From Hell is now available as a purchasable download from itunes and Comixology and other places. Price $14.99 US.

On and on it goes. Apparently Scotland Yard is suppressing information that could lead to the unmasking of Jack the Ripper.

The cold, cold case of Jack the Ripper LA TImes Sept 20

A retired homicide detective is trying to force Scotland Yard to release uncensored versions of files that might offer fresh leads on the identity of Britain's most notorious serial killer.

The volumes contain tens of thousands of tidbits on the Yard's dealings with the public and police informants in the years that followed the Ripper's grisly two-month killing rampage in 1888. The shadowy figure is alleged to have slain five women in London's seamy Whitechapel district, slitting their throats and, in some cases, eviscerating them with almost surgical precision.
But the Metropolitan Police Service, as Scotland Yard is formally known, has staunchly refused to publish the documents in unexpurgated form, without names blacked out.

Alan Moore and I intended to do an update of the dance of the gull catchers (or ripperologists), a further appendix indeed, on the tenth anniversary of the realease of From Hell, which would have been two years ago. But we never got around to it.

On 27 July I made a survey of the various From Hell covers that have been used over the last ten years since I launched the big collected edition. Here is the latest. I believe this is the second of a two volume set, from our Japanese publisher Misuzu Shobo. They've put up a very impressive web page, which includes a nicely made video using panels from the book. Click the object at the top of the page if, like me, you are bewildered by the Japanese characters. But I guess that 'play' arrow must now be the most universally recognized character internationally. I thought of dropping it in the text here but there doesn't seem to be an html code for it.

for the lover of From Hell who has never made it to my more personal books, here's a tip. There's a running subplot in After the Snooter where I contemplate From Hell and the movie which was still on its way at that time. There are various scenes in which things play out a little differently than in the big book and the villain starts to come alive in my nightmares. All done in the classic From Hell style. And Alan Moore is in there too. Here are a few panels.

i was shown the 2-volume cover designs for the upcoming Japanese edition of From Hell last week. They were hoping I still had the originals of some incidental drawings they wanted to use within the designs. I don't, and I'm not sure how that will affect the overall plan. Not too much I hope as the designs were striking and definitely the most daring version of the From Hell covers so far. Hopefully the problem will be solved and I can show them here soon. meanwhile it got me thinking back over the assortment of covers adorning the big book since it was launched in Dec 1999 on the eve of the new millennium, just short of ten years ago. The earlier eleven painted covers of the Kitchen Sink Press parts are visible on one page here (1991-98.) My original cover was an update, but darker and with a new ominous feeling, of the first KSP cover, a still life in oils depicting a velvet covered top hat with grapes, which had come to be emblematic of the whole story.


The foreign editions of the book sported this cover design, with technical variations, for instance the French edition had matt varnish and 'French flaps,' and elsewhere I've told the story of Mick Evans and the bantam cock on the spine of the Australian Random House edition (which was printed in India from the second set of negatives which we had made specially for the limited signed Graphitti Designs edition... none of this was straightforward). The exception was our Spanish publisher, Planeta, who made the first of the foreign editions and boldly went its own way, using the old Todd Klein logo from the KSP run and combing it with a photo of the actual William Gull superimposed on the infamous From Hell letter. I've always liked to imagine that our William Gull is a fiction who just happens to share a name with a real one who existed once, so this discomforts me a little, attractive though it is as a cover. It certainly serves the same purpose as the still-life in making the book look very unlike a comic. (On a side note, I'd be interested in hearing Todd's observations on designing that From Hell logo because he was brought in after the first book was already out and it was impossible to put the new logo on the reprints of it. The story involves Tundra and could only include accounts of hair-pulling exasperation.)


To coincide with the release of the movie it was necessary, as demanded by the bookstore chains, that we tie the cover design to the movie poster. This was what was available, an interestingly simple motif which was subsequently compounded with photos of Depp and Graham closer to the release of the movie. Half of our third print-run had this cover.




If we'd had the full version (above, of which my son Callum has a huge six-foot version, on that shiny plastic canvas material, obtained from a cinema by hayley campbell and inherited by him along with the bedroom wall on which it is hanging after she shifted to London), I'm sure it would only have confused many readers who tried to match the characters on the cover to any of the characters inside. We were glad when the movie came and went and we could get back to our regular cover. But once that sparkling red streak was in our system, by which I mean on our 'core resources' disc, it turned up on some of the later foreign editions to come on board, such as the Danish one. Or at least, I think it's Danish, as this image I found on the net is my first sight of it.


