Jack The Ripper or Uncle Sam: every nation takes whatever icons it can find, and invents those it cannot. The prototype serial killer of Victorian London, “ … a shifting cloud of facts and factoids onto which we project the fictions that seem most appropriate to our times and our inclinations,” has been the subject of every conceivable variety of speculative fiction and historical research, but the graphic novel From Hell (Knockabout, £24.99), written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell, melds the two in such high style that Ripperology of neither type will ever, thankfully, be quite the same again.
Currently being filmed in Prague by the Hughes Bros with a stellar cast including Johnny Depp, Nigel Hawthorne and Robbie Coltrane, From Hell took Moore and Campbell a full decade to complete, passing through the hands of four different publishers, including Campbell’s own eponymous imprint, before winding up in this handsome collection. Their grim, sprawling tale takes as its credo “the suggestion that the 1880s embody the essence of the twentieth century, along with the attendant notion that the Whitechapel murders embody the essence of the 1880s, is central to From Hell.”
Campbell’s scratchy and consciously unglamorous illustrative style could hardly be more different from the flashily-rendered but indifferently-drawn artwork currently generic to mainstream comics, but it is marvellously subtle and evocative, never compromising or sensationalising a virtuoso script which incorporates every established fact available and uses speculative and fictional techniques only to join up the dots. Just which bits of From Hell are fact, factoid or fiction can be unravelled with the aid of over forty pages of detailed notes and appendices supplied by the author.
Symphony completed, the composer has been keeping his hand in whilst letting his hair down by playing some boogie, writing no less than five concurrent monthly series for the modestly-named new company, America’s Best Comics. Top 10 (Titan, £24.99hb) certainly rocks: imagine the chaotic inner-city precinct of Hill Street Blues relocated in a future where everybody — vics and perps, cops and squares alike — has some form of super-power, and you’re halfway there. Illustrated with enormous wit and vigour by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, it’s Big Fun, and as dissimilar to From Hell as any two works by the same author could possibly be.
For dessert, discreetly celebrate the return to print, after too long an absence, of Moore’s early left-anarchist masterpiece V For Vendetta (Titan £14.99), plus the bravura eco-terror of Saga Of Swamp Thing (Titan, £12.99), and the first of its many sequels, Love And Death (Titan, £13.99). It is sobering to note that whenever a comic or graphic novel is hailed as ‘proof that comics have finally come of age,’ nine times out of ten it will have been written by Alan Moore. It’s certainly been Moore’s year: man of the match indeed.
Americans being incorrigibly optimistic souls, Uncle Sam (Titan, £8.99), written by Steve Darnall and illustrated in his patented painterly Norman-Rockwell-in-bad-mood style by Alex Ross, ends with a small victory to send the audience out happy. That’s its sole concession to the tenets of an American Dream from which its creators spend the rest of the book attempting to awaken its readers by grabbing their lapels and shouting in their faces. It begins with the goateed, striped-trousered incarnation of the nation as a ragged, ranting street person but, as Greil Marcus puts it in his introduction, “he lies on the pavement not to ask for what you’ve got but to ask you how you got it. He might be a bum, he might be a judge …”
Sam turns out to be both, skidding uncontrollably through American history revisiting triumphs and tragedies alike, and questioning why the latter have so often been mediated as the former. It is an immensely powerful piece of work: a demonstration of the artistic and political potential of the medium which posits serious questions as to why so many comics creators so frequently set their sights so low. Alan Moore admires it. So does Billy Bragg. So do I. So should you.
And so, probably, would a certain shaven-headed, drug-addled, loose-cannon, muck-raking guerilla journalist. Not Dr Hunter S. Thompson, as it happens, but Spider Jerusalem, the protagonist of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s near-future dystopia Transmetropolitan, which joins Preacher and The Invisibles at the forefront of the New Transgressive comics movement. The first of the series to be published in the UK, The New Scum (Titan, £10.99) is actually the fourth volume, but its three predecessors will shortly be joining it in the shops. This is just as well since The New Scum drops the reader into an ongoing story arc, begun in 1999’s Year Of the Bastard, concerning a Presidential election which pits a stubbled, thuggish Nixon-alike incumbent against a glib, smarmy smiler not unlike our own Beloved Leader.
Transmetropolitan arrives not a nanosecond before time. With the current Preacher collection, All Hell’s A-Comin’ (Titan, £12.99) little more than an extended set-up for The Alamo, the series’s Grand Finale (due in May), and Preacher: Dead Or Alive (Titan, (£24.99hb) merely an annotated assembly of Glenn Fabry’s cover art for the series, transgressophiles urgently require a replacement, and this is as funky a fill-in as could possibly be desired. As for The Invisibles, the latest volume, Kissing Mr Quimper (Titan, £13.99), finds Grant Morrison and various artists continuing their mission to create comics which are simultaneously decadent, sexy, gory and intellectually intriguing. Morrison’s saga of war between his guerilla squad of hi-tech anarchist mystics and their extra-dimensional antagonists draws freely and freakily on myth, history, popkulchtriv and conspiracy-theory hi-jinks. How long the Scottish art-terrorist and his associates can maintain this level of high-camp weirdness is anybody’s guess, but this volume betrays no signs of them running out of steam quite yet. The Invisibles is not bad — quite the reverse — but it is mad, and quite possibly dangerous to know.
Independent, 2000
