Graphic History: From Hell

This will be a regular feature as long as I have material to support it -- every Wednesday, a look at historical fiction in graphic form (or, comics, for those of us not trying to be so pretentious). There's a lot out there, and it gets overlooked by just about everyone.



This week, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, likely the gold standard of graphic history. Painstakingly researched (there are two factual appendices), and told by a writer and artist at the absolute top of each of their games, From Hell elevates the Jack the Ripper story from just another whodunnit into a meditation on the end of the Victorian era. Which, of course, is a fancy way of saying that Moore and Campbell produced an engrossing book that makes you think -- hard -- about how many of the problems faced in the twentieth century were foreshadowed in a famous serial killer's story.



It does raise one disturbing question, though. Why are writers of historical fiction so obsessed with serial killers?