Huzzah to Craig Fischer & Charles Hatfield for inaugurating a series of monthly articles on the work of Eddie Campbell. Readers of the blog and friends of the blogger know too well my abiding interest in Campbell’s output– Alec: How to Be An Artist remains my favorite work of comic art– and it’s nice to see his efforts receive what promises to be a thorough examination. The first article in the series contains an extended discussion of the visual style in From Hell, with some contention as to the rough, “caligraphic” linework that Campbell employs.

From Hell was where I first encountered Campbell– I had gone in with an earlier fascination with the Ripper crimes (and Alan Moore) and came away with a profound appreciation of the artist. I presume that it’s my familiarity with the Ripper crimes that gives me a sense of what’s missing in the discussion of Fischer & Hatfield: the historical influence.

The Ripper is often called the first serial killer. This supposed emergence of the New Breed has been employed as a dubious metaphor for the Grim & Dark nature of late 19th and 20th Century modernism (including in From Hell itself.) This is, of course, nonsense. There’s been serial killers for as long as there’s been people. What distinguishes the Ripper crimes are their unique positioning: by the 1880s, London had become the epicenter of a globally connected economy with a rapidly developing newsmedia. Unlike, say, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811, the Ripper was killing in a city with numerous daily and weekly papers geared towards a population with a historically high literacy rate, and at a time when the telegraph network had advanced enough to send reports to the entire world. The crimes received an enormous amount of attention, locally, nationally and globally.

The best way to conceive of the Ripper is not as the first serial killer, but as the first serial killer to be covered. The villain became a global celebrity based on the infamy of his misdeeds. (Comparisons to Paris Hilton are dutifully withheld.) Incidentally, there was a second serial killer active in London at the same time as the Ripper– the Thames Torso Murderer, who, as the moniker implies, dumped headless and limbless corpses around the Thames. Sometimes the legs and arms turned up. The heads never did. I mention this only to make the point that even in them olden dayes, certain stories had more traction than others.

Of the tabloids covering the Ripper, most iconic was the weekly Illustrated Police News. This publication’s covers were illustrated with fine line engravings. The socioeconomic status of the Ripper’s victims– doss house unfortunates– did not lend itself to a lifestyle that accrued many visual mementos. (It was not until 2001 that Ripper researcher Neil Shelden miraculously uncovered a photograph of the third victim, Annie Chapman, in life.)

Thus, the paucity of visual materials (other than mortuary and deathbed photographs) created a vacuum that was filled by period illustrations. In particular, those of the Illustrated Police News, which were especially salacious, became the most frequently circulated images. These engravings are the dominant narrative determinants of how the affair was, and continues to be, visualized. I’ve gacked a few images of the Illustrated Police News covers off the indispensable Casebook.org and, oddly, Allposters.com:

Compare these images with the page of From Hell supplied by Fischer:

Ignoring the superiority of Campbell’s compositions and figure work, it’s clear to me that the style of From Hell was intentionally rendered as an echo of the period illustrations. I’ve always assumed that Moore chose Campbell for the reason that much of his work exists in a space that is close to the tradition of British engraving. (This invites an argument not worth having– you’ll note that the Illustrated Police News employs almost every device associated with comics.)

Fischer complains, specifically, that:

And while it goes against prevailing critical opinion–and makes me feel like a persnickety jerk to boot–I think that Watchmen, superheroes, BEMs and all, is a better book than From Hell, because Dave Gibbons’ art perfectly complements Alan Moore’s words. In multiple sequences in Watchmen (remember Tales of the Black Freighter?), Moore’s writing drifts away from the denotative meaning of the visuals, but Gibbons’ pictures are so clear and easily legible that they nail down what’s happening in the sequence without any verbal assist.

This presumes that there is an inherent defect in From Hell– that its apparent lack of visual clarity is an impediment from a final meaning. As much as Hatfield ably counters, I think both sides miss a greater point: From Hell is best understood as a work of comic art that aims at a construction that, theoretically, would have been possible in 1888. This kind of speculation gets very thin, very fast, but there’s an argument to be made that an intentionally messy, contrived formalism permeates the book’s script from beginning to finish– the full title, the seriality, the varying size of individual chapters, the apparent meandering and the length of the work all lend themselves to the idea that we are not reading a Graphic Novel so much as a desultory Victorian Novel done Graphically. (Hair splitting.)

Campbell’s visual approach in From Hell is different than that in his other works– the photorealist architecture, the extremely and unusually fine lines and the enforced awkwardness of panel-to-panel narrative have been called “distancing,” but I’m not sure that’s the right word. Distance from what to what? Considering that From Hell’s basic narrative principle relies on an essential unclarity– after all, Moore started in the muck of Lud Heat and White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings and made it murkier– it’s more than suggestible that the approach of Campbell’s art is another formalist effort at rendering the story within a historically appropriate set of techniques. If the engravers of the Illustrated Police News were putting together a pseudomystical graphic narrative on the history of London and the interconnectedness of magic and death, one suspects it would look very, very similar to From Hell.

–

Two final semi-unrelated notes: from the first, the Ripper murders have been about class. There’s a very radical idea in the visual presentation of From Hell– the style remains the same regardless of the personages being depicted; which means the toffs are treated same as the scum. There’s a lesson for you, me lads.

Secondly, if anyone wants more writing by me on the Ripper crimes, I suggest that they check out “May My End a Warning Be: Catherine Eddowes and Gallows Literature in the Black Country,” on the aforementioned casebook.org.