucial for the successful completion of From Hell. By this point Campbell had already drawn Chapter Eight, which would come out that June, and was at work on Chapter Nine, which would see print at year’s end. Nevertheless, there was the plain problem of how to make money off of the comic. Much of it had been produced under Taboo’s $100 a page format, which meant that Campbell and Moore had each made less than $9000 for the first 174 pages of the comic. The standalone issues had moved to Kitchen Sink, but they were hardly top sellers, selling only ten thousand copies an issue or so, and publishing only two or three issues a year. Moore had largely solved the problem for himself via his Image work, but Campbell had no similar options. And so they turned to the most obvious potential source of income: Hollywood.

And so the pair took a meeting with producer Don Murphy, who was then in post-production on his and his partner Jane Hamsher’s debut film, the soon to be infamous Natural Born Killers. Moore was, at least according to Hamsher, who recalls Murphy giving her stacks of his comics while they were in film school together, “one of Don’s big heroes,”[6] although this relationship would eventually sour to the point where Murphy described Moore, not entirely inaccurately, as “an old man who smokes too much hash and prays to a lizard god.”[7] This took place in one of the surprisingly large number of blog comment sections in which Don Murphy can be found angrily defending his honor against anyone who might speak ill of his work—indeed, Murphy once optioned a book, James Robert Smith’s The Flock, after getting into it with Smith in the comments of Eddie Campbell’s blog. For his part, Moore has never mentioned Murphy once save for a passing description of him as “a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about.”[8]

This cavalierness is generally in keeping with Moore’s attitude towards adaptations of his work, at least prior to him souring on the idea completely in the wake of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, also produced by Murphy. For all that he’s withering about them in interviews, Moore professes to “have never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I’ve never wanted to, and there’s absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.”[9] (Asked to resolve the contradiction between that attitude and his criticisms, Moore joked “I do prefer to criticise things from a position of ignorance.”[10]) To him the major virtue of film adaptations was that “you got a lot of option money, and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren’t going to make the film, which was a perfect result.”[11] In this regard, the film adaptations of his work ought be thought of as an extension of his larger “artist as con man” ethos—indeed, when an interviewer put to him that his desire to get paid for movies that never got made amounted to trying to get money for old rope, Moore positively beams with agreement. And even when the movies did come out, Moore was largely indifferent to them, as evidenced by his not even bothering to watch them. As he put it, he maintained “a sense of emotional distance” from the films, citing the anecdote of Raymond Chandler being asked what he thought of Hollywood ruining his books and pointing to his shelf to note that the books are actually just fine up there.

This attitude undoubtedly served Moore well when it came to the From Hell movie, which finally came out in 2001. Obviously From Hell was never going to be an easy adaptation, but the scale of misguidedness involved in the film is still striking. Campbell recalls the producers coming to him saying that they had a great idea—“you don’t know who the Ripper is until right at the end!”, noting, obviously, that this “was the first thing we kicked out, because Alan absolutely detested the idea of turning murder into a parlor game.”[12] And this largely sets the tone for the grimly witless spectacle. In practice it’s not even much of a parlor game—the film repeatedly stresses that only a surgeon with a detailed knowledge of human anatomy could possibly be the killer and the only character to fit that description is William Gull, an otherwise pointless-seeming character who shows up occasionally to give Inspector Abberline advice.

As for Abberline, the character is a strange composite of the inspector and Edward Lees, whereby he’s a cop who gets visions—accurate ones, thus precluding making things up to have them come true anyway. Played by Johnny Depp, the character is, in Moore’s words, “an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force of 1888, would have gotten him beat up by the other officers.”[13] The romance between him and Marie Kelly, which in the book is so tentative that Campbell goes to considerable lengths not to show the face of the woman Abberline keeps chatting up at the pub, becomes a main plot, with Kelly helpfully signposted as the important one of the sex workers by the fact that all of the other ones are portrayed as impoverished grotesques while Kelly is groomed immaculately to Hollywood starlet standards.

Vestigial bits of the comic occasionally pop out—Gull directs one of his victim’s attention to Cleopatra’s Needle as he kills her, John Merrick makes a brief appearance, and the murders are said to be committed in locations forming a five-pointed star much like the one depicted in “What doth the Lord require of thee?” Gull even gets a brief allusion to the idea of birthing the twentieth century in the course of his villain monologue after being uncovered, which Ian Holm delivers with crumbs of scenery still falling from his mouth. But they exist in no context—not even a historical one, with the liberties taken extending far beyond changing Abberline from a portly middle aged copper to a tortured fop. The film’s actual interests extend no further than being a gaslit slasher flick, and a fairly mean-spirited one at that, treating its female characters as nothing more than bags of blood that can soon be splattered across the screen.

Nevertheless, the old rope sold, and for a decent chunk of change at that, giving Moore and Campbell the freedom needed to go and actually finish the beast.

The first part of From Hell to be originally produced for Kitchen Sink and not Taboo was chapter eight, “Love is enough,” a transitional work in every sense. Campbell was drawing it in 1993, meaning Moore wrote the script prior to his magical awakening. Indeed, the timeline suggests it originates in the same period as 1963, a document of Moore at the nadir of his tailspin, moments before he abruptly pulled up and took flight anew. Certainly it marks the point where it is easiest to imagine From Hell going the way of Big Numbers, drowning in the sheer complexity of its own ideas.

