By Harry Kassen — Hello everyone and welcome back to Comics Anatomy. To those who read last month’s article: thank you, and I hope you found it interesting. Last month was a request based on a giveaway I ran last year (very overdue) and this month begins the Comics Anatomy Charity Commissions. For this article I’ll be writing about From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, as requested by fellow critic Sean Dillon.

When Sean requested From Hell for this article, I had to scramble a little. There’s a ton to say about this book, and a ton has already been said. Even I have a lot of ideas about From Hell, which I’d love to turn into a book or some long-form writing at some point. I contemplated using this as an opportunity to delve into those ideas but I figured if I did that, especially after last month, I’d have people storming my house to get me to stop.

What I’ll be focusing on instead is the art style Campbell uses throughout the comic and the impression it creates in your mind as you read it. Informed in part by a class I took at school this past semester, I’ll be bringing in some outside sources for this one which is something I don’t usually do, but it feels important here, and is really the only way to fully get across what I’m trying to articulate.

The first thing to note is that the style used in From Hell is somewhat different from the styles he used in other books. Looking first at this example from Bacchus, we can see the sort of basic elements of Campbell’s art style. 

Looking now at a page of From Hell, it should be pretty clear that there are some major stylistic differences.

The general approach to construction is the same, with characters looking similar and the page being built in a similar way. Other things are very different between the two pages. Overall, the From Hell page has more marks on it, producing a darker look. This is aided by the fact that the page is all either entirely white or entirely black. There is no grey on the page as there is in the Bacchus page. The mark making technique also appears to be different. The Bacchus page features a variety of line widths and shapes that seem to have been made by various drawing tools. The From Hell page features thin lines and fully black areas nearly exclusively.

Looking now at this page from Alec, another Campbell book, we can see a third style used by Campbell.

This one lands somewhere in between From Hell and Bacchus but feels more similar to Bacchus due to the variety of line weights and overall lighter look. From these we can conclude that the style used in From Hell is not typical for Campbell and was a specific approach designed with that book in mind.

My theory about what led to this particular style has to do with the content of the book itself. Being a story about the Jack the Ripper Murders of 1888, it makes sense that the art itself would be inspired by material from that time, in this case illustrated newspapers. Take this example, which is Marie Kelly’s house from the Penny Illustrated Paper issue that came out 8 days after she was murdered.

Already the general similarities are apparent. Just like Campbell’s From Hell pages, this image has a lot of marks on it, creating a similar dark feeling. The marks are also very similar to those in the comic, being almost entirely thin lines of uniform thickness. Compare that to this From Hell panel showing the same building at night.

The only really notable stylistic differences here are the increased presence of full black areas in the From Hell image and the variation in the orientation of the lines. The presence of additional black space can be attributed to the different times of day being depicted, leaving the direction of the marks the only major differentiating factor. That’s something that seems more like a difference between individual artists as opposed to general style. That can be seen here in another contemporaneous newspaper page, this time from Illustrated Police News.

Once again we have a generally dark page, with this one looking even more like Campbell’s work than the last in my opinion. This one is also mostly made up of those thin lines, with some variation in mark type, but importantly nothing that looks like it was made with a brush. That’s something that seems to define both these newspapers and From Hell. Compare the Illustrated Police News page to this page of From Hell featuring closeups on some of the characters, including Annie Chapman, the victim portrayed in the newspaper.

With these examples, the similarities in the two approaches should be relatively clear. I’m sure that Campbell, and potentially also Moore in his choice of collaborator, was influenced by the art in the newspapers of the time. It makes a lot of sense that they would choose this style to visually link their book to contemporary portrayals of these crimes and the world they were trying to depict. Beyond that basic link though, there’s more to the effects of that particular style. Getting into this, however, requires a little bit of digging into the history of illustrated news.

For this historical background, I’ll be referring to Chapter Six of Michael Twyman’s Printing 1770-1970, which features a lot of information on the genesis of printed newspapers as well as several examples of the same. If anyone reading this is interested in this subject, I’d recommend that book as a place to start. It has a lot of information about all sorts of elements of printing across a vast time period, albeit with a focus constrained to England.

The passage about newspaper illustration, and in particular early illustrated broadsheets, is the most relevant to this story, both for reasons of form and content. Twyman first mentions that satirical lithographs were very popular but that those were usually targeted toward the upper classes. Printing for the lower classes mostly consisted of sheets with “crude but lively woodcuts depicting the latest execution, act of violence, disaster, or royal event” (Twyman, 94). This is a culture we see on full display in From Hell, from the old man selling commemorative slasher canes to the fabricated letters created by newspapermen to sell copies and the public to be a part of something exciting and historic.