Here you see it combined with our own logo (Incidentally, I wrote about the logo here):



After five printings I handed the whole business over to Top Shelf and gave them a new cover with which to get started. Curiously they were very wary of it at first, and reused the old cover with this as a black and white endpaper on their first printing (sixth in total). Something to do with the blood and the bookstore chains. Anyway, it's been on the front where it belongs from the seventh printing and the book is up to it's ninth or tenth. I stopped counting after a while.


Top Shelf used the same image on their hardcover, but without the logo, which appears only on the spine. Knockabout in England took advantage of the new digitalized files (relevant post, November 2006) to organize their own printing (theirs was previously ganged up with the US edition printed in Canada) and redesigned the look of the hardcover. The splash motif, in red, comes from the title page, where it has always been printed in black.


The above cover is a variation on that of a very odd edition I published myself back in 2002. It consisted of nineteen copies bound in plush kangaroo leather. As a publisher it was my only adventure in extravagance. photo by Chris Mclaren of his copy.


Last Monday I linked to an old article I wrote titled 'The Technical history of From Hell', which I guess is what suggested today's post, which goes some way toward updating the essay, though I would probably need around 5,000 words to do it properly.

from Radiant City to Mega City One, the Architects’ Journal selects the greatest illustrated urban spaces. Top 10 comic book cities: #3 is From Hell’s London. We're in there behind Mega City One and Chris Ware's Chicago.

"The East End of Jack the Ripper’s London was a filthy, blackened, riotous place and Eddie Campbell’s artwork in From Hell captures the mood perfectly. It is among the most startling black and white comic book artwork you’ll find in print.
From Hell is quite a bit more than a pulpy slasher comic. Alan Moore’s script uses the Ripper murders as a device to unpick wider narratives centred on the social structures and secret histories of a vast imperial city on the cusp of modernity.
Strongly influenced by the psycho geographic musings of Ian Sinclair, much of From Hell dwells upon the mental impact cities exert upon their inhabitants. In particular, one chapter takes the reader on a tour of Hawskmoor’s London, each of the architect’s buildings rendered in a scratchy black and white manner that terrifies and delights in equal measure - much like the buildings themselves."

I've always been pleased with this panel from Chapter 1, which is not an important site in the story, but has a successful spontaneity as a drawing. The smoke has an overwhelming presence, like it's trying to drag the whole thing away."

chris Mclaren has posted seven photos of his recently obtained copy of the 'Painfully Limited' edition of From Hell and it's pleasing to see it again. This was the neatest trick I ever pulled off in my seven years as a self publisher.


The biggest problem I had when I came to publish From Hell was that I no longer had most of the art. I had sensibly presumed that the previous publisher, Kitchen Sink Press (KSP), would have known the value of the thing and looked after such matters. So I had been steadily selling off the art originals, but I didn't anticipate that the publisher and I would fall out. I was able to negotiate the rights back based on the fact that we were owed fifteen thousand dollars that wasn't forthcoming. Then the person who had wound up holding a lot of the physical materials after the collapse of the company was trying to SELL me the From Hell negatives. This was wrong in so many ways, so I set about reconstituting the entire book from the equal mix of available art plus the full size high quality xeroxes that I always took care to salt away before sending in each chapter. In fact we finished up with a better looking set of pages. The two chapters rendered with a lot of crayon and charcoal came out much better than in the KSP printings. But there remained the problem of what I was to send our foreign clients to reproduce from. The master pages, half art and half xerox and with a couple of weeks of cleaning and reworking, were too valuable to ever let out of my sight again. The solution I arrived at was to ask Graphitti Designs to overprint thirty copies for me when they made the signed and numbered limited hardcover, and to leave these unbound as bundles of loose pages. I would then send a couple of sets to each of my foreign licensees. This was a far from perfect process, but the From Hell art was all drawn before digital scanning was the norm. After a while it looked like that market had dried up and I took a notion to have the remaining nineteen copies bound and then sell them. When I first collected From Hell in one book it was an enormous undertaking and I went at it very cautiously. The five printings of the softcover under my own imprint were all made on the cheapest possible materials. I have occasionally regretted that, but the initial orders from Diamond Distribution were so low, less than six thousand of a book that would go on to sell over two hundred thousand (and rising) copies worldwide, that caution was only sensible. When I decided to bind these leftovers I thought that for once I should make a 'beautiful book,' an object lavish in every possible way. The binding job cost around $110 per unit. The binding is plush kangaroo leather, with the logo embossed in blood red; the book is placed snugly inside a black hard shell box, also embossed with the logo in red. Then I painted a different little image inside each copy. I offered it for either 300 or 350 bucks on the front page of the old Eddie Campbell Comics website and the whole lot sold out in less than a week.