Even the centerpiece of the issue is unruly, with Moore confronting the so-called double event, the twin killings of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on September 30th. As with the murder of Anne Chapman in “A Torn Envelope,” neither is given singular focus within the issue—indeed, Gull doesn’t even show up until page twenty. Neither do the victims dominate proceedings—Stride only appears on four pages prior to the scene in which she’s killed. Eddowes gets a bit more, but this is mostly necessitated by the contortions necessary to get her killing to work with Moore’s larger plot—Eddowes was not a sex worker, and was not among the four women involved in the attempted blackmail. Instead Moore contrives to have her murder be a matter of mistaken identity, with Gull getting bad information that she’s Marie Kelley. Setting up the mechanics of this, and more broadly introducing Eddowes as a character at all (her only previous appearance being a two page cameo in chapter seven), requires some work.

But while getting his ducks in a row with Eddowes requires some effort, it’s no more the focus of the issue than Stride. Abberline and Marie Kelley get just as much attention as her, if not moreso. And there’s also room for a two page scene catching up with Prince Albert Victor, and another, wordless scene of Netley having a nervous breakdown over the stresses of being Jack the Ripper’s driver. There is simply too much going on to describe the issue as having a singular focus.

The problem—if it even is a problem—is not that Moore is unfocused, but that there is simply an awful lot of things he needs to focus on. The hubris of solving the entirety of Victorian England and the dawn of the twentieth century via an unfounded conspiracy theory about Jack the Ripper is making itself known. The result is that even substantial elements rich with thematic weight are pushed down in the mix, not for any reason but by the sheer cacophony of ideas and concepts.

Consider William Morris, for instance. One of the great British polymaths, Morris was a major nexus point of Victorian culture, working simultaneously as a writer, translator, designer, textile artist, printer, and socialist. Born to a well-off family, he developed an early love of architecture, which developed at Oxford into a specific love of the medieval. He was drawn from there into the cooling embers of romanticism, especially after befriending the painter Edward Burne-Jones and becoming the cornerstone of the so-called Birmingham Set along with Charles Faulkner, and then befriending Burne-Jones’s mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti and becoming an enthusiastic backer of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

This list of influences gestures at the core of Morris’s aesthetic principles, which were rooted in a nostalgic rejection of industrialism in favor of reviving older styles. He was the sort of man who described London as a “spreading sore,” yearning to establish a rural community of crafters. In 1860 he commissioned Red House in rural Kent and moved there, establishing, alongside Faulkner, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and others, an interior design company initially called Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co, but later simply Morris & Company, selling murals, hand-embroidered fabrics, and stained glass designs. His first iconic success came in the form of a wallpaper design titled Trellis, depicting roses twining around the wooden beams of the eponymous structure. Morris’s principles eventually led to him becoming the father of the Arts and Crafts movement (although the actual Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from which it drew its name was founded by Walter Crane). This movement rejected industrialism and excessive ornamentation, favoring instead a focus on utility and quality of design, insisting that a designer should also be a craftsman heavily involved in the actual execution of his ideas.

Separate from his career as a designer, meanwhile, Morris was an accomplished writer and poet. His earliest works to get attention were epic poems—a retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a cycle of retellings called The Earthly Paradise, and a reworking of the Volsunga Saga. But in his later career this approach began to evolve. In 1889 he published A Tale of the House of the Wolflings and The Roots of the Mountains, a pair of novels about medieval Germanic tribes living in and around the forest of Mirkwood. These had their obvious roots in the Norse sagas he’d previously been rewriting, complete with the slight tinge of the fantastic—details like a cursed armor and discussion of monsters and wights living in the woods. And he would develop further in that direction with his late career works The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, both published through his own Kelmscott Press, an effort to bring the values of the Arts and Crafts movement to printing by reviving the style and detail of the first printed books. These were outright fantasy novels—among the first of the genre, with The Well at World’s End being the first example of a full-on secondary world story.

That Morris does not get the recognition for his role in creating the genre that his contemporary H.G. Wells does for creating science fiction is largely down to the fact that fantasy, unlike its sister genre, has ample roots in mythology and in ancient genres like fairy tales, making the question of its creation even harder than usual. But Morris was not without his contributions to the other half of the era’s development of the fantastic. In 1890 he penned News from Nowhere (or An Epoch of Rest), an account of a futuristic utopia. In this, Morris was drawing from the third major strand of his life and career—his ardent socialism. The novel was at its core a response to another piece of utopian literature, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s vision of the year 2000 was based primarily on a vision of nationalized and heavily automated industries, which was of course anathema to Morris, who offered a competing vision of a pastoral socialism in which harmony with nature renders work no longer a miserable drudgery and enabling a truly equal society.

Morris’s involvement in the socialist movement dated to the beginning of the 1880s, when he became disillusioned with the Liberal Party following the rise to power of William Gladstone, concluding that even their radical wing could never hope to escape its middle class nature. Following Henry Hydman’s foundation of the Democratic Federation—Britain’s first outright socialist party—Morris joined the movement and, due to his profile, swiftly rose through the ranks, joining the party’s executive committee just five months after joining and quickly becoming its treasurer (as well as designing its membership card, of course). He quickly made use of his fame to become one of the most visible and outspoken proponents of socialism, touring the country to lecture about it, at times to his hosts’ considerable chagrin.

