An autobiographical stories about Jack The Ripper?  Not quite, but it is a semi-autobiographical look into the mind of Alan Moore in the wake of the release of his important seminal graphic Ripper novel, From Hell.

Drawn into publicity work and promotion for the ambitious and heavily researched book, Moore found himself drawn to several of the Whitechapel, London locations of the infamous unknown killer’s crimes, and taken to East End lap dancing bars where he meets women who might have been victims of the Ripper had they operated in that Victorian fog era of the mid-1880’s.  Moore finds himself thinking s the Ripper might have done, and even follows a woman down the street as she leaves the sleazy bar.

This is a chilling look at the temptations that lurk in the dark recesses of all our hearts. The Ripper has of course been back in the guise of other serial killers, and in the tendency of writers like Moore to re-run the story of his crime spree for new audiences. Jack lives on in many ways, and we are left hoping the most real of these, the actual killer in a human, is not going to erupt from inside us.

Oscar Zarate’s wide panel artwork works well here and the story closes the Mammoth collection of crime stories perfectly, as after all they don’t come bigger than Jack The Ripper, do they?

Arthur Chappell

Image via Wikipedia

People continue to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, not because it matters, not because it is in anyway important (countless have died in the intervening years, not knowing) but because people don’t like the idea of being beaten by a mystery. To die never knowing seems to be a torture to them. The absolute impossibility of knowing, the frustrating horror of pure, black ignorance is something that has to be escaped by any available means, including baseless speculation and fiction. The big mysteries of life, the ones that no amount of scientific knowledge can truly satisfy, the ones about what happens after death and what happened in the undocumented past (who was Jack, really?), those are torture to the brain that demands answers, that wants to break the nature of life and time, to bring it under control. Some escape into science fiction where fantasies of time machine and alternate dimensions exist, and into religion where, if you roll your own you can basically devise anything for an after life that you want, confident that you will not be proven wrong in this life. 
A great deal of human efforts seem to involve wishful thinking, creating and substituting fiction for fact where the facts, or the lack of them, cannot provide satisfaction. Like a dildo to a wife with an impotent husband. 
Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, got away with it. He broke the law and he won. He showed up at the right time in history and he did what he wanted to do and there will be no closure. There can only be theories.
This is where all of your plans become pointless and stupid. Everybody seems to think that they will live forever, so that what happens a century from now is supposedly their business, and what a hundred years back still somehow matters, like we, we the individuals, are connected to those places in some way when we are not. Everything that happened before you were born and everything that will happen after may as well take place on another planet, or else not take place at all. You rent one lot in a neighborhood and you may be evicted at any time. What your neighbors are up to behind closed doors should be of no interest to you. 
Is this to say that history is not important? No, it is not. History is important in the way that it can be a study of human nature and as entertaining as fiction. It is a story written according to human tendency and the unpredictability of nature. It is not a science, and it does not have some big, practical influence on our lives. All it the possibly true anecdotes of people you don’t know, written by people who may or nay not know how to research, and who may or may not have an interest in lying to you.
The whole Jack the Ripper thing, being useless as it is for anything practical, and not being an entertaining mystery in that there is no solution, no answer, no satisfying conclusion to the whole thing gets used to shed light on the miserable lives of women in Victorian London, or it gets used to show how backward detectives of the era were. It is used for entertainment because it is sordid (involves prostitutes), and allows any writer to take on a resolution of his choosing. It comes with a built-in audience, people who have read Alan Moore’s From Hell or some other book full of speculations and enough history to make you feel invested. It’s about marketing, a relatively sure thing for a writer to use to make money.

Image via Wikipedia

I freaking love me some Alan Moore books. V For Vendetta and Watchmen are the two superhero books I look to when I want to read about a hero trying his damnedest to save their worlds because he creates people first and puts them into the situations that unfold. But he does more than just write people as super heroes, he has an agenda.

When writing Watchmen Alan Moore thought that he was writing the best comic book to ever be printed, he openly admits this, and hoped that it would change the way people write super hero stories and I believe this is why he and Dave Gibbons worked so hard on the project and made sure to put everything they had into it. They weren’t looking for a movie check and didn’t expect that the characters would eventually be handled by someone else, they said This Is It and made it the best possible comic they could imagine.

In Alan Moore’s book on writing comics he talks about panel transitions, rhythm and character development but after his lesson in what comics are and how they function he says point blank to forget everything you’ve read and to develop your own tricks. He says to visit people in prison and get a sense of who they are and to study people who are in trouble and to be a good person and try and find the humanity in everybody.

And he couldn’t be more right. That is what story tellers are attempting, after all. We want to find humanity in other people and this is why Alan Moore’s comics are the best comics on Earth. Watchmen isn’t good because the mystery of who killed the Comedian is so dramatic and engulfing. Watchmen is good because it is the only time in my life that I had ever felt a connection to an openly racist, homophobic man with extreme right wing tendencies.  Alan Moore is an Anarchist and has stated that he intended Rorschach to be so dark and disturbing that people would look at super hero comics in a new light and he did. He made us care for someone who would, in other comics, have been the bad guy.

In V For Vendetta we care, not about V himself but about Evey, the woman he saves and introduces to the world. We care also about the woman who wrote the letter to V while he was imprisoned, which V passed onto Evey.

We even understood the people who had been the bad guys, the corrupt government and their quest for safety and truth and their love of order, the very thing V had wanted to destroy. Alan Moore hadn’t intended for some US film makers to come along and make an allegory out of his film to discuss their disapproval of the Bush administration. His intent was clear. He was afraid of Fascism in his own country when he heard politicians talking about putting gay men and women into concentration camps.

Lost Girls, a pornographic book he wrote with artist Melinda Gebbie (who later became his wife) is about the sexual hang ups people develop based on their introductions to the world of sex as children. He took characters from classic stories and found sex, often in the form of abuse, and how it shaped girls into women.

His other works, such as From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Miracle Man and such feature people in difficult situations overcoming surmountable odds and are often deep in historical accuracies. Swamp Thing features some of the most brilliant writing I have ever seen and gave warmth and humanity to a creature that would otherwise be the Scary Monster of a b horror film.

This is the face of madness and his name is Alan Moore. He dares to take people on as they are rather than see the stiff ideologies that so many of us hide behind. He doesn’t believe that people are all good or all evil, but rather that people are problematic and that they do what they think is best. He often tries to figure out why people think the way they do and that is what makes his stories far better than anything else out there.