Notorious cannibal Sawney Bean was a popular subject, as was romantic highwayman Dick Turpin. The News was far from the only publication to capitalize on this phenomenon it was preceded in infamy by The Newgate Calendar, a monthly list of executions published by the warden of Newgate Prison and expanded upon and embroidered by other publishers, who issued chapbooks under the same name detailing the crimes for which the condemned had become famous. But in 1888, a string of five similarly gruesome and cruel murders have been credibly attributed to the single murderer we call Jack the Ripper, who may have killed as many as 11 between 18. Many people killed Whitechapel’s sex workers, often without consequence. It’s a drawing of a lurid comic about women’s unthinkable suffering, which increases the misery of characters who will appear in a future issue, all documented in a lurid comic about women’s suffering drawn a hundred years later a little Mandelbrot set of gendered violence that seems utterly without hope. Illustrated Police News was, as Campbell once observed, “every bit as horrible as the worst sorts of comic books.”įrom Hell © Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell, courtesy Top Shelf Productions. The News and others wallowed in the murders, publishing images of the victims going about their daily business just before their gruesome deaths alongside drawings of their bodies and fanciful sketches of what the killer might have looked like.Īnd it is from those illustrations that Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore take many of their references in From Hell, the comics world’s Moby-Dick-both an encyclopedia of minutiae on its subject, and a sweeping work of immense influence and ambition in conversation with all sorts of other media. The murders were acts of profound misogyny and inhumanity, and, as such, windfalls for the periodicals of the day, especially Illustrated Police News, the weekly four-page newspaper popular among London’s largely unlettered working class for its elaborate illustrations, which covered the entire front page. The letter’s return address line announced that it had come “From Hell.” 15, 1888, someone put half a human kidney preserved in alcohol into an envelope with a letter taunting the police who had failed to catch the killer (or killers) of sex workers in London’s poverty-stricken East End.

From hell alan moore eddie campbell