There was always a strangeness to Morris’s socialism, as News from Nowhere ultimately suggests. He did not, for instance, step down as the head of his company, although any controversy this might have caused within the Democratic Federation was undoubtedly blunted by his willingness to bankroll it. And besides, his involvement with the movement was sufficiently ardent that it quickly ate the bulk of its time. In 1884 he was one of the major figures in a schism within the party, rejecting its electoral focus and splitting off to form the openly revolutionary Socialist League, designing and editing their newspaper, Commonweal, in which he initially serialized News From Nowhere, although he was eventually booted from the organization after it took an anarchist turn.

But for all his plain import, in From Hell all that Morris proves good for is a two page sequence in which Moore takes advantage of the fact that Liz Stride was murdered in Dutfield’s Yard on Berner Street, beneath the International Working Men’s Educational Club (whose steward discovered her body) to have the murder take place while William Morris is reading his poem “Have No Thought for Tomorrow.” Moore is being slightly apocryphal here—although Morris frequented the club, there is no evidence he was there on the night of Stride’s murder, and his selection of poem, from Morris’s 1872 collection Love is Enough is purely for the contrast it provides as Campbell alternates between panels of Morris reading and panels of Stride’s brutal murder. It’s a comparative throwaway, the rich tapestry of connection and significance that Morris represents reduced to a small tile in Moore’s sprawling mosaic of the times.

Perhaps the biggest sign that things were getting out of hand came behind the scenes, however. “Love is enough” marks the point where Moore stopped delivering complete scripts to Campbell, instead sending a couple of pages at a time. This was not the first time that something like this had happened—Dave Gibbons loves to recount how Moore would send chunks of script for Watchmen by taxi as they were completed, although the logistics of that raise questions. But it highlights the sheer difficulty of what Moore is doing in these pages—the basic unmanageability of what he was, somehow, managing.

No, more than just managing. It would be easy, amidst the density of the book’s thematics, for From Hell to lapse into being a sterile intellectual exercise. Indeed, some of Moore’s critics, not least Grant Morrison, largely suggest this is his primary failure mode. But even amidst the mad bustle of “Love is enough” Moore repeatedly finds time for the human scale. Stride may not get much page time prior to her murder, but the scene of her being thrown out of her lodging after a fight with her boyfriend is quietly devastating, made all the more so by Campbell’s decision to have her clothes, thrown out the window after she’s been evicted, land on the sidewalk in the same arrangement that her corpse will be found in twenty-six pages later. Similarly Abberline’s flirtation with “Emma,” who the reader is led to conclude is Marie Kelley (though her face is never shown in the scenes with Abberline) paints both with a kind of innocent despair, made all the more heartbreaking when his wife, also named Emma, remarks on how sweet it is that he’s been murmuring her name in his sleep. Even the murders are studded with stark details like the beat where Gull “bares his teeth, and he is paleolithic, even pre-human. No civilization remains,”[14] a point emphasized by his reduction to guttural grunts of “nnugh” and “mrrooargh” as he dismembers Eddowes.

Of the many elements in From Hell that resonate with Moore’s descent into wizardry (or, if one prefers, ascent into madness), one of the most straightforward are the series of increasingly intense visions that accompany Gull’s murders. These began with his seeing light spilling out of the disemboweled body of Polly Nichols, then with the unexpected vision of a 1960s living room on the way to his murder of Anne Chapman. Chapter eight, containing two murders, unsurprisingly escalates the matter considerably. The murder of Liz Stride, which is interrupted with the inaccurate news that Marie Kelley has just been released from jail in Bishopgate, only has the opportunity for a small hiccup—Gull, dazed, remarks that “I remember now… this is the one that I didn’t finish isn’t it?” before confusedly asking “has this… has this happened before?” Once Gull is hied off to Mitre Square to intercept Catherine Eddowes, however, Moore is able to up the stakes considerably, with the climactic moment of the murder seeing Gull standing, arms raised in triumph and dripping with blood, beneath a skyscraper from the modern-day Mitre Square—an image depicted in the comic’s first splash page since his earlier vision of Jahbulon.

With chapter nine, titled simply “From Hell,” Moore’s newfound dedication to magic finally spilled into the pages of his great work. Before long this would be visible across his work—his Image comics of the period are littered with little references like having an extradimensional being named Aiwass, the insane Spawn in the future taking the title of Ipissimus, or the self-description of one of the clones of John Colt as “the part that’s left after the soul is gone” and an “abandoned husk.” But “From Hell” was the first place that his interests manifested in his work. Indeed, it happens on the third page, where Inspector Abberline is buttonholed by an adolescent boy named Alexander who asks whether he thinks the killings might be a work of magic. Abberline scoffs, declaring that “it’s all a pile of bollocks and there’s no such thing as magic,” to which young Alexander fixes him with a disdainful look before proclaiming, “you’re wrong. Goodbye.” Although the fact that Alexander was the birth name of Aleister Crowley was, perhaps, a bit obscure for most readers, the Tundra and Kitchen Sink editions helpfully included several pages of annotations in the back of every issue where Moore could snark about how he “later changed his name to Aleister for largely numerological reasons when he discovered that the letters in Alexander only added up to the second cousin of the beast.”

Indeed the references come hot and heavy over the early portions of the book. When Gull is brought before Queen Victoria to explain why, exactly, silencing the would-be blackmailers has to be done with “such excessive ghastliness,” he explains that they serve as a warning to the Illuminati, which he explains “has reached England via a recently founded order called ‘The Golden Dawn.’” Three pages later, Gull is running into William Butler Yeats, who he taunts about his membership in the Golden Dawn, which he describes as “a splinter, split from the bough of Masonry, no longer nourished by its truths nor anchored by the roots of its tradition, soon to wither.”