Publishing books was an interesting adventure, but I don't think I could go through it all again.
Here's an earlier post about a whole different set of problems that arose when our printer went bankrupt in 2005.
Top shelf's subsequent second printing was essentially a new edition, being the first digital version of the work, and sporting a new painted cover.
Topshelf's Fourth printing now in stock. (ninth printing in all counting my five) And note that the production values of their editions are higher than those of mine.
And strictly for the anally retentive, I wrote out my notes on all the various editions up to the end of 2001 on the old website

a Yankee in London' blog takes the From Hell chapter four tour of London. That's the episode where William Gull explained, while moving through the Victorian capital by horse and coach, all the mythical and mystical points on the map that are relevant to his wicked masterplan. I was enjoying it until the blogger, Jason, photographed his big greasy English breakfast. The horror, ugh, the horror!



Smoky man has a great Alan Moore story, and a great photo courtesy of Norman Adams to go with it.


'Alan Moore defends rational thought' in a piece of street oratory outside Abington park Museum. "The protest, organised by Northampton Socialist Forum, came after an information sign about Darwinism at the museum was partially covered following a complaint by what appears to be a Christian fundamentalist."
The Northampton Chronicle has the museum story:
Museum in censorship row over Darwin sign
"Censorship of an exhibition on evolution at a Northampton museum has led to claims organisers are pandering to Christian fundamentalist sensibilities..."

a new book on an old subject, hot off the presses from its editor, Alex Werner, who requested the use of a couple of illustratons out of From Hell for the seventh and final chapter titled 'Jack the Ripper- A legacy in Pictures', by Clive Bloom, Emeritus professor of English and American studies at Middlesex University. His piece begins: "The East End is both a geographical location and a location for filmic fantasy." which confirms the problem I always felt I was up against when working on From Hell. "It has to be recreated in filmland as a set, so that it is airless, claustrophobic and without escape..." "Jack finally strikes and the set constructed around his absence finally reveals the reason for its construction." I like the caption on the photo at the end on page 266: 'In this publicity shot for The Hands of the Ripper (1971), Eric Porter is caressed by actresses dressed in the obligatory boas and feathers which always signify fallen women in such films. The costumes are Victoriana rather than Victorian." Some great old photos in the rest of the book, most of which are new to these eyes, and I looked far and wide over the years, underline such misconceptions.

(I previously addressed the problem of costume vis a vis film adaptation)
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Bart Beaty continues his examintion of Wertham. "Comics need boogeymen since it is always simpler to blame the outsider for one's own failings than face the truth that is right in front of you."
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Drunk Darth Vader's Jedi assault- BBC NEWS- Tuesday, 22 April 2008

A man posing as Darth Vader attacked a Star Wars fan, who had founded a Jedi Church, a court has heard.
Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, from Holyhead, Anglesey, admitted assaulting Barney Jones and cousin Michael with a metal crutch. They suffered minor injuries.
Hughes, who was drunk and dressed in a black bin bag, shouted "Darth Vader!"
Earlier, when Hughes failed to arrive on time, District Judge Andrew Shaw issued an arrest warrant, adding: "I hope the force will soon be with him.

(via wee hayley campbell)

Drinks! More!

Nathalie sent this photo of the front door of a bar in Rome named From Hell. The gothic style of the lettering suggests a connection with our jackarippy.


However, before go into the bar From Hell, balance the following two reports:

I've always suspected this: Drink limits ‘useless’- From The Times, London-October 20.

The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever. Subsequent studies found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers. One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.

BUT
Don't discount the latest scare: In vino, scare-itas: Is anything safe?- Chicago Sun-Times- October 21, 2007

Just when we thought it was safe to toast good times comes news that alcohol drinking can boost a woman's risk of breast cancer by as much as 30 percent. Women probably don't know whether to roll their eyes or toss their wine racks. Didn't we just get used to the idea that red wine, for instance, protects the heart, lowers the risk of dementia and helps prevent gum disease? Add this latest scientific mystery to a long list of substances that are at one moment great for us -- such as butter, chocolate, coffee and vitamins -- then bad for us, then good for us once again.

