Eddie Campbell about the Ripper

Excerpt from an Eddie Campbell interview by Chloe Maveal, published on NeoText Review site.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Eddie Campbell: Were you a fan of From Hell?

Maveal: I was! I think it’s one of Moore’s best works and I, of course, am always blown away by your artwork. It was very cool seeing it in color for the first time though. I — and I think a lot of other readers — have become so accustomed to seeing it in black and white and grey that seeing the addition of color is pretty wild.

Campbell: When I did the issues — the ten volumes — in the scene of Mary Kelly’s death, I had gone very light on the blood. When it printed in color, all the reds just disappeared! I looked at it and thought “I’ve had nosebleeds worse than this!” So I went in a added a lot more blood and red. I think it looks terrifying now.

Maveal: Hat’s off to you, seriously. The color of the blood alone is pretty harrowing. You got it to a nice, rich blue-red.

Campbell: Yeah, it was really nice. And I wanted to mention —and I had to fight for this really hard — that I had to argue to get the women put on the cover. I really had to fight for that. And they said “Nah, it’s too dark”, but I got my way in the end. I just wanted them walking in the street with the street-lamps and they said “Well can’t we have Jack the Ripper at the end of the street or something?” And I said no, just walking in the London street when they were happy and healthy and before it all went wrong.

Maveal: That’s a pretty hefty thing to fight for. That’s considerably darker than the original.

Campbell: Well when Alan [Moore] and I originally released it, we didn’t want people to know it was about Jack the Ripper. I put still life sketches on the cover back in the 1990s. Things like grapes or a melting candle and a cell phone [laughs]. The number on the dialed cell phone was the number for the publisher. It was Kitchen Sink Press and they noticed it right away. [laughs] But we wanted people to buy it thinking that it was a story about real life and the real world every. So often thing about jack the Ripper are horror stories in general. They take place in an environment that is designed to receive and produce horror. Horror…it just works at its best when it comes out of nowhere and you’re not prepared for it…