The story of the Golden Dawn begins with William Wynn Westcott, a Freemason and a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a Rosicrucian order whose membership was drawn entirely from the Masons, as well as of the Theosophical Society. In 1887 Wescott was given a sixty page document by one of his Masonic brethren, Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford. Known as the Cipher Manuscripts, these consisted of pages of strange glyphs, which Westcott identified as a cipher from Johannes Trithemius’s 16th century compendium the Polygraphia, and quickly set about decoding. The actual origins of the Cipher Manuscripts remain unclear and hotly debated. They’re generally taken to have been written some time after 1855, as they make use of Éliphas Lévi’s connection between the Tarot and the Kabbalah, and they’re plainly British given that the decrypted plaintext is in English, but beyond that one can only speculate.

Appended to the manuscript—at least according to Westcott—was an additional page with directions on how to contact a supposedly famous Rosicrucian named “Fraulein Sprengel” at the Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart. Westcott proceeded to contact her, whereby she explained that she had contact with the Secret Chiefs—a group of powerful adepts living on the astral plane. Acting as their representative, Sprengel granted Westcott a charter to establish a British branch of her order, the Golden Dawn; shortly thereafter, Westcott announced that Sprengel was deceased. All of this, it must be stressed, was complete nonsense. The additional page of the Cipher Manuscripts providing Sprengel’s address is plainly written in different handwriting than the rest of it, and reads left to right, whereas the rest of the manuscript reads right to left. No evidence of Sprengel’s existence has ever been found, and it is almost universally agreed that she was an invention of Westcott’s in order to justify his subsequent creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Aiding him in this task was Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a fellow Freemason and Rosicrucian, who Westcott tasked with translating the descriptions in the Cipher Manuscripts into full blown rituals. This was no small task. For instance, the first initiation ritual for the grade of neophyte at one point instructs the candidate to be stopped and have an exchange with the Hiereus—one of the officers in the order. In the Cipher manuscripts this exchange is denoted thusly:

HS: Pass not til you know my name

C: Darkness

HS: Fear not—pass on.

Mathers expands this, specifying that the candidate should be threatened with a sword as the Hiereus proclaims “Thou canst not pass by me saith the Guardian of the West unless thou canst tell me my name,” to which the candidate is to respond “Darkness is thy name, the Great One of the Paths of the Shades,” at which point the sword is slowly lowered as the Hiereus says “Child of Earth, fear is failure. Therefore be without fear, for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not. Thou hast known me, so pass thou on.”

In other words, Mathers took the structural notes contained within the Cipher Manuscripts—which consisted of little more than a composite summary of various esoteric traditions—and made them into the poetry and theater of actual rituals. This proved a smash success, unifying a variety of independent traditions into a one-stop shop for esoteric knowledge that, crucially, allowed women to be full members, and the Golden Dawn soon became a trendy and vibrant organization that, at various times, saw actress Florence Farr, authors Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer, and Arthur Machen, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and, of course, William Butler Yeats all join.

For the first several years the Golden Dawn consisted of what is now referred to as the Outer Order—a series of degrees mapping to the lower reaches of the Tree of Life. Eventually, however, Mathers produced a second set of rituals granting three further degrees and access to the Inner Order, the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, or Order of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross. More interestingly, however, he claimed that he had obtained these rituals by making his own contact with the Secret Chiefs.

It would be easy to scoff at this. The Secret Chiefs, after all, originate in Westcott’s Sprengel hoax. Mathers even knew as much, or at least he figured it out by 1900 when he wrote to Florence Farr to tell her that Westcott “either himself forged or procured to be forged the professed correspondence” with Sprengel. And yet there is no evidence that Mathers was being disingenuous when he claimed to have made independent contact with them; by all appearances he had a genuine mystical experience, and a tremendously powerful one at that. And whatever one might think of the validity of that experience, the fact remains that Mathers was able to derive another set of poetic and effective rituals out of it. Westcott may have made it all up, but once again it came true anyway.

In 1896 Westcott stepped down from involvement in the Golden Dawn for reasons that are not entirely clear, leaving Mathers in complete control. This was awkward for several reasons. For one, Mathers had decamped to Paris while the center of Golden Dawn activity remained the Isis-Urania Temple in London. For another, Mathers became increasingly dictatorial in his leadership, resulting in growing restlessness among the British contingent. Things came to a head when Aleister Crowley, a young hotshot of a member who’d torn through the degrees of the Outer Order, was blocked by leadership at the Isis-Urania Temple from ascending to the Inner Order on the broad grounds that he was a complete cunt, which, admittedly, he was. Crowley made an end-run around their leadership and traveled instead to Paris, where Mathers initiated him into the Inner Order, only to have the Isis-Urania Temple refuse to recognize this. After a dispute in which Crowley, dispatched by Mathers to seize control of the Temple and start administering loyalty tests, was removed from the premises in full ritual gear after Yeats called the cops on him the order collapsed into a series of splinter factions around the turn of the century.

One of these factions, of course, was forged by Crowley, who would have his own contact with the Secret Chiefs a few years later. Another was the Stella Matutina, or Morning Star, which in 1933 was joined by Israel Regardie, who had served for a few years as Crowley’s personal secretary. Regardie was deeply unimpressed with the organization, and proceeded to write a tell-all, My Rosicrucian Adventure (later reprinted as What You Should Know About the Golden Dawn), followed by a four volume set detailing all of the group’s rituals. Another strand came from Pamela Coleman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite, who together designed an Golden Dawn-derived Tarot deck that quickly became the default template for modern decks.