The second above has good Richard Laurent editorial cartoon of a woman holding up a huge wine glass with a shark fin skimming through the dark ominous liquid.

ANOTHER LOGO
This one was fun
Mick Evans' idea was to make a neatly designed logotype and then damage it by hand. Actually, I think he said it was to be 'distressed.' He made up a bunch of xeroxes on ordinary bond paper and invited me to attack them with a scalpel. Then we selected the best. On this close-up of the L you can feel the paper and toner suffering under my scraping. After a few efforts we decided on a disturbance coming from off-field and after a few more fixed upon the lower right as the source of the violence. Mick scaneed and saved at 800 dpi. When it's done in red and superimposed on the cover painting its origins are less obvious than you see here in black and white.

his nibs (2)

N ow where was I up to before I had to dash across the Pacific? Oh yes, the nibs. When you use these in your regular work you need to be buying them by the gross, so that your stash looks something like this:


Whenever you get together with a colleague in the trade you say 'hey I found that this one suits my puposes, you should give it a try', and you shove a handful in the other guy's mitt. In this way I came by the crowquill style of nib via Dave Sim. This style has the cylinder in emulation of the bird feather from which it derives, as opposed to the flat reed in which the more flexible type of nib originates. This style offered me a tighter control of the linework, but with less thick-and-thin dynamics, which you can see from the selected examples below. In fact The use of this type (in conjunction with my other favourites) starts coming in around From Hell chapter 7. I had spent a week with Sim early in 1994 after which I added to my armoury the Hunt 102 crowquill, pictured in the red box.
On occasion I come across a box of a rare nib. The large Brandauer nibs above came as a Christmas present many years ago and I occasionally find a use for them. I think these are very old. (Some other gorgeous Brandauer antiques.)
The quaint abel on the underside of the box reads:
Brandauer: CAUTION: Whereas, with a view of securing the public from imposition, and of protecting our own manufacture, we have caused our Trade mark, to wit, 'an Archer in a kneeling position, with bow and arrow, to be registered according to law...etc.
A history of the Birmingham pen trade including Branfdauer and Gillott: The Brandauers remained involved with the business until the First World War, when the factory was confiscated by the authorities on the grounds that the Brandauers were Austrian, and was eventually released to the Petit family.
Examples using mainly the crowquill:

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Changing the subject, I'm leading up to a video clip which made me laugh, but we must get there via unsavoury matters, so bear with me a minute. While I was away they nabbed somebody for groping, but surely this isn't the groper I mentioned here before (which should not be taken to imply that I know anything about the matter):
Sex assaults linked to bikeway attacks?- July 31, 2007.
Man charged over sex assaults- August 1, 2007 .
hayley campbell sent a link to the unrelated incident in England:
Man sought over TV bottom pinch- BBC- Tuesday, 31 July 2007
A man who pinched a Channel 4 News presenter's bottom during a live broadcast is being sought by police. (Youtube)
Sue Turton was speaking to the camera from Oxford's flood-hit Osney Island when the man was seen on film walking past her. She said she found the incident "quite humiliating" but continued reporting. She does not wish to pursue the matter. Police said they still intended to impose an £80 fixed-penalty fine on the man under the Public Order Act.
Ms Turton said in a statement: "Many people found the incident in Oxford last week when a man pinched my bum live on Channel 4 News humorous.
I am not one who finds amusement in the puerile behaviour of annoying of ladies in public, but while at Youtube I came across this U.S. news reporter getting mad, which has nothing to do with bottoms, and had me in stitches because of the placing of the word 'violent'.

his nibs (1)

T ime for another technical post, all about the pen nibs I've used. The degree of flexibility is the primary consideration. A very flexible nib that suited my purposes is the Hunt 103, seen on the left in the photo. Something about that little florette shaped vent hole enables the tines to spread wide for great flexibility. The more rigid Gillott 209 is next to it. I used that for back up, when I needed to get in closer and turn around in a narrower space. The one on the far right is the quite different 'crowquill' style. More on that next time.


