From Hell isn’t a superhero story like Miracleman. Nor is it a vigilante story like V for Vendetta. However, it also explores an idea that appeared in Captain Britain.[i] Like Captain Britain, it is an apocalypse. The hero’s brutal death felt like the world was ending. A similar apocalyptic sense appears in Moore’s other 1980s works. Watchmen deconstructs superhero tropes while telling a story about superheroes trying to avoid a nuclear war. In Moore’s three Superman stories, the Man of Steel finds himself in situations where death or incapacitation seems inevitable. Swamp Thing and Miracleman learn that everything they know about themselves is wrong. In each case, the protagonist’s world crashes around his shoulders before rising again.
Apocalypse… Now?
However, apocalyptic literature isn’t just about the world ending. Eugene Peterson argues that the Bible’s final book retells the Gospel narrative in a new way.
“I do not read the Revelation to get additional information about the life of faith in Christ… Everything in the Revelation can be founded in the previous sixty-five books of the Bible… The truth of the gospel is already complete, revealed in Jesus Christ. There is nothing new to say on the subject. But there is a new way of saying it. I read the Revelation not to get more information but to revive my imagination.”
Reversed Thunder, xi-xii
Even when Peterson later wrote that Revelation describes the future, he argued that it focuses on showing the present in a new way.
“The book of Revelation really is about the future, but what it says does not satisfy our curiosity or match what we think are the obvious things to say. It is not a disclosure of future events but the revelation of their inner meaning. It does not tell us what events are going to take place and the dates of their occurrence; it tells us what the meaning of those events is. It does not provide a timetable of history. It is not prediction but perception. It is, in short, about God as he is right now. It rips the veil off our vision and lets us see what is taking place.”
The Hallelujah Banquet, 7
So, apocalyptic literature may not be a clear-cut vision of a coming disaster but a lens for seeing the past or present in a new way. This is key for understanding From Hell, which Moore built around an idea that the Whitechapel murders were an “apocalyptic summary of those times” (Groth 79).
From Hell opens in London a year before the Whitechapel murders start. Following a conspiracy theory Stephen Knight suggested in his 1976 bestseller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Moore presents the killings as an elaborate block ops mission. Women of ill repute living in Whitechapel try to blackmail Queen Victoria’s grandson over an illegitimate daughter. The daughter has disappeared, the mother committed to an asylum, but the threat is still potent. Queen Victoria, who has already called on physician Dr. William Gull to silence her grandson’s paramour, requests his services again. With streetwise cabbie Netley as his sidekick and Freemason brethren covering his tracks, Gull begins his bloody mission.
When Moore started writing From Hell in 1989, most “Ripperologists” had disowned Knight’s book. Moore freely admitted that he didn’t believe its claims and would not claim to identify Jack the Ripper.
“Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory’s obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn’t like books. Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution.”
From Hell Appendix II: Dance of the Gull-Catchers, 16
However, as Moore explained in a 1997 interview with Dave Sim, “there were still ways to approach the Whitechapel murders that might expose previously unexplored seams of meaning” (ibid). The true solution might be found, but the story could still be used to explore interesting ideas.
“To some extent the peripheries of murder, the myth, rumour, and folklore attached to a given case had always seemed more potentially fruitful and rewarding than a redundant study of the hard forensic facts at a murder’s hub. This traditional approach to murder might tell us Whodunit (which is admittedly the most immediate of practical considerations), but it does not tell us what happened on any more than the most obvious and mechanical level. To find out anything truly significant, we must take the plunge into myth and meaning, and to me a case with the rich mythopoeic backwaters of the Whitechapel murders suddenly seemed like the perfect spot to go fishing.”
Alan Moore Interview with Dave Sim, The From Hell Companion, 16
Moore’s goal wasn’t to solve the Whitechapel murders but to use it as a mythopoeic story he would use to say something new.
Apocalyptic Mythology
As noted earlier, mythopoeic literature takes past elements to forge a new mythology—an idea that was very important to the Inklings.