In this regard, then, Gull’s denunciation of the order to Yeats was, like much of what he says in From Hell, at once accurate and misleading. For one thing, the entire conversation was an anachronism on Moore’s part—Yeats didn’t actually join the Golden Dawn until 1890. And, obviously, his declaration that the Golden Dawn would soon wither was literally true. But for all that his declaration that “the older ways have yet more blood in them” was literally true within From Hell, it would be the Golden Dawn, not Freemasonry, that formed the cornerstone of the twentieth century’s western occult tradition.

But magic was far from the only thing, or even the main thing that “From Hell” is concerned with, however. In his outline of the remaining chapters prepared for Don Murphy at the beginning of the year, he described chapter nine as being about “the increasingly chaotic period of thirty-nine days from the double murder of Catherine Eddowes and Elizbaeth Stride to the even of Marie Kelly’s murder on November 9th. All the characters are gradually driven to points of extremity in their approach to the final apocalyptic slaughter.”[15] The sense of increasing chaos is reflected in the page count, which ballooned to a plainly ridiculous fifty-eight pages.

And yet one place the chaos isn’t reflected seems to be in Moore himself. Yes, the page count is out of control and he’s still sending Eddie Campbell his pages in batches, but where previous installments felt as though they were at the edge of control, “From Hell” moves with a strangely methodical precision. It has no shortage of digressions, even above and beyond Moore’s smattering of occult references—old subplots like Prince Albert Victor are brought back for a concluding sequence, odd period details like an early effort at using bloodhounds for police work, and even a quick scene in which Gull bullies a museum attendant over the purchase of an Egyptian sarcophagus. This latter scene, set in the Egypt room of the British Museum, also sees Moore’s scripts in their most lyrical mode—indeed, Campbell suggests that “the concentration of phrases to be relished is denser here than in any other two pages of the scripts.” Moore describes how “Gull just stands there impassively and watches him go. colossal sleeping kings and jackal-headed deities keeping their eternal silent vigil all about him. Half-hour old echoes still whisper and clatter faintly. A zombie sibilance in the far corners of the room. Maybe Gull eats a grape,” specifies that “as the two men stand talking to each other, their reflections waver indistinctly in the polished tiles at their feet, their voices ringing and echoing in the stone ears of the dead pharaohs,” and explains how Gull’s “smile might be mistaken for a friendly one were it not for the cold, sardonic and unwavering superiority always evident in Gull’s eyes. To him, everyone else is a particularly amusing strain of paramecium.”[16]

It is worth comparing the issue to the two before it. With “Love is enough” it is in many ways difficult to even articulate a unifying theme of the issue. Its goal is simply to keep all of the plates spinning—no small task given the number of them in play, but nevertheless operating on a somewhat lower artistic level than, say, “What doth the Lord require of thee?” “A torn envelope” is in some ways even worse. It clearly has a primary purpose—to paint the tragic picture of Anne Chapman’s final days. Two-thirds of the issue is focused on Chapman or her murder, and she features on all but five pages of the book prior to her death. And yet Moore is stuck awkwardly giving a nine page coda after the murder in order to deal with other matters, resulting in an issue that’s oddly disjointed.

In contrast, for all of its sprawl and chaos, “From Hell” has a plain focus. This is perhaps clearest in its ending sequence. Starting from page thirty-seven the comic is unwaveringly focused on the buildup to the final murder—that of Marie Kelly. Every single scene from that point on either features her or is expressly about her. But the thirty-six pages before are equally focused on delivering the book to that monomaniacal focus. The issue opens with a man standing in Mitre Square the morning after Catherine Eddowes’s murder, ranting to a crowd about how the place is cursed and recounting an urban legend about a homicidal monk before switching gears and selling walking sticks and pamphlets about the murder. Abberline, standing at the outskirts of the crowd, reacts in horror: “Four women get killed and it’s like the start of a new industry! Only the start, mind you. Mark my words, in ‘undred years there’ll still be cunts like ‘im, wrapping these killings up in supernatural twaddle. Making a living out of murder.” Moore is, of course, poking fun at himself here, as he readily admits in the annotations (“Sometimes, after all you’ve done for them, your characters just turn on you”), but there’s a larger point in highlighting the cultural feeding frenzy that sprung up around the murders. It establishes that events have acquired an independent momentum.

This, in turn, ensures that once Gull enters the picture, positively jaunty on the back of his perceived triumph, he no longer feels as though he’s driving events, a point that’s made clear when, a few pages later, he finds out that he failed to actually kill Marie Kelly. Henceforth his actions feel largely inevitable—he becomes a fundamentally reactive figure. Even when he has Netley dictate the eponymous “From Hell” letter in a bid to “reclaim from them the myth they sought to shape for profit” and “give them truer legends, grand enough to slake their morbid thirsts,” he is plainly chasing events, as demonstrated when Abberline largely treats the letter as barely distinct from any of the hundreds of other supposed Jack the Ripper letters. “What kind of men write stuff like this,” he despairs, and Moore and Campbell move to a montage of people writing fake Ripper letters: a minister holed up in his room instead of reading to his children, a bloke at the bar, a man who’s masturbating as he writes, and a pair of grinning, impish teenagers, all caught up in the mad rush.