Wikipedia: Thick and thin strokes can be achieved by varying the pressure the nib is pushed against the paper. A hard pressure causes the nib tines to widen allowing more ink to come in to contact with the paper, this results in a thick stroke. Light pressure causes the tines to narrow and even close creating very fine hairline strokes. These flexible quills and later steel nibs were what led to the styles of penmanship such as Copperplate and then Spencerian. However pointed nibs are not just used for the purpose of writing, pointed quills have been utilised by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci for sketching and pen drawing. Although any pointed steel nib can be used for drawing, nibs that resemble flexible nibs but are much more rigid have been produced for pen drawing.
Below are two portraits of the real (as opposed to our fictional version) William Gull I drew from photos, using the Hunt 103, for the From Hell scripts book way back in 1994. I was always very pleased with these, but whenever they were reproduced it was always too small to notice anything about the pen technique (click for larger). I once read that the great illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (left, greatly reduced) used great big flexible nibs as though they were paint brushes, and worked standing at an easel in a smock, with his art board upright. I tried to take some of Gibson's panache on board.


However it was usually difficult to carry that quality over into the small rectangular panels of the From Hell chapters themselves. Here's a good attempt from chapter 1:


For further investigation: a display of the Hunt nibs and the equivalent catalogue for Gillott
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'I don't think bloggers read' -Friday July 20, 2007- The Guardian
Andrew Keen says the internet is populated by second-rate amateurs. He's written a book, The Cult of the Amateur, with the no-messing-about subtitle "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy"
Until recently the Wikipedia entry for Andrew Keen informed readers that, in addition to coming from Golders Green, London, having an academic background and being an outspoken critic of Web 2.0, he was also "a child actor who found fame in a series of soup commercials". This isn't true; the sentence was inserted deliberately by the host of a Radio 3 show prior to an appearance by Keen, to show how easily the accuracy of Wikipedia can be undermined. This bit of factual vandalism remained for 12 days before it was removed - 11 days longer than an emendation from June 5, which replaced the entire first paragraph with the words "Andrew Keen IS a dumb motherfucker".
(link thanks to Mick Evans)

The invisible Fred Abberline.

I 've been doing quite a number of interviews over the last few weeks in connection with the release of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. In one of them the interviewer brought up the old story about the invisible Fred Abberline in the epilogue of FROM HELL, and it occurred to me that most of my readers have probably never seen the mistake since it was fixed in later printings.
What happened is that because of the system here at campbell industries, heads would get inked at a different time from bodies, and the pencils would be erased by a different person (Anne) from the one who had done the drawing (me, Pete or both of us) and therefore when I missed inking Abberline's small head in one panel, it was cleaned up and erased and the ommission went unnoticed. Thus the famous invisible Fred Abberline. Such booboos are commonplace in the making of comic books; this error was very small as errors go, but what is curious is that whoever at Kitchen Sink Press prepared the ad for the book used that page as the basis of the layout, placing objects on top of it, and failed to notice the incomplete figure, over which he or she discreetly dropped a photo of the From hell t-shirt. Sim and Moore seized upon the fault in a chat that Dave was running on the back of Cerebus and mocked it mercilessly. This is Alan writing, mimicking exactly his style of presentation in the FROM HELL scripts:

From the back of Cerebus #217
Correspondence
FROM HELL
On the matter of what has been viewed in some quarters as an untoward wordiness in my panel descriptions, might I draw your attention to the final volume of From Hell, specifically to page two, panel five of our epilogue, The Old Men On The Shore. In the script description for this panel I unfortunately allowed myself a moment of laxity and omitted the words "INSPECTOR ABBERLINE’S HEAD IS STILL ON HIS SHOULDERS DURING THIS PANEL. IT HAS NOT RETREATED TORTOISE-LIKE INTO HIS NECK, NOR HAS IT IN SOME FASHION MANAGED TO REFRACT LIGHT AROUND IT LIKE A KLINGON SPACESHIP SO THAT THE INSPECTOR RESEMBLES SOMETHING OUT OF MAGRITTE WITH HIS BOWLER FLOATING THERE SUSPENDED ABOVE THE EMPTY COLLAR OF HIS COAT." Last time I’ll make that mistake, obviously.
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well, I never! My pal mr j in the uk SUN online with his On the Mat:
WE have a hilarious new wrestling cartoon each week - the latest features CM Punk
Longtime readers of me blog will remember that On the Mat evolved from Hayley Campbell Funnies, and the wee lass still appears in it.
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and a link from my pal Bob Morales, which should be of interest to all us internet users:
U.S. Internet defamation suit tests online anonymitySat Jun 16, -BOSTON (Reuters)

Extra! Read all about it.