Before talking about the broader philosophical and thematic implications of that as it relates to From Hell, I want to just get into the mechanics of woodcuts for a bit, because it helps explain why the book looks the way it does in various sections. Woodcuts and wood engravings are two slightly different versions of the same basic process where the artist cuts into a piece of wood and removes some portion of the face of the piece. Being a relief printing method, the parts that are left uncut are the parts that will ink, and the parts that have been cut away are left white. Given that, it makes sense that a lot of the woodcuts available in these newspapers are largely dark, as I’ve mentioned before. It’s less work, and therefore more practical and cost effective, to leave large sections mostly untouched, which leads to a dark final image, as we’ve seen both in newspapers and From Hell.

An interesting comparison is the scene in From Hell set nebulously in the present day. I’m assuming it’s the ‘90s. This scene features a slight departure from the style of the rest of the comic. While it still uses the same mark making techniques as the rest of the book so as not to be distractingly different, it also breaks from the general dark feeling that I just got into. It’s effective in telling the reader at first glance that something is different but it also takes its cues from contemporary printing techniques. Most modern printing, or at least the non-digital varieties, are variants on lithography, which is a planographic technique. This means that the printing surface is completely flat, and the part the ink sticks to is determined by chemical interactions. Specifically, grease is applied to sections that the artist wants the ink to stick to, and so it is an additive technique, where the work is in adding areas that will print rather than cutting them away. This leads to a lighter, or more balanced, overall aesthetic, because it is more work to add black areas, though because it is not a cutting or carving process, the additional work is less. So with this understanding, we can see that the modern day scene features a balance of black and white that might be expected of something printed using a lithographic technique, tying it formally to the era in which it is set.

Now, with that very formal analysis taken care of, let’s turn to a discussion of the culture that produced these execution broadsheets. From Hell is, in many ways, about this culture. Not so much the strict economics of it, but the way in which storytelling and retelling can mythologize people and events. That distinction doesn’t really matter though when you consider that it’s all part of the same machine that feeds on trauma and chews it up to spit out content to be purchased and gawked at. From Hell both explores that and embodies it at various points. Draping itself in the visual style of that era’s exploitative press is just another way in which it links itself to that theme.

Another passage from Twyman’s book that can be applied to From Hell is about the manner in which these illustrated broadsheets were created. The primary motivation behind making them was profit, and so newspapers took steps to capture as much of the market as possible at the lowest possible cost. To this end, when covering an execution, “ the fate of the poor victim was usually described and committed to wood in advance of the occasion so that the broadsheet could be sold to the eager crowds who gathered to witness the event,” (Twyman, 94). Beyond that, as a cost cutting measure, “It was common practice for the same wood block to be used over and over again, and some even incorporated a section which could be varied according to the number of men being hanged,” (Twyman, 94).

This is obviously part and parcel of the cultural exploitation of trauma that I was talking about above, but these points have a deep resonance with the themes of preordination present in From Hell. Producing the broadsheets ahead of time could be easily explained by the fact that these were widely publicized events, and it was just good business to have newspapers ready to sell, but creating fill in the blank woodcuts ahead of time changes that narrative completely. Implicit in newspapers’ decisions to have dedicated “execution plates” is the idea that these happen regularly. Violence as a spectacle is so ingrained in the culture that newspapers can rely on it for their income.

While there’s clearly nothing supernatural in that, it does bear a lot of similarities to the way Gull talks about the preordination of violence in From Hell and its increasing prominence in the popular consciousness. Both in the text and in Moore’s historical notes, there’s reference to the fact that the 1880s represent a microcosm of the 20th Century with its normalized everyday violence. Part of that thesis is that these previously once in a generation acts of horrific violence, the slashings and serial murders, become more frequent as time goes on. Nothing proves that more than the fact that execution memorabilia was in such high demand, and executions so frequent, that newspapers kept generic plates on hand to report on executions at a moments notice.

It might seem unlikely that the reader would be able to get all of this out of the comic without extensive prior knowledge, and I feel like that’s probably true, but I also think that’s not a reason to think this isn’t intentional on the part of Moore and Campbell. There are so many things in From Hell that exist outside the range of popular understanding. It’s a book in layers, with something for everyone, but the real reward is going back in with new knowledge and coming out with a whole new understanding. This layer, to me, seems very appropriate. How fitting that a comic proposing that there could be evil in the architecture fills its own architecture with its own themes and ideas.

Sean Dillon is a comics critic. He can be found on Twitter @deathchrist2000. He is the author of One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy. His writing can be found at http://thekinginredandblue.blogspot.com/.

Check out past editions of Comics Anatomy.

Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.