Only then does the comic enter its final stretch of singular focus on Kelly and her impending demise—a fate she’s acutely aware of, caught up in an almost nihilistic fatalism. The issue concludes with three pages focused almost entirely on her door, which Gull has obtained the key to. Seventeen of the issue’s final twenty-five panels are an identical composition of the door, sometimes with people entering or departing, but for seven of them simply a silent panel of a closed door. As with most seemingly simple things in the book, there is a fiendish complexity here—one that left Campbell “going back over and over the second half of chapter 9 for months after it was first published in December 1994, trying to figure out all the moves to be sure they made sense and to see if I’d done something wrong.”[17] He compares the sequence to a shell game—an elaborate sequence of comings and goings carefully set up to enable a future reveal Moore was considering but still uncertain of. Such is the precision of the sequence that they even have the tiny structural conceit of having three consecutive pages in which Marie Kelly is seen to enter her flat in panel six—the first two times with a customer, and then finally alone—only to have Gull, on the final page, enter in the fifth panel, “creating a frisson of alarm in the reading by being one panel ahead of schedule.”[18] The comic then holds for four straight panels on the silent door, unchanging save for the subtle shifts of the light, focusing the reader on the terrible apocalypse commencing within.

That apocalypse would form the sole content of Chapter ten, “The best of all tailors.” As Moore described it in his synopsis for Don Murphy, “over thirty or forty pages, in excruciating real time, we watch Gull dissect Marie Kelly.” This is, obviously, considerably more space than any of the previous four murders got, but this is consistent both with the murder’s status as the climactic act of Gull’s ritual and with the sheer horror of it. Unlike the other four murders, which were conducted outdoors on public streets, Marie Kelly was murdered in her home at 13 Miller’s Court, allowing her killer several hours to work—time he used to extensively and horrifically dismember her body. The autopsy report gives an awful sense of the scale of this: “The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.” But the clinical nature of this description elides the horror elicited by the actual crime scene photo. In it, Kelly’s body lies on her bed in what is still a recognizably human pose. Her legs are slightly bent, but around the knees give way to a sprawling pile of gore that does not even look like anything save the absence of what should be there. Humanity momentarily reasserts itself for her left arm, bent and folded over the remnants of her abdomen, but then one reaches her chest, which is horribly recognizable as muscles stretched over an exposed rib cage. Her hair is still in place, and even looks well groomed; below it, a bit of her forehead remains. But her face itself, which is turned directly towards the camera, is simply not there, replaced by a blur of carnal noise. It is an uncanny tableau—to a modern eye used to Hollywood special effects it looks frankly unreal, although in fact when it came time to actually depict it in the film the directors blanch from it, keeping the camera almost exclusively on Gull, with Kelly’s body, when it’s even in shot, blurred in the background. In the handful of shots where it is relatively visible, the directors ironically increase the level of mutilation so as to remove the awful sense of humanity that is, in practice, the worst thing about the photo.

It would not be accurate to say that Moore had spent the bulk of From Hell looking forward to this issue, but it’s clear that he had a certain professional relish about the prospect. Talking about it several years before he and Campbell actually reached it, he explained that “We’re going to show what it’s like to be in a room for two hours cutting up a woman,” agreeing when his interviewer suggested that this actually sounded strangely tedious, and adding that “given the restrictions we’re setting for ourselves with From Hell, there’s going to be very little dialogue. I presume that you don’t talk. It would be a bit phony to have the guy suddenly start talking. Perhaps the odd little words to himself, a mumbled snatch of a musical refrain under his breath, a couple of lines before it peters out. It’s going to be a big challenge.”[19] In practice, however, it was not the technical challenge but the emotional one that seems to have stuck for Moore. Describing it a few years after the issue came out, he notes that “to get into that mind-state, to be William Gull, if only for the two or three days it takes me to write such a piece, it’s a life-changing experience.”[20]

The scope of this is clearly born out in Moore’s annotations for the issue. These text pages had, for the preceding six issues of the Tundra/Kitchen Sink series, been divided up into sections for individual scenes. Here, however, Moore simply presents a single three and a half page essay, explaining at the start that “Appendix notes for this chapter seem almost unnecessary, given the singular and specific nature of the event described” before breaking down his rough reasoning on presenting the murder the way he did. He concludes by noting that “While no one can profess to know what thoughts went through the mind of whoever it was in Marie Kelly’s room that night, it seems to me that, at least on the level of the killer’s own emotional reality, some kind of Apocalypse transpired. Human experience went to the very edge, there in that sordid little flat, then stepped beyond. The depiction here is as close as I can get to a portrayal of what might have happened on that night. In that room. In that mind.

To be absolutely honest, it’s as close as I want to get.”

Moore based his approach on several factors. First and foremost is the simple historical fact of the thing, which Moore got deep into the weeds of. Writing in the introduction to the 1994 script collection, he related the story of being offered “newly-published post mortem details that related to Jack’s final victim, the hideously-mutiliated Marie Jeannette Kelly, including some previously undisclosed facial wounds.” Moore admits that this is a difficult offer to understand the appeal of. “’Does it matter,’ you ask, ‘if the first cut was made in the face? He made hamburger out of the woman, for God’s sake! Who wants to know the precise order he did it all in?’

I do. I know it’s a sickness, but I do,” he admits, before explaining the heartbreaking detail that the facial incision matches one found in the bedsheets, “which means that when she saw the man with the knife crossing over the dark, twelve-foot square parlour-room to her bed, she pulled up the bed covers instinctively, just like a small child afraid that the monsters will get her.” And sure enough, he includes that exact beat on the first page of the comic.