At least one Inklings fused mythopoeia and apocalypse. Brenton Dickieson outlines how in Charles Williams’ poem “The Son of Lancelot,” the story of Lancelot fathering Galahad becomes more than a story about a knight falling from grace. Williams uses biblical imagery (comparing Lancelot to Nebuchadnezzar, comparing Galahad’s birth to the Revelation 12 nativity) to do what Jewish apocalyptic writings do: recast past events for a new perspective. For example, “The Apocalypse of Abraham” retells Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac, shown in the context of Israel’s history, and then “Israel in terms of her entire mythological framework” (Dickieson 1).
In apocalyptic literature, “by the aid of a mediator, we are risen to a cosmic view so we can see the true significance of history through mythic-spiritual symbolism” (ibid). In Williams’ poem, this means that Galahad’s birth marks a new age for Arthur’s England. Galahad becomes not just Lancelot’s son but the messiah child to rebirth Logres.
Hence, apocalypse can be a form of mythopoeia, recasting older myths (Arthuriana) or historical events (Abraham sacrificing Isaac) in a new light. Moore accomplishes the latter in From Hell, turning the Whitechapel murders into an apocalyptic tale about misogyny, change, and authoritarianism.
Moore starts taking an apocalyptic turn when Gull enters the story. He casts Gull as a man who has reached great heights. A respected Freemason. A surgeon whom Queen Victoria trusts to examine her family. A man with sophisticated friends—like James Hinton, who tells Gull about his son’s essays on the fourth dimension. Despite his prestige, Gull yearns for a “special task.” (From Hell Chapter 2, 25).[ii] A stroke before Gull’s seventieth birthday, where he sees Masonic deity “Jah-Bul-On” (From Hell Chapter 2, 26), seems a harbinger.
When Queen Victoria assigns Gull to deal with Mary Kelly and her friends, Gull treats this as his great task. He takes Netley on a trip around London to five locations that create a pentangle formation. He points out Masonic symbols in architecture and talks about magic. Gull describes his task as more than assassination. He views it as an act of ceremonial magic to put down womenkind. To Gull, human civilization is a long story about women once ruling in prehistoric matriarchal societies, followed by men creating a masculine, rational world. Movements like the Suffragettes leaves Gull worrying that womankind is rearising. Steps must be taken.
“Measured against the span of goddesses, our male rebellion’s lately won, our new regime of rationality unfledged, precarious. Our grand symbolic magic chaining womankind thus must often be reinforced, carved deeper yet in history’s flesh, enduring ‘til the earth’s demise…”
From Hell Chapter 4, 25
Gull’s vision is bizarre—and events become more bizarre as the fourth dimension Hinton told him about apparently breaks down. While preparing to kill his second victim, Gull looks into a window and sees a twentieth-century living room where a man watches TV (From Hell Chapter 7, 24).
While killing his final victim, Gull sees a vision of a modern office space, which he realizes must be the future. As the vision fades and he returns to the room where his victim lies, Gull seems depressed. As he leaves, he tells Netley that things are “only just beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century. I have delivered it” (From Hell Chapter 10, 33). In the book’s final act, dying in an asylum, Gull has another vision where he sees future serial killers, including Ian Brady and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Moore leaves it unclear how authentic Gull’s visions are. The key is he uses them to cast the killings in an apocalyptic light, along with other tools. Moore sets the events in a wider social context (the cameos of Crowley, Yeats, etc., mentioned earlier and a wide range of supporting characters) and a cosmic context (the shifts across time and place). In doing so, Moore tells the Whitechapel murders in a new context, exploring their effect from new angles.
Three particular angles are worth noting.
First, this apocalypse provides a new lens for considering misogyny and the Whitechapel murders. Gull declares he represents male authority, which he believes must dominate womenkind. Meanwhile, Gull’s victims are women routinely taken advantage of—by poverty, by lack of opportunities. The detectives talk about how Whitechapel locals are “married by twelve, most of ‘em,” though marriages frequently end and the girls become prostitutes (From Hell Chapter 6, 22). There are, as one of the detective notes, “twelve hundred tarts in Whitechapel. Officially.” (ibid).
