FROM HELL: 10/12

When I dropped the huge bundle of FROM HELL scripts the other day, this page, chapter 10 page 12, was on the top facing me. I took a notion to do a little series of posts on my favorite pages of script.
This one was completely unpredicted. In the appendix Alan relates an incident in which our pal, and first From Hell publisher, Steve Bissette recounted having 'watched a film of an autopsy, and noted that his initial understandable revulsion gave way to a fascinated awe at the magnificence of our inner workings'. and Alan reflected upon 'the view of life that doctors have, that they alone have been elected to that priesthood that may look upon the mysteries inside us.... I hoped to create within the reader's mind... a brief glimpse through the alien eyes of something that's emotional response to mutilation might be very, very different from our own.'

I don't remember exactly how I went about doing this page. I suspect I pasted on xeroxes of photos from a book on the human heart and then inked over it all to bring them into From Hell stylistic territory. I'm sure the original printing showed more of the half-tones of the source materials, but in a way the simplification to rigid black/white division, caused by the current image being at least twice removed from the source, helps the material to bond with the rest of the book. I also suspect that I would have planned it and then given it to Pete Mullins to do since it doesn't involve any character likenesses.

Another thing that I just remembered is that somewhere in the long process that was From Hell, I asked Alan to indicate at the beginning of each page what the panel layout would be. This enabled Anne to line up the pages without me having to mark up the script first, cutting out an unnecessary stage and saving us a lot of time.



(CHAPTER 10 )
PAGE 12.
PANEL 1
ANOTHER SEVEN PANEL PAGE, THIS TIME WITH THE BIG PANEL AT THE BOTTOM TIER AND THREE PANELS ON EACH OF THE TIERS ABOVE THAT. IN THIS FIRST PANEL WE HAVE CLOSED IN STILL FURTHER, ONTO THE VERY TIP OF THE BLADE AS IT ENTERS THE TISSUE. THE BLADE IS A GIANT WALL OF METAL DESCENDING INTO THE PICTURE FROM OFF, THE BODY CAVITY AROUND IT BECOMING A LANDSCAPE OF FLESH AS WE DESCEND FURTHER AND FURTHER.
NO dialogue

PANEL 2
CLOSE IN FURTHER, SO THAT WE ARE RIGHT DOWN AT THE POINT WHERE THE GIANT EDGE OF THE METAL IS CUTTING THROUGH HUMAN MEAT. WE SEE THE LIPS OF THE WOUND PEEL BACK AWAY FROM THE SHARP BLADE AS IT SLICES THOOUGH THE TISSUE. THE INSIDE OF THE CUT FLESH IS HONEYCOMBED WITH TINY CAPILLARY VEINS, HARDLY VISIBLE HERE, EVEN AT THIS MAGNIFICATION.
No dialogue.

PANEL 3
CLOSE IN FURTHER ONTO THE CUT SURFACE OF THE FLESH. THE PATTERNING OF SEVERED VEINS IS NOW MUCH MORE PROMINENT, SO THAT THEY LOOK LIKE A SYSTEM OF TUNNELS SEEN FROM A DISTANCE.
No dialogue

PANEL 4
CLOSE IN FURTHER, SO THAT WE ARE ZOOMING IN ON THE MOUTH OF ONE OF THE CAPILLARY VEIN TUNNELS. IT GAPES BEFORE US, HUGE AND DARK. A TRICKLE OF BLOOD RUNS SLUGGISHLY ALONG THE BOTTOM OF THIS HUGE WATER-PIPE
No dialogue

PANEL 5
WE ARE NOW MOVING DOWN THE TUNNEL OF THE VEIN, ITS RIBBED WALLS RISING AROUND US AND THE SPLASHING TRICKLE OF BLOOD SLAPPING ARPOUND BENEATH US. IN THE BOTTOM OF THE VEIN WE MOVE ON, INTO IT
No dialogue

PANEL 6
WE CONTINUE ALONG THE VEIN AS IF WE WERE WHITE WATER RAFTING… OR RED PLASMA RAFTING IN THIS INSTANCE. WE CAN SEE THE PLATELETS AND THE WHITE CORPUSCLES IN THE SANGUINARY SOUP ALL AROUND US. UP AHEAD, DOWN THE TILTING BORE OF THE TUNNEL WE CAN SEE A COMPLEX JUNCTION APPROACHING, WHERE THE TUNNEL SEEMS TO WIDEN OUT INTO AN AS-YET UNGLIMPSED CHAMBER. WE SURGE FORWARD, THE WORLD ABOUT US GETTING BIGGER ALL THE TIME.
No dialogue