For all Moore’s attention to detail, however, he did memorably slip up at one point, directing Campbell on page eight to draw Gull placing one of Kelly’s severed breasts on the bedside table. Some time later, however, he realized that he had made an error, and that the breast was supposed to be located on the bed near her right foot. Unfortunately, because of his practice of sending script pages in batches, by the time he’d realized this Campbell had already drawn page eight, along with several others in which there is, quite clearly, a severed breast sitting on the bedside table. Not wanting to force Campbell into the busywork of redrawing multiple pages, Moore hits on the clever solution of having Gull pause his mutilations to stare troubledly at the breast with “the exact air of an artist stepping back from his canvas for a moment to judge as to what further strokes are necessary. He regards the arrangement of the body and its organs critically: what else does the composition need?” And then, after a bit of consideration, he picks the breast up and moves it to its historically accurate location.

Gull’s flair for the artistic, however, created a distinct tension with the second major approach Moore took to the murder, namely his more general research into serial killers and their practices. Moore drew from contemporary understanding here, particularly citing Robert Ressler’s 1988 Sexual Homicide, although he also plainly draws from Joel Norris’s Serial Killers, published the same year, from which he takes his breakdown of the individual phases of a serial murder, particularly the hallucinatory “aura phase” that precedes a murder and Norris’s larger descriptions of serial murder as having a ritualistic element. But these sources seem to have, by and large, been more problem than help. For one thing, he found the descriptions “too sharp, too clinical: a virtual and digitised reconstruction of the murder scene that was mathematically accurate but necessarily bloodless.”[21] He was also stymied by the fact that the Ripper murders are outliers within the larger corpus of serial murder—as he notes in the annotations, “given that no semen was in evidence it would appear that sexual release was not the purpose of the murder… nor do the mutilations seem to have been carried out in rage,” these being the two primary categories of such mutilations.

More broadly, Moore had the problem that serial killers simply aren’t generally inclined towards the sort of baroque ritualism that Moore had made central to Gull’s approach. As he later put it, “serial killers are miserable little fucking things. They’re not Hannibal Lecter. That last Thomas Harris book was a pile of wank. You’re not going to get a serial killer sitting listening to The Goldberg Variations, because he might as well be listening to someone banging a tin can on a plate. They’ve not got more than us, they’re not Nietzschean supermen, they’ve got something less than us. You’ve only got to look at your Peter Sutcliffes, your Dennis Nielsens. These are grey little men with bad haircuts.”[22] Leaving aside the subjective matter of Gull’s hairstyle, this simply isn’t a description of Moore’s take on Gull. By creating a character who gives thirty-five page lectures on architecture in order to philosophically justify his murders Moore had created a situation that was fundamentally unlike anything in real life.

This left Moore with his third major approach to depicting Gull’s interiority during the long dismemberment of Marie Kelly: his own understanding of magical ritual. This does not mean that Moore created a symbolically coherent method of ritual sacrifice or anything along those lines. Even if he had for some inexplicable reason wanted to do this, it would be quite difficult given that the actual mutilation of Marie Kelly was not conducted under any occult principles. The one vaguely magically coherent point, drawing on alleged appearance in Masonic lore (Moore provides no citation on this point), is Gull’s burning of Kelly’s heart and scattering of the ashes, which had the helpful secondary effect of explaining why the killer had stoked a fire of such intensity that it melted the kettle hanging above it. Beyond that, the issue is characterized by what he describes in the annotations as a “vague sense of incoherent ritual.”

Instead Moore worked by a process he describes as “a kind of speculative seance-divination on my part.” (“Sus,” said William Blake in a… well, nevermind.) His most thorough account of what this entailed is the one he gave to Dave Sim, where he explained that while he’d had the broad idea of “The best of all tailors” in mind for some time, “what I didn’t have until comparatively recently was any clue as to how the occurrence in Miller’s Court might actually feel to the perpetrator,” and that in answering that question he drew “from my own experiences and ruminations concerning the non-ordinary consciousness; the magical state; the process of going mental; call it what you will.”[23] He describes this experience as akin to a psychological fugue state, using the analogy of “a twenty-four-track mixing disk with separate strands of complex information on each separate track. The engineer responsible for the final mix that is one's consciousness, unfortunately, is a baboon. Tracks (of thought) suddenly blast in out of nowhere or just as suddenly drop out of existence. Melody swells up, is gone, its presence only registered moments later. Both speakers cut out, and when they cut back in there are six of them. One is playing what sounds like Inuit opera, another broadcasts a debate on superstring theory conducted entirely in a Maori dialect.”[24] The experience is enough to break down the normal rational ego. “After that, it gets rather difficult to describe, firstly because what is going on isn't remotely human, and secondly because one's self isn't actually present while all this is occurring. Whoever is in control of the vertical and horizontal, as it were, isn't you. Recollection of the experience is necessarily non-linear, fragmentary. Time, mind, identity, cause and effect...all of these have been behaving in unusual ways. A certain confusion is forgivable.”[25]

Moore appears to be drawing primarily from his experience in January 1994 here, while noting that his decision to become a magician a few months prior gave him at least some tools to process the experience instead of simply going mad, as did the fact that he was accompanied by Steve Moore and thus “we each had the other’s confirmation and validation for some of the more peculiar moments.” Gull’s experience, obviously, is different on almost every front. It is perhaps most accurate to say that Moore took the psychology of actual serial killers and his own experience of magical states and triangulated an experience between them.

