From Hell premiere

New, non-comic-related, answers.

Jack the Ripper = James Maybridge so dud

?huh? let's set aside the whole fact/fiction thing (is that what you mean): From Hell = fiction. What about the adaptation of a fantastic comic-book? Chances R slim, huh?

i don't heart alan moore unlike everyone else in the known (= comic geek) universe, so i don't necessarily believe "from hell" = good in the first place

popeye = altman's only good movie not adapted from a stageplay written by someone else

I have not read the seires but this movie thrills me so fucking much that i went out and bought it and am going to read it b4 i see the movie.

I am terribly confused by Mark's first post. Is he saying that the Ripper was REALLY Maybridge and that Moore should therefore have 'fingered' him as the killer, or is he saying that 'From Hell' suggests Maybridge WAS the killer, and is therefore a big absurd dud? 'Cos in my copy of the GN, it's pretty clear from the second or third chapter that Sir William Gull is the 'real life' person that Moore has chosen to be his JTR, not Maybridge. I believe he based this 'theory' on the Stephen Knight bk 'The Final Solution' (in an appendix Moore acknowledges that the Knight bk is prob. a v. clever hoax.)

Johnny Depp playing a middle-aged cockney copper? What were they thinking of?

Another good movie based on a comic strip - Mario Bava's 'Danger: Diabolik'. Agreed that the 'Popeye' movie is v. underrated, but I think that has much to do with Jules Feiffer's screenplay as with Altman - it's v. v. faithful to the original E.C. Segar strips. And I haven't seen it yet, but everyone tells me that 'Ghost World' is terrific. I'm certainly looking forward to that a lot more than 'From Hell'.

i think the gull theory is intrinsically lame as a route into the evisceration of victorian society, and typical of the way a.moore always takes the reactionary soft option politically (eg it basically rests on the kind of royalist identity-switch conspiracy which Anthony Hope would have been embarrassed to shoehorn into Rupert of Hentzau)

the maybridge theory is of course also highly unlikely, but rests on a far more interesting and dynamic portrait of victorian bourgeois life (eg philandering much-travelling Liverpool-based merchant husband takes prescribed arsenic for kicks, sexual and narcotic: away from home, starts slicing up women; back home, his frightened bullied young wife Florence takes a lover; JM dies, horribly, of arsenic poisoning; ripper murders cease; Florence is convicted and jailed for his murder; by public outcry spared the rope; eventually freed, she emigrates and makes a life rather miserably elsewhere, surviving well into the 20th century

a possibly totally bogus maybridge diary surfaced abt ten (??) years ago in liverpool, a family heirloom: if a fake, a work of some imaginative magnificence, nevertheless

Alan Moore knows the score. Alan Moore knows the score.

i tried to sneak into it and ended up in that corky romano movie. i watched the last few minutes of that and then zoolander came on and i forgot about from hell.

This movie's fucking choice, and stylish as fuck. Ian Holme rocks the place as one hella delusional motherfucker. Best graphic novel cinematic goth candy since The Crow. I still think it's weird that the Hughes Brothers made it, though.