Elizabeth Sandifer and Penn Wiggins

LWIA 4.3 Act 2 Omnibus

Added 2025-10-23 00:15:03 +0000 UTC

I've got like four more bosses left in Silksong, and I'm honestly quite eager to get back to work, but while polish off the last couple murder bugs, I figure I should actually catch up on the omnibi. So here's From Hell, Act 2, picking up where Act 1 left off.

The use of “architecture” is, of course, far from accidental. Another of the structuring elements of “A State of Darkness” is Gull’s involvement in Freemasonry. Obviously the vision of Jahbulon draws on this, but Moore also spends time on Gull’s initiation—the source of one of the echoing lines on the first page—along with the ritual to attain the third degree of Freemasonry and become Master Mason, in which he is beaten and has his “organs of generation” cut in a reenactment of the death of Hiram Abiff, said within the masonic tradition to be the architect of the Temple of Solomon. Moore drew on this imagery further in chapter four, “What doth the Lord require of thee,” which sees Gull deliver a lengthy lecture on the mythic structure of London—what he describes as “a literature of stone, of place-names and associations where faint echoes answer back from off the distant ruined walls of bloody history,” and which is heavily influenced by masonic thought.

By and large Moore had no choice in this theme. A central pillar of Knight’s theory is the claim that Gull conducted the Whitechapel murders according to masonic ritual—a point that was in turn central to the BBC series in which Gorman’s claims were first aired. Indeed, Knight’s follow up to Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution was The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Freemasons, in which he purports to document the history of Freemasonry and expose its control and influence over the British government. And the idea of the Ripper murders as ritual was much of what drew Moore to the project—the hook upon which he could justify his reading of them as an apocalyptic end of the nineteenth century that prefigured the horrors of the twentieth.

The problem he faced was simple: Freemasonry was kind of rubbish. As with most such things the elaborate conspiracy theories around it are, while not complete nonsense, still wildly overblown. Certainly one looking for masonic influence on history can find it—too many notable historical figures were Freemasons to avoid that. But Freemasonry’s historical influence—as opposed to the influence of specific Freemasons—rests largely on its status as an old boy’s club. Undoubtedly there are no shortage of men who found employment because a masonic friend of their father put in a good word, and countless meetings taken by government officials because some mason or another arranged them. But this is simply the mechanisms of the capitalist class system operating normally—not evidence of the world’s secret masters.

As for the vast quantities of masonic lore of varying salaciousness, much of it is broadly real. The existence of further degrees of Freemasonry beyond the third, for instance, is absolutely a thing. So too is the figure of Jahbulon. But these concepts can only really be understood in the context of how Freemasonry works. Although Grand Lodges exist to provide larger scale governance, and largely oversee the three so-called “blue lodge” degrees, the basic unit of Freemasonry is the individual Lodge, which is given a tremendous amount of leeway in terms of their rituals and use of symbolism. This has led to a profusion of masonic rites—individual systems of Freemasonry with their own set of degrees and rituals. The famed thirty-three degrees of Freemasonry, for instance, are an element of the Scottish Rite—the most widely practiced at this point. Jahbulon, meanwhile, hails from the second most common one, York Rite, which offers only thirteen degrees. And there are dozens more such rites, each with their own peculiarities and, more to the point, network of Lodges that are all putting their own spin on things. The result is a functionally bottomless supply of masonic rituals, symbols, and concepts, but not one that coheres into any sort of singular system or practice.

Moore, for his part, seems to have been left largely unimpressed. He describes masonic history in the appendix as “an impossibly convoluted web” and proclaims that the best commentary is from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, which notes that Freemasonry, “originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and the Formless Void” and remarks that “its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids—always by a Freemason.” More tellingly, Moore has Gull paraphrase the primordial chaos joke before dismissing the whole ancient history thing with a “Hogwash! The order as it stands goes back no further than the Eighteenth century,” proclaiming that the “true descent of Masonry” is “not mumbled words passed down across the generations but ideas that spark from mind to mind across the centuries.”

This is actually quite close to Freemasonry’s own account of itself as a “beautiful and profound system of morality, veiled in allegories and illustrated by symbols.” And at the end of the day Freemasonry’s ties with the larger esoteric tradition—there’s significant overlap between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and the Ordo Templi Orientis was originally a masonic order and literally purchased the rights to a large amount of its ritual from the Swedenborgian Rite—left Moore a wide amount of leeway in how he set about building his symbolism. Ultimately he found inspiration in “the Masonic notion of the universe, of space-time, as a rough and solid block hewn out by the Great Architect,”[1] an idea that resonated closely with Hinton’s “What is the Fourth Dimension,” with its attendant notion of history having an architecture. But while he dutifully draped his occult history of London in the trappings of Freemasonry, his primary inspiration in its structure came from another source entirely.