PANEL 7
NOW THE BIG WIDE PANEL. ON A STREAM OF BLOOD WE POUR INTO THE GIANT CATHEDRAL-LIKE CHAMBERS OF THE DEAD HEART. THE INNER STRUCTURE OF THE HEART RISES UP ALL AROUND US, A BIZARRE AND GIGER-ESQUE LANDSCAPE. AWESOME AND WEIRD AND ODDLY BEAUTIFUL. WE SWIRL THROUGH IT ON THE BLOOD CUURENT, RAFTING THROUGH INCREDIBLE SUBTERRANEAN CAVERNS OF TRANSLUCENT FLESH AND TISSUE. THIS PANEL SHOULD LOOK REALLY STUNNING, ALMOST APOCALYPTIC IN ITS DEPICTION OF THE LANDSCAPES OF THE INNER BODY.
No dialogue

Alan Moore's London. postscript.

I do believe I've squeezed all I can from the FROM HELL photo refs. There is still a bundle of them (though none in which Alan appears), but there's little else I can say to make them more than anybody's commonplace snaps of London town. One little observation I might add that may be of help to young artists: the real value in using photo reference is that it allows us to capture particularity. Compare the Bournemouth cemetery with the one at Bunhill Fields which I showed in part 1 on on 21 dec. In this one notice the preponderance of cross-shaped stones, compared with the flat stones of the earlier cemetery, (punctuated with an occasional obelisk). Let's presume that every cemetery has its own thumbprint.




And it would be unwise to assume that a London shop front is much like one from any other city. Thus I engaged my pal Ed Hillyer, who was working on the Eyeball kid with me at the time, to shoot a roll of film in and around Cleveland Street for chapters 1 and 13 (Ed lives in London and Alan doesn't). For Snakes and ladders Glenn Dakin was able to do the honours and shoot a roll in and around Red Lion Square. You won't find the exact images you're going to need on the internet.




Still on the From Hell theme, I've been eyeing that pile of script in the box over there. It was annoying me being all out of order after dropping it a few days ago and so I organized it. It may be interesting to copy out one or two of my favorite pages of Alan"s script and show that under the relevant page as printed in the book.
Let me sleep on it.
Till tomorrow

Alan Moore's London. part 6

With the epilogue in FROM HELL it was strange coming back to this scene I'd started ten years before, with Abberline and Lees as old codgers in Bournemouth on the south coast of England. Alan had made a trip down there and taken a dozen photographs of the cemetery. I then filed the photos away until they were needed ten years later. This all sounds somewhat extraordinary to me now. I was recently talking to a young girl just out of school, telling her that I would be spending the whole of the next year on my new book (I'll tell you about it soon). She found it hard to understand that somebody could spend a whole year on one job. How little she knows. Alan planned this thing out in thorough detail and then we spent ten years seeing the plan through. Were we mad? In Greek myth Odysseus spends ten years after the Trojan war finding his way back to Greece. I remember feeling that this was very far fetched. Ten years is too long to contemplate. Too long indeed. From this side of it even more so.
With the epilogue we had ten pages of two characters interacting in mid distance. This is my favourite thing to draw in the whole world. So i handled the lettering and figures and Pete Mullins took care of everything else in this one.





"There's no hurry." Abberline is saying.
No hurry indeed.

(ps I know it wasn't literally ten years between the prologue and epilogue, but it was ten between the first page and the end of the appendix, so I feel I was taking a justifiable poetic liberty up there.)

Paris in the fall.

My pal Evans sent this from the Weekend Australian, syndicated from the London Times:
From the gutter to the stars: The post-impressionist painter ridiculed for his small physical stature was in fact a giant among artists, writes Waldemar Januszczak
"THERE'S a painting in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris of two lesbians in bed. You can't actually see their bodies, only their heads. But it's clear there's no hanky-panky going on. They're just staring at each other sleepily. The girls always strike me as terribly young and vulnerable, as if they've just been tucked in by their dad. It's only a small picture, but there's so much fondness and empathy in it."



"That it was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec is also remarkable. Fondness and empathy are not what he's famous for. He's famous for all the other stuff. But most of the crowd knew only one thing with complete certainty, and that was that he was short. A dwarf. So that's his tragedy. Everyone's heard of him, but nobody knows him. His fame is immense, but worthless."

