Jun 14, 2018

From Hell and... beyond

Excerpt from an interview published on EW.com on May 31, 2018.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Have you been in contact with Alan Moore at all about this?
Eddie Campbell: I’ve told Alan I’m doing it. I was like “Alan, if there’s anything you want to fix, you’ve gotta fix it now, this is your chance.” He hasn’t said anything so far. I might jog his memory by getting the stuff to him in the next week or two. If there’s any dialogue that’s wrong, now’s his time to fix it. He’s always talked about adding another appendix. When I spoke to him last month, he said “Eddie, maybe it’s time we do that other appendix, this is the only time we’ll be able to do it.” That’ll be a whole other dozen pages of illustration, but he wants to bring it up to date because in the last 30 years there’s been a lot of developments in Ripper-ology. Even though this was a crime that happened in 1888, every second year there’s a new book about it, where somebody’s found a new culprit. Five, six years ago, Patricia Cornwell went to huge expense buying Walter Sickert’s paintings to get DNA evidence from the paintings and compare it with DNA evidence from the murder site just to prove it was Walter Sickert. But since then somebody’s come out with another suspect. Everybody thinks they’ve got the last word on it. We did this 24-page appendix to the original From Hell called Dance of the Gull-Catchers, in which we ridiculed all the theories, including our own. It’s a grand piece of postmodernism, where you finish the book of “this is our theory, here’s why it’s right” by going “well no it isn’t, nobody’s right, it’s all baloney.” That was great fun doing that, we had a riot doing that in an almost comedic style. Alan wants to do another one where he brings it up to date. I’m not promising that, because we’ll probably have to beat him up to get it out. We’ll have to tie him to the computer and make him type it out. But we’ll see, it’s a possibility.

1 comment:

Mike said...

I was hoping he’d be doing watercolors to keep with the scratchy, handmade feel of From Hell, but this flat digital color does not look good.