Abandoning superheroes for superkillers

Moore made quite a big splash in the mid-'80s. After turning Swamp Thing into an endlessly imitated gothic horror show with innovative, mature, and comical scripts, he did a milestone 12-part series with Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, which he intended to be his last word on revisionist superhero comics. His theme: heroes are inherently right-wing, neo-fascist vigilantes, prone to extreme mental imbalance and moral Manicheism.

Watchmen starts with Nixon in his fourth term as president and a complex plot to bring about peace on Earth at the expense of half the population of New York City. Mixing in bizarre formalist tricks and layers of subtle and obvious symbolism, Watchmen was nearly the definitive statement Moore intended it to be. It deserved to be as big as Art Spiegelman's Maus, but you needed a background in those "lowbrow" superhero conventions to appreciate it fully. So while Moore became a superstar in comics, the rest of the world only celebrated Spiegelman's highbrow, self-important pretensions. Moore, sickened by comic fanboys and the scads of rotten imitators he had spawned, abandoned mainstream comics for good and resolved never again to write about superheroes.

If Moore thought he was escaping idiocy by leaving mainstream comic conventions, he was naïve. He even lost a lot of his comic-world support because he stopped writing those cool superhero comics. So now he's done the unthinkable and gone back to writing happily moronic adventure comics for the insipid, vapid Image brand name.

From Hell, which after many years has finally concluded with its 10th issue, is a meticulous 400-page examination of the Jack the Ripper murders, painted against an expansive pastiche of Victorian London. But that, of course, isn't enough for Moore: through various contrivances, he brings in Masonic belief, nasty attacks on the upper classes, and cameos by the Elephant Man, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake, and Adolf Hitler. Each volume contains about 10 pages of footnotes, obsessively documenting every fact Moore could dig up supporting his theory of events.

And what a version it is! Moore makes Oliver Stone look like G. Gordon Liddy. He's not merely content to portray a tawdry tale of murder--he takes all of England down with it. Here's the deal: an obscure member of the royal family impregnates a prostitute. Four other prostitutes find out about it and hatch a blackmail plot, so Queen Victoria has her Masonic physician, William Gull, dispose of them. Gull does so, but not without arousing a bit of suspicion and a lot of hysteria. A coverup ensues. Gull also has his own monomaniacal plans, represented by the Ripper's infamous letter signed "From Hell," from which the title is drawn.

No doubt about it, Gull is psychotic; his ritualistic murders are gruesomely detailed in Eddie Campbell's (Bacchus) scratchy, detailed, black-and-white inks. No shading is used, and the effect is desolate, but meticulous. Details are packed into panels, and for such sparseness, the expressiveness of the characters is remarkable. When Gull comes on the scene many pages in, his penetrating eyes and imposing figure instill his every act with real terror (particularly the clinical disembowlings).

Gull's agenda is complex. The murders, specifically his reverential excavation of the bodies, cause some sort of transcendence in him, via his Masonic religious beliefs. As he makes abundantly clear in the footnotes, Moore has nothing but contempt for the Masons, so even when Gull reaches his self-prophesied apotheosis after being shut away in an insane asylum, the Masonic issue is not exactly the central one. Gull's hallucinations are more general, as the fax machine on the cover of the seventh issue should indicate. Gull, evidently, is possessed of some destructive spirit not only in him but in other killers and (as it is implied) in the world in general. Moore's effect in having Gull hallucinate a modern-day business office during the last and most "exploratory" killing is somewhat obvious, but no less powerful for it.

By this point, Moore seems a tad misanthropic. From the gutter speech of the prostitutes to the cold, motionless face of Queen Victoria, to all the indifferent, amoral doings of late 1800s London, Moore can't bring himself to be sympathetic to anyone. Even the poor inspector, whose every move to uncover Gull futilely fails, is less likable than admirably pathetic. And at the heart of it all lies William Gull, easily the most repulsive character Moore has ever dwelt on, overflowing with hubris in every sense and devoid of redemption.

Moore is lucky enough to be highly literate, and he paints his disgust in complex colors. But you have to wonder if Moore's fascinating story has any meaningful significance other than as an outlet for his prowling, misanthropic eyes. And if it doesn't, where does that leave it? From Hell is an impressive and immensely entertaining comic worthy of analysis by the best of them, but it is strangely cold at its heart, if indeed it has one. As a straight condemnation of mankind as it was, is, and as far as Moore is concerned, ever shall be, it is morbidly interesting, but nonetheless, completely hopeless.