From Hell Master Edition (In Colour) h/c back

Please Note: this is my review of the original black and white edition from many moons ago. Interior art of this Master Edition, transmogrified by its new colour treatement by Eddie Campbell himself, will be supplied shortly.

You will want both. Trust me.

Please see my review of Eddie Campbell's FROM HELL COMPANION for more depth and insight. Largely Eddie's.

On the surface (Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's surface are most creators' core) it's the story of one sick bastard's execution of a royal cover up, fuelled by his own personal Masonic obsession with carving a male sigil across the heart of London by slaughtering the women of the street who happen to have strayed too close to a blue-blooded Victorian's philandering.

Madness and ceremony and the architecture of time play large parts in this gruelling masterpiece, as the women struggle hard enough to survive in their own unforgiving environment, let alone when they're lured by grapes into the alien world of an upper class cab, and Dr. Gull has visions of the world as we know it, where his deeds are anything but forgotten.

Eddie Campbell's intense visuals are inseparable from the experience, whether it's the look in Dr. Gull's eyes that see more than is there, or the bleak, unsanitised and dark and stark London which he scratches indelibly on your mind. How did anyone have the arrogance to believe that they could ever film that? And speaking of Hollywood, how typical of them to turn this into a Whodunnit. That we know the who from just after the prologue makes the investigation all the more frustrating, infuriating and painful to follow, so it was never about the who - it's about the why. Why did Dr. Gull do it? Why was the case never solved? And why are we still studying these events then studying the studies of those who have studied the events?

This is a vast work of enormous power that will take you twice as long to read as almost any three other graphic novels combined.