While I had the 2001 files out yesterday, I saw this piece of art in passing, and remembered the circumstances of its making. The FACE magazine commissioned a drawing of Johnny Depp 'in the FROM HELL style'. I had already drawn him once before, for a tv camera in Paris (The French like a performing element in their cartooning). But this second one, I never should have agreed to it since I couldn't see a better way than just turning a movie still into a From hell panel. Here's was what I came up with. The magazine ran it too small, even smaller than the size you're seeing here. One might ask whether they were having second thoughts on the grounds of good taste except that they and stuck a label over it that read 'A ripping yarn', which clearly marks them as clods. (How many of those scores of papers that used 'ripping yarns' as a header thought they were being cute?)


This isn't bad for what it is; I got a relaxed figure after much effort, but I wish I'd stopped scraping the background hatching much sooner. It was my second attempt at the drawing. The original for the first attempt is in the possession of my pal Christopher Moonlight, who showed it on his blog recently. I abandoned this at the pencil stage and later threw some watercolour over it and put it in my convention portfolio. I'm sure Christopher has done some photoshop tweaking on it into the bargain.


I suspect I drew the next one for free, or didn't bother billing the French magazine Ciné Live, since it is such a carefree drawing, on rough paper with a 6b pencil. What a cluttered mess of a layout though. What were they thinking when they stuck that From Hell page in front the standing Ripper, but tucked under his mitt as though he's selling the late edition?



Ripping yarns! come an' get yer ripping yarns!

Mary Kelly, Mary Kelly, etcetera

I once told Dave Sim that these lines you see behind Gull's head are called 'etcetera lines'. You carefully put the first one down and then whizz along repeating it at microscopic intervals going etc. etc etc. The faster you do it the more chance there is of it coming out right. It's not a technique that favours the cautious or faint of heart. Whoever else might be working with me on From Hell (mainly Pete Mullins from chapter 5 on) I'd finish the page with a mad web of etcetera lines to give the distinct feeling that it all came out of the 'same inkpot.'

(If you haven't read From Hell you might want to come back to this one later.)

There's a criticism of From Hell that occasionally rears its head. And it is the criticism that Campbell can't draw women because in From Hell they all look alike. The first retort is the facetious one. What, do you mean you can't tell between the tall skinny woman (Liz Stride) and the short plump one (Annie Chapman)? No, let's be serious. It's the Mary Kelly problem, isn't it?

Okay, let's have a look at it.

First there is Mary Kelly, the East end lass who first appears in chapter 1. I had two bits of information to work with: a) she's Irish and b) There needs to be a visual connection to the Sickert painting known variously as 'Blackmail' and 'Mrs Barrett.' So far, so clear. By this third panel here from chapter 3, I had worked out a comfortable shorthand for Mary Kelly.

Secondly, Inspector Abberline walks into the Ten Bells at the end of Chapter 6 and finds himself talking to a girl who calls herself Emma. Both Fred and Emma are constructing false lives for themselves in these scenes and the reader is supposed to be feeling all the time that this is really Mary Kelly but we're not categorically stating it. How am I to draw something that remains in the fuzzy area of speculation? In the script Alan asks for a lot of camera-over-shoulder and arm-coming-in-from-off-panel, which, given that we would be dwelling on this set-up for several scenes, struck me as frustrating because Abberline would be talking to a non-existent person since they have no true presence, in effect giving the feeling of a tv program where the interviewer is never visible. There would be no possibility of reactive body language, which is the essential spirit of of my figure art. I asked Alan to let me try putting her square in the picture, albeit with her back to us, and trust the reader's intelligence to figure it out. I was happy with the results and so was Alan.

Thirdly there is Julia. It was necessary for Mary and Julia to have some slight resemblance so that we could leave the book with the possibility that it was she, and not Mary, who was murdered on that bloody bed. If I didn't show the face of the woman being mutilated, the reader would think I was coyly shrinking form the task, and we didn't want that. The reader must be as UNcertain that the person being murdered is Mary and not Julia as they are elsewhere CERtain that Emma is Mary (such as when she kisses Abberline on chapter nine page 24). Thus another likeness.

