The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
| The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell | |
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| Category: Graphic Novels | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Not just for a handful of avid fans, this look at the birth and building of a classic graphic novel is a fascinating insight into the art of turning words into pictures. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: May 2013 |
| Publisher: Knockabout | |
| ISBN: 9780861661848 | |
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Alan Moore will always be synonymous with two major books – Watchmen and From Hell, his look at the Whitechapel Murders. While the latter may appear to many to be a great, galumphing graphic novel loosely about Jack the Ripper, you ain't seen nothing yet. This volume is his illustrator Eddie Campbell's look at proceedings, and for a book that would appear to have no actual Moore input in it, he provides a welter of words for it.
Just as the actual From Hell is a metafiction – telling lies about truths, as the creators might have put it – so here too we get several strands of narrative. We see, as not even the most avid fan would have done before now, many insights into the creative process, as the actual instructions from Moore to Campbell are recreated in all their florid, verbose and vivid glory. We only get a small fraction of them, but they are enough – a little of Moore writing like this goes a long way, and he never believed in little. Added to those are some of his own scratched-out design briefs, which nobody had ever seen before now, not even Campbell, and miniatures of the finished, published page. And with Campbell annotating everything, we get the non-fiction of how From Hell came to be, from initial approaches and what was planned before the first issues were published, through several publishers and distributor hosts to the polished, de luxe complete novel we have today.
So just as the original managed to get away from Jack the Ripper and absorb 20th Century killers as well, along with modern attitudes to Victorian attitudes, sex, drugs and mobile phones, so this manages to be a lot more than at first appears. One would think this was just for the completist, the hardcore fan of Moore who would lap everything up. But we also get a fascinating glimpse into the construction of a graphic novel classic, and it is this insight into the artistry and graft that absorbs. Moore clearly was on a plane of his own, adding far too much detail, direction and movement into the descriptions of his requirements, but he had a collaborator who was certainly his match, one who was able to take a coherent essence from it all, and do his share of the work.
Here, then, is a strobe light flashing onto highlights from Moore's telling of the From Hell story, and Campbell's response to it, in both what he produced then and how he looks back on those events and times now. He even manages to chuck in a couple of dropped story ideas, and revisits some of his earlier panels to show what he might have changed. The feeling of the book is definitely of being privy to something very special and artful, and while books about comix are getting more and more prevalent (Supergods by Grant Morrison for one), this offers a unique way of showing one in gestation. This Companion is certainly not for the niche audience one might assume.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The last book solely about one graphic novel that had more detail than this would be MetaMAUS by Art Spiegelman, which it quotes. We also have a review of The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell at Amazon.com.
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