From Hell: Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell.

This is a darkly magnificent masterwork and a superb (the best?) example of what a graphic novel is capable of achieving. I love the sardonic notes by Allan Moore. The entire work gives a seriousness (is it deserved?) to an essentially pretty fringe conspiracy theory re Jack the Ripper but it is done with passion and conviction.

The images are superb and wonderfully wide ranging in style. They add as much to the story, and are as essential to it, as the words, the two elements working together in perfect symbiosis. Also very effective are the quite frequent image sequences that are so short as to be almost individual frames on a piece of film.

The final chapter – the transfiguration of Gull – is remarkable and lifts the book almost into another dimension (pun unintended) with its links and connections across time. It’s gloriously imaginative.

The final Gull catchers sequence (Appendix 2)  is very clever and an excellent conclusion - in a way perhaps indirectly suggesting that we have all been ‘gulled’ by what we have just read and by what all the characters have said and done. And is the Dr’s name wonderfully ironic OR is it another clue that it is a hoax/conspiracy theory? It all becomes philosophical meta-fiction – can we ever really, truly, know anything at all?