Fourth, right at the end we see a much older Mary Kelly hypothetically still living in Ireland many years later. In retrospect I think the loose way that I draw is perhaps what made me the ideal artist, if I may say so, for the depiction of so many people walking about only in the realm of hypothesis.

And we finish with
Five: chapter 11 page 12, After the murder of Mary Kelly, Abberline approaches a woman he thinks is 'Emma' from behind, but it turns out to be a stranger. Remember that we have never actually seen 'Emma' face to face anyway, so this is a strangely disorienting scene. She turns around and neither he nor we have ever seen this woman before. To make absolutely sure there was no confusion caused by the sort of 'family likeness' that you unavoidably find in all the characters drawn by a single artist, caused by such things as habitual pen technique, an artist's 'signature', I asked my art assistant through all those From Hell years, Pete Mullins (last seen in this blog yesterday as a 'cork man') to draw this woman.
And then I went in with all the etcetera lines.

From Hell to Eternity

I wanted a quote up here about William Gull being a giant besmirched by pygmies, but i can't find the damn thing. I thought it was in Melvin Harris' The Ripper File, but he just says "the promised devastating solution was simply the Gull hoax once again. An innocent man was once more recklessly smeared." (he was referring to the 1988 tv special, which reiterated the Stephen Knight theory of a decade earlier. But he might as well have been referring to us.) And if you google the line about the pygmies you get a soccer commentary. Not sure how the world's pygmies feel about it all. There have been enough new Ripper theories since we finished From Hell that Alan has posited the idea of an additional appendix, a "Gull-catchers 2", to bring it all up to date. Perhaps to be released as part of an anniversary special in 2008 (twenty years since we started it and ten years since we finished it. But hey, this is just a rumour. You heard it here first.

The new edition is out at last, about three or four weeks ago.. This is the seventh printing of the complete From Hell, and the second Top Shelf edition. And it was a tortuous path getting it here. It was supposed to be out in the middle of last year but our printer went into bankruptcy. Buying printing is one of those publishing things I was never very good at. The Top Shelf guys do that much better than I ever did. To tell the truth I just stuck with Sim's printer, Preney, since it so happened that he had the old style photographic machinery to make negatives straight from artwork. Nowadays the information is input digitally, and I think the plates are treated directly, leaving the big negative sheets out of the process altogether. And this state of affairs may even have something to do with Preney losing a hold in the market. The very thing they were good for inevitably put them at a disadvantage if you consider that only Campbell and Sim were running their operations in much the same way as publications have been doing for sixty years, or however long offset litho has been the preferred commercial process. (I had started to find things difficult when I started employing computer design more, on The Birth Caul and after.)

This is just one more episode in the loony publishing history of this book, which has seen publishers, distributors and now a printer all go out of business. So, the problem was that there was no digital copy of this work in existence, and the only usable materials outside of the Preney shop was my collection of fine quality xeroxes. We had already advanced the printer a bunch of money for this printing, which he had (and still has) defaulted on. And in the meantime, I spent months making scans of my master xerox file, which in the final analysis proved unreliable in places and therefore unacceptable overall. Somehow Chris Staros had gotten the printer to sneak our From Hell negatives out of the factory when the receiver wasn't looking, and store them in his garage. Chris then paid him to hire a truck and drive the whole lot to Ronalds Quebecor which is where the majority of comic books seem to be printed these days. The negs were given to a good prepress op. who proved that they knew their stuff by making excellent scans from them. It appears that the Preney negs (the one thing they were good at, remember) were better than their own print job, which means that the same materials on a better printing press have quite remarkably given us the best version of the work thus far. To seal the deal Top Shelf have put it on a better quality paper this time around. Another notable feature is the new colour painting on the front. I made this for the first top Shelf printing but the guys went into a panic about putting all that blood on the cover when we urgently needed a good display in the bigger bookstores, and they figured the buyers there would be wary. So that image appeared in black and white in the endpapers of the sixth printing (first Top Shelf).

The various typeset pages have also been refreshed and this really is the dog's bollocks, as we would say in the UK.

Anyone who kept my long history of From Hell from the old Eddie Campbell Comics website can cut and paste this onto that as the latest sorry chapter in the peculiar history of the book that has kept a roof over our heads here at Castle Campbell all these years. I used to do a one and a half hour comedy routine which consisted of telling the whole story.

But the joke aint funny any more.