It's another case history to file under the Fate of the Artist.

Incidentally, Januszczak wrote an excellent early critique of the modern 'graphic novel' movement in the Guardian way back in '84: "... since the neurotics appropriated the comic strip we have seen the perfect marriage of form and content... They have subverted its innocence , and filled its thought bubbles with their wretched, guilt-sodden soliloquies." And that was before it had really got rolling, as far as the mainstream press knew about it I mean.

The 'other stuff', for which Toulouse-Lautrec was/is famous, centres around the antics at the Moulin Rouge. Here's a Photo of Anne and me in front of it in November 2001, taken by an obliging passer-by.



The US premiere of the From Hell movie took place the previous month (go on, click it. Would I give you a bum steer?), but it hadn't been released in Europe yet. Nevertheless, the folks at Delcourt, publisher of the French edition of From Hell, know how to make the best of things. I did a signing at Fnac, the big bookstore, that lasted for some time after they'd closed the doors, and I think I was even on television a couple of times. It all went too fast to take notes.

Alan Moore's London. part 5

Firstly, if you're reading my blog because I mentioned it at a party last night, you should scroll downstairs and find something that doesn't begin with 'Part 5'.
Continuing: the making of FROM HELL (the book) chapter 4.
The most fun with From hell chapter 4 was to be had not with the majestic churches but with the odd little details that are not remarked upon by Gull as he sweeps through the metropolis. I'm speaking of all the little incidental details along the way. Alan had a great eye for the striking visual notes that would make excellent backdrops to the running dialogue that linked the principal sites. As he toured London himself, he'd snap this or that view, knowing that when the time came I would not be able to thank him enough for making my part of the job so much easier. Like the corner of this building, which is memorable without our being able to say exactly why:




Those leafy out-of-the-way squares that are very typical of the city:




Another enjoyable fact about chapter 4 is the passing of the light of day from early morning to night, giving an added variety to the proceedings. That and the mid afternoon downpour of rain. I thoroughly enjoyed myself with the inky distortions it allowed me:






The final shot wasn't one of Alan's. I got this corner form an old book. Between this and the reflection of the horse above, I was pitching into near abstraction.



Now, has there ever been writer that supplied his artist with so much visual reference? When we'd finished chapter 4, I counted it all up and we had 64 individual photgraphs that had been used, most of them from Alan, subsidized by books of architecture (some supplied By Alan) and period detail.

ps. But this, from a later chapter, is perhaps my favorite street view in the whole book. It's actually a pasted-on photo which I scribbled over, but somehow it's come out looking quite demented.



pps. (strictly Ins-and-outs-of-a-chook's-bum department.) Some have asked about the details of my working relationship with assistants. The bottom line was always that either publishers were likely to go out of business or could fail to pay you for some other reason. For instance, just before starting to work with me in '93 ('94? get me to check if you're going to quote this anywhwere), Pete Mullins' publisher was murdered and Pete never got paid. (See my Comics Journal interview for that and other tales.) And I could get a better page rate and on-time payment from one publisher (eg Dark Horse) and always have to be pestering and getting mad at another (eg. Kitchen Sink Press). The solution was to avoid being totally dependent on one project. If I had a lot of things going on at the same time, then if one went bad it wouldn't be the whole fortress razed to the ground, maybe just a breach in the north wall, or one of the turrets collapsed, but the whole outpost would still be defendable. To keep several projects going simultaneously it was necessary to have an assistant. It would begin with doing backgrounds (and could develop from there to handling more than that), and b/gs is what Steve Stamatiadis did for me in From hell Chapter 4. In the above panels I would have lettered first. If Gull and the carriage took up a lot of space I'd do them in pencil and ink too, then hand it to Steve, otherwise I'd hand it to Steve lettered with a photo lightly taped at the side. The lettering tended to define the composition, which might otherwise be suggested by a few crosses and circles from me. Since there would be different permutations on the same page, the art boards would go back and forth until done. We'd usually have half a dozen circulating the room at the same time. Steve would have pencilled the scene from the photo, got a nod from me and then inked it with a fine rapidograph (.18 probably). I'd then add in the carriage and other traffic, go in strengthening lines, sometimes removing some ( it was easier to white them out later, if I didn't want them, than to look over Steve's shoulder through a whole drawing) and adding all the atmospheric stuff. Large areas of black would be marked with a red cross. Anne was invoved in the process too. She would do the filling in of blacks, the clean up and then wrapping for mailing with the invoicing and necessary fedex export paperwork etc. Anne would also rule up the pages in ink before starting, using my numerical markings on the script which I'd put on there as I read it for the first time ( ie '9 grid' or ' 1-3-3' etc.), and the templates one of my assistants had cut years earlier. The trick was to make sure everybody had a page in front of them all the time. Since I was paying hourly rates and getting fixed page rates from the various publishers, which varied, It was essential to produce a minimum number of pages per week, which isn't a consideration when i'm just working by myself. When I found that I was burning through the material at a hectic rate it then became useful to buy in story ideas from other people too.
I've survived a lot of changes in the game, so maybe I had the right idea. But for now I'm working with a publisher from the 'book trade', getting a decent advance and painting art pages solo. You do what you need to do, and try to keep an eye on the road ahead. It could all change again tomorrow.