But all of this elides what is perhaps the most remarkable thing about Moore’s treatment of Marie Kelly’s murder, which is that as a magical ritual it is at least broadly, if not completely successful. This is in some ways inevitable given the flashes of visions seen in Gull’s previous murders, and more broadly by Gull’s introduction all the way back in chapter two and the way fragments from throughout his life echo around in it. In the course of his butchering of Marie Kelly he finally becomes completely unstuck in time. In Moore’s account, “William Gull's progressive alteration of the text that is Mary Kelly's physical body shades into William Burroughs, maybe with Brian Gysin as Netley. Cut-up technique, they call it. The scalpel interrupts the normal linear continuity of things, allows new possibilities. Sometimes, intimations of the future leak through, luminous dribbles of the eternal. The consciousness of the artist, of the writer, or of the beef-sculptor, is changed along with the deliberate disruption of the work in question, of his successful and much-visited Dorset Street installation. Gull drifts in and out of different times, different texts, different identities. The mutilation he is carrying out unfolds in his mind, through escalating levels of metaphor, becomes all mutilations, all murder.”[26]

This results in a series of visions. First Gull is visited by James Hinton, with whom he repeats a conversation from back in chapter two. Subsequently he has a vision of himself giving an anatomical lecture to an audience made up of killers from the future, with Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and the Kray twins all watching intently as he explains about the four lobes of the liver whilst removing Marie Kelly’s. Finally he has a vision of Tiamat and Marduk, which Moore explains, saying that “Gull, momentarily and forever, becomes Marduk, just as his victim is translated, transliterated into Tiamat. For a moment the flash of becoming is too brief, too instantaneous to register on the doctor's mind. A second or two passes, and the comprehension of what has just happened to him starts to filter through. Enervated, palpitating from the rigors of the experience, he tries to assemble a jigsaw awareness from these burning fragments, but before he can do so the next voice in the fugue enters, the next wave of alien consciousness crashes in, carrying him away.”[27] Punctuating these various flights of fancy are a series of wide panels of Gull standing alone in the shabby and blood-splattered flat, emphasizing the sharp contrast between his visionary experiences and the squalid horror of what he’s actually doing.

As Moore suggests, the vision of Tiamat and Marduk is quickly followed by another—indeed, by the climactic vision of his entire reverie as Gull finds himself standing in the midst of a modern office building, surrounded by computers and alt girls on cordless telephones. Gull is at once stunned and dismayed, declaring that “this is dazzle, but not yet divinity,” and that “we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos—morose, barbaric children playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys.” He climbs upon one of the desks in the office building (seen to be a chair in Kelly’s apartment) and berates the workers. “Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I may not see the meanest spark! Your past is pain and iron! Know yourselves! With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. Its black root succours you. It is inside you. Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks its cuffs? See me! Wake up and look upon me!I am come amongst you. I am with you always!”

Nobody even looks at him, and he is left to embrace Marie Kelly’s blood-soaked corpse bemoaning how “time’s leveled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this listless world,” and telling her how “you’d have all been dead in a year or to from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.” And then, once again, Gull trails off, finding himself once again soaked in blood in a decrepit east London flat. He has a few subsequent fragments of vision—a momentary glimpse of his forthcoming Masonic trial and of his death. But the main reverie is largely over. He removes and burns the heart, staring rapt into the white-hot glow of the fire and the divine light within, then staggers out into the cold dark of a London night and back to Netley’s coach where he offers the comic’s only real verbal account of what has just transpired. “The twentieth century,” he explains. “I have delivered it.”

[1] The Comics Cube, “Rich Veitch Interview: 1963,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIfPDKgp_pM&t=6s&ab_channel=TheComicsCube

[2] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” 1999 interview for an unknown venue, transcript provided privately

[3] Nick Hasted, “He Does it With Magic,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/01/artsfeatures.fiction

[4] Brad Stone, “Alan Moore Interview,” Comic Book Resources, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20081227042437/http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=511

[5] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” 1999 interview for an unknown venue, transcript provided privately

[6] Jane Hamsher, Killer Instinct, “All the Oscars in the World Can’t Fix That Forehead”

[7] Quoted in Noah Murray, “Producer Don Murphy calls Alan Moore ‘a hypocrite’ and ‘a liar’,” The AV Club, https://www.avclub.com/producer-don-murphy-calls-alan-moore-a-hypocrite-and-1798215784

[8] Peter Murphy, “Eroto-Graphic Mania,” The New Review, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130622182813/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/alanmooreinterview.html

[9] Adam Rogers, “Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic,” Wired, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20140809005358/https://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa?currentPage=all

[10] HARDtalk, April 10, 2012, transcript provided privately

[11] HARDtalk, April 10, 2012, transcript provided privately

[12] Dirk Deppey, “The Eddie Campbell Interview,” The Comics Journal #273

[13] Jennifer Vineyard, “Alan Moore: The Last Angry Man,” mtv.com, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060615045537/http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/

[14] Script quoted in From Hell Companion

[15] Quoted in From Hell Companion

[16] All from From Hell Companion

[17] From Hell Companion

[18] From Hell Companion

[19] Gary Groth, “Last Big Words,” The Comics Journal #140

[20] R.F. Paul and Peter Whitehead, “An Authentic Fake,” Esoterra #6, transcript provided privately

[21] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[22] Simon Lewis, “Ripping Yarns,” Uncut #40, transcript provided privately

[23] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[24] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[25] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[26] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[27] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218