From Hell by Alan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm torn on this one. I mean, sure, it's Jack the Ripper and Alan Moore and it's supposed to be this grand masterpiece, but to me it just feels mostly like some kind of disjointed hodge-podge collection of personas that simultaneously lift up and denigrate both the East Side women and everyone else, nearly randomly, until much later in the comic when things finally tie together into a mystical extravaganza that is both surprising and feeling rather out of place.

What do I mean? Well, throw out the movie version, for starters. Keep the bits about William Gull, REALLY emphasise the importance of Masonic conspiracy theories and the connection to the crown, and then, after you're thoroughly grounded in all the blood and gore and the feeling like nothing really matters, top it all off with a dose of Alan Moore's more odd explorations in the human psyche and/or WOW mysticism.

Fortunately, I've read Jerusalem.
From Hell goes there, serving as a freaky introduction to life without time, magical incantations, demons, and the power of location upon magic.

This part is worth all the apparent slog of most of the rest of the comic. (At least for me, but I love literature of ideas and oddities and complex plots.)

Will people hate me if I was rather bored with long segments of this story? That I only really started perking up to it with Gull's becoming Virgil?

Still, in the end, I really liked it and I thought it was rather cool how all the well-researched conspiracies tied it back in. I did, however, have a hell of a time with reading the text. It hurt my eyes.

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