Indulge yourself today!

Bacchus wishes you a day of exhuberant self indulgence, and to kick it off in the right spirit, this is about me indulging myself. The above photo comes from one of our outings to the annual black tie ball at the Irish club. My pal White's a member and he used to book us a big round table every year (between '96 and 2001) until it all went pear-shaped. They had a regular do and a masked one. We'd alternate. The main thing was that we always used the event to come up with some photographic nonsense to run on the back of Bacchus or Deevee. For instance this is me, Minty Moore and White pretending to be 'the three tenors'.


And a year later we picked a picture out of the session from which this came to pass off as the monthly editorial meeting of Eddie Campbell Comics inc. That's Mullins, Me, Kirsten and Minty (who was contributing quite a few storylines to Bacchus back then).


Anyway, in 2000 we did the masked ball and I went as Bacchus. I used a papier mache mask that Hayley Campbell had made at school using a plastic template as the base. The other kids made clown and pussy cat faces while my daughter fashioned the dark goat-god Pan, with his horns and all. In urgent need of a mask and not having a clue how to start from scratch I acquired permission to turn Pan into Bacchus by sawing off the goat-beard and then using acrylic paints with that thickening gel, laying it on with a big impasto, moved the mouth downwards and introduced all the other distinctive facial characteristics. (There are some out there thinking that destroying my daughter's work in the process was a heinous crime against ART. I'm sorry, Kelly... I don't know what to say... the gods will punish me one day... i just hope it ain't Pan.) This is Mullins at the same event, as Dr. Zaius. Wait, it was White who arrived as Dr. Zaius, but now Mullins is wearing it home?.


A similar case of confusion happened the following year when an attractive lady mistook me for Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of my pals overheard this and, what with me being a long skinny geezer and the other guy being Mr. 'pumping iron', not to mention me lingering a little too long at the site of this implausible compliment, suddenly our table was beside itself with uncontrollable mirth. The wife thought the joke was on her, instead of me, and took umbrage.
And that was the end of our annual black tie ball.
Nice mask though?

A merry Christmas to yez. An a happy new yair.

Alan Moore's London. part 4

Being the continuation of our commentary on the book, FROM HELL.
Earlier in the day the two Moores discuss some important occult matter in camden Town.


These photos were taken by Jamie Delano, of Hellblazer fame, who was the driver for the day. He wrote about it in a piece to introduce the booklet for an exhibition of From Hell art pages in Gijon, Spain in 2000 (I ran the English version in Bacchus #60, may 2001: "I was happy to play Netley to his (Alan's) Sir William Gull..."
It's interesting how the mind of the horror writer gathers information: "And another church- don't ask me which- derelict, roofless, peopled by scrubby trees twisting amongst its fallen stone. there was a locked wrought-iron gate to climb, a dark crypt with an unhealthy smell to explore. I remember descending into this with Alan, waiting in the half-light at the foot of the steps, watching him set off into the pitch blackness of the interior with a flickering cigarette lighter held futilely over his head to light his way."
And: "That night we stayed at Steve Moore's house... Alan and I shared a room. I woke once. Alan twitched, smiling a little in his sleep. I thought about waking him to ask him what he was dreaming... but then decided that I didn't really want to know."
It occurs to me now that the reason my own short spell on Hellblazer didn't work out is that I don't think like a horror writer.
Here's a shot of Alan crossing a road in a photo that wasn't otherwise used.

And here's Brook Street, where Gull lives.


There's his house:


Right there.