All of Gull’s victims are (officially or not) prostitutes, barely making rent money. Mary Kelley hits on blackmailing the Royal Family because she needs money fast after an extortion gang threatens a friend. These women live in an environment where selling one’s body and selling dirty secrets have become the only way to survive.
The society-wide misogyny is also underlined in how supporting characters behave. Victoria is portrayed as a woman who doesn’t mind crushing other women threatening her power. When her grandson mentions the Whitechapel murders to his friend J.K. Stephens, Stephens replies, “Oh Eddie! Come off it! They were women! They must have done something” (From Hell Chapter 8, 8). Whether or not these historical figures are portrayed accurately, Moore uses them to highlight a particular point: this is a society where minimal opportunities, power dynamics, and systemic poverty leave few women with options. In that context, the Whitechapel murders become a symptom of misogyny infecting the whole society.
“It’s easy enough to say that From Hell depicts the infamous Whitechapel slayings of 1888 — the so-called Jack the Ripper murders — as a conspiracy theorist’s dream… But the novel goes further, implicating the violent misogyny of all of Victorian society, from Queen Victoria on down — and the misogyny of our own time.”
Craig Fisher and Charles Hatfield, The From Hell Companion, 5
Secondly, Moore portrays the Whitechapel murders as a harbinger of doom, the transition from one age to the next. Unlike Williams’ “Son of Lancelot,” where the apocalypse involves a messiah child ushering in a potentially better age, From Hell involves an antichrist figure ushering in a darker age. Moore argues that the Whitechapel murders “embody the essence of the 1880s,” a decade that embodied the essence of the twentieth century (From Hell Appendix I, 14). Moore highlights various trends and events in the 1880s—scientific advancements like the light bulb, political trends like rising antisemitism—that had dark consequences in the twentieth century (ibid).
Coincidentally, Adolf Hitler was conceived around the time the Whitechapel murders started. Moore even works that fact into the story—after Gull declares his mission, the story shifts briefly to Austria, where a woman implied to be Adolf Hitler’s mother has a vision of blood gushing from a church (From Hell Chapter 5, 2). Doom is coming.
The shifts across time and space allow Moore to show the world that is coming (Gull sees a modern-day room with a TV, and later an office space). Gull looks around the office space and observes how impersonal this future world is.
“It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos… Morose, barbaric children playing joyously with their unfathomable toys.”
From Hell Chapter 10, 21.
The technological advances of the 1880s will change the world. Gull’s actions will become part of the revolution. Ultimately, it will be a colder world.
The other shifts also suggest that Gull’s violence is a taste of what’s coming. Mrs. Hitler’s vision of blood running through a building heralds the future violence in Whitechapel and the antisemitic violence her son will wreak. Antisemitism figures in the Whitechapel case, with police trying to pin the killings on a Jewish leather worker. The future killers that Gull sees (the Yorkshire Ripper, Ian Brady, etc.) will carry on his example in terrible ways. In playing the Whitechapel murders as “The Apocalypse of Jack the Ripper,” Moore forces readers to consider how that period foreshadowed and helped create the violent world we know.
Third, Moore uses the theory that the Freemasons and Victora were being the murders to critique authoritarianism. Victoria wants the women eliminated to protect her legacy. The Freemasons want Victoria’s wishes fulfilled to keep their power system in place. Once the crimes end, Moore depicts the Freemasons going even further to hide Gull’s tracks.
Neither Victoria nor the Freemasons have the fascist overtones of Norsefire in V for Vendetta. However, as Elizabeth Ho observes, these Freemasons serving Victoria do resemble “Thatcher’s England… an old boy’s club [whose] primary goal is to protect its own and its iconic mother figure” (103). Moore depicts them as another variety of authoritarians willingly crushing others to maintain their interests. Hence, From Hell uses the same liberty versus authoritarianism theme in Miracleman and V for Vendetta.
From Hell continues Moore’s interest in mythopoeia, seen in Miracleman and V for Vendetta, applied to new contexts. In doing so, Moore highlights particular elements of the Whitechapel murders (Victorian misogyny, corrupt hierarchies, violence forewarning future violence), recasting the story in a cosmic view that makes those elements prominent.
The fact that Miracleman, V for Vendetta, and From Hell all become critiques of authority shows how utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse can explore the same theme via different lenses. Utopia allows a writer to show a society with values they promote, without necessarily showing how they can be attained. Dystopia allows a writer to show what happens if a certain value is forgotten, often tying the story explicitly to its written period. Apocalypse allows a writer to perform another kind of critique, using cosmic scale to show a world and particular injustices.
A Final Thought on Alan Moore
The fact that Moore uses utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse to explore similar themes in such very different ways shows that his talent is not overrated. His chosen themes—particularly his arguments for anarchy and free love—may not be as life-giving as he believes. Still, the ways that Moore explores his ideas are always interesting and definitely literary. Even at his most maverick and inconsistent, Moore has shown that comics can be literature and have a worthy part in the speculative fiction canon.
After decades of legal battles, Neil Gaiman is finishing Miracleman: The Silver Age. New issues are on sale. Alan Moore’s first novel, Voice of the Fire, has been reissued for its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Footnotes
[i] To a lesser extent, Douglas Adams appears to be another touchstone in Captain Britain and From Hell. As noted earlier, Moore uses some sci-fi elements in Captain Britain that resemble Adams’ work. While there’s nothing Adams-style about the plot of From Hell, Moore said in a 2001 BBC interview with Danny Graydon that Adams inspired a key plot point: “I’d seen advertisements for Douglas Adams’ book ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.’ A holistic detective? You wouldn’t just have to solve the crime, you’d have to solve the entire world that that crime happened in. That was the twist that I needed.”
[ii] From Hell was first published in 16 volumes which each had a numbering system based on the chapter, as in “From Hell, Chapter X, pg. Y.” This numbering system was maintained in the collected volume, which also includes two appendices. All quote citations are from the collected volume, using its pagination system.
Print Works Cited (For Full Article Series)
Note: because many of these graphic novels had multiple illustrators, only the authors of the text are listed, except in comics where front matter lists them as a co-author.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. HarperCollins, 2006, pg. 43.
Claremont, Chris and Alan Moore, Jamie Delano, and Alan Davis. Captain Britain Omnibus. Marvel, 2009, pg. viii.
Fischer, Craig and Charles Hatfield. “Foreword.” The From Hell Companion. Knockabout Comics & Top Shelf Productions, 2013, pg. 5.
Gaiman, Neil. “Introduction.” Fahrenheit 451: 60th Anniversary Edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013, pp. xii-xiii.
—. Miracleman: The Golden Age. Marvel, 2016.
Groth, Gray. “Alan Moore: Last Big Words Part III.” The Comics Journal No. 140, February 1991, pp. 74, 79.
Ho, Elizabeth. “Postimperial Landscapes ‘Psychogeography’ and Englishness in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novel ‘From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts.’” Cultural Critique, no. 63, 2006, pp. 99–121. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/4489248.
Moore, Alan (credited as The Original Writer) with Mick Anglo. Miracleman Book One: A Dream of Flying. Marvel, 2014.
—. Miracleman Book Two: The Red King Syndrome. Marvel, 2014, pg. 71.
—. Miracleman Book Three: Olympus. Marvel, 2015, pp. 21, 65, 77, 78, 79, 92, 115.
Moore, Alan. Superman: Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow? The Deluxe Edition. DC Comics, 2009.
— and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Top Shelf Productions, 2004. See endnote viii for info on page citations.
——. The From Hell Companion. Knockabout Comics & Top Shelf Productions, 2013, pp. 5, 16.
— and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 2005, pp. 170, 195.
Murphy, Graham J. “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 28, no. 1 (98), 2017, pp. 70–85. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/26390194.
Peterson, Eugene H. Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be. Waterbrook, 2021, pg. 7.
—. Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination. HarperOne, 1988, pg. xi-xii.
Schwartz, Roy. Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero. McFarland & Co, 2021, pp. 106, 170, 182, 252.
G. Connor Salter 