Indeed, Moore drew the entire idea of offering an occult history of London from the work of Iain Sinclair. This was a debt that was, rather impressively, identified by Grant Morrison several months before “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” even saw print when, in one of their Drivel columns, they remarked upon From Hell’s “great, unacknowledged debt to the subtext and subject matter of Ian [sic] Sinclair’s books White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Lud Heat.” (Indeed, Steve Bissette once claimed that Moore’s addition of an appendix annotating his sources emerged out of his “incredulity at such a statement given the multitude of sources Alan was clearly working from for research.”[2]) This debt was indeed visible as early as “A State of Darkness,” where Gull and Hinton discuss the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor. But it is in “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” that the influence fully takes center stage.

Iain Sinclair is one of the slower moving success stories in British letters. His career dates back to the 1970 self-publication of Back Garden Poems. He produced a variety of other poetry collections over the next fifteen years, most notably his 1975 Lud Heat, before pivoting to novels in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. At no point in these nearly twenty years, however, did he experience anything like success. This was not a surprise to him per se—he was after all self-publishing avant garde poetry with a heavy debt to William S. Burroughs. As he later put it, “I was quite happy initially doing odd jobs and writing when I wanted to, and being a book dealer,” which he did for a decade starting in the mid-70s.[3] Gradually, however, he began to acquire a critical reputation and, following the 1991 publication of Downriver, an exploration of Thatcher’s Britain beginning from his wholly unironic belief that she was “demonically possessed by the evil forces of world politics.”[4]

Sinclair is most often thought of in terms of psychogeography, a label he has in turns embraced and rejected. The word’s origins lie with the French Marxist group the Situationist International, and particularly the work of its founder Guy Debord. Beginning from the Lettrist notion of hypergraphy—an attempt to decouple language from phonemes—psychogeography emerged when the Situationists began applying the idea to architecture, understanding buildings and, subsequently, urban spaces at large not from a top down perspective of design but rather in terms of how they are experienced. As Guy Debord put it, “psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” From this Debord and his comrades designed the notion of the derivé—“a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” in which one moves through a city according not to its normal routes and geographies but along more idiosyncratic paths that cut across neighborhoods and regions and reveal the landscape’s hidden, or perhaps unconscious logics.

The concept did not so much make the jump to the UK as it began fundamentally entwined with the country. Among the founders of the Situationist International was British artist Ralph Rumney, who had the distinction of being the first of many people to be expelled from the organization—“politely, even amiably,” he was sure to note—by Guy Debord, whose ex-wife Michèle Bernstein Rumney would later marry. Rumney contributed to a 1957 psychogeographical art exhibition in Brussels under the banner of the “London Psychogeographical Committee,” although in truth he was the only member of said committee. The banner was revived, however, in 1993 by the London Psychogeographical Association, which openly admitted the previous organization’s non-existence in the course of trumpeting its resurrection.

Sinclair was involved in none of this, but quickly adopted the label as “a useful term to create a kind of brand image with.”[5] Unsurprisingly once he adopted the term his work began to shift fairly clearly towards its implications, perhaps most obviously in his unexpected 2001 hit London Orbital, which records his experiences walking the entire length of the M25 ring road around London. But these tendencies were present in his work well before 1993, and indeed his work was a major influence on the LPA. The psychogeographic approach is also clear in this, or any number of similar passages from White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings: “Southwark holds its time, with the City, with Whitechapel, with Clerkenwell, holds the memory of what it was: it is possible to walk back into the previous, as an event, still true to this moment. The Marshalsea trace, the narrative mazetrap that Dickens set, takes over, the figures of fiction outliving the ghostly impulses that started them. The past is a fiction that absorbs us. It needs no passport, turn the corner and it is with you. The things they do there are natural, you do those things. Detached from this shadow you are nothing, there is nothing. You have no other existence.”

White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings is in many ways the most obvious point of Sinclair’s influence on From Hell for the simple reason that it is in a large part about the Ripper murders. And indeed, the similarities go well beyond that. Sinclair’s use of William Gull as the Ripper can be chalked up to Stephen Knight’s common influence. But Sinclair’s tying in of Hinton’s What is the Fourth Dimension?, his repeated discussions of the “geology of time,” and his suggestion that the Ripper “made sacrifice that the new century could be born” are, as Morrison observes, all plainly influences on From Hell. But Drivel being Drivel, Morrison pushes the point further. The discussion takes place in a section labeled “plagiarism,” as one of several examples in which Morrison tries to work through the concept. They never manage a coherent notion of it, ultimately mounting a defense of it on the grounds that the idea of plagiarism rooted in “the bourgeois concept of art as a commodity which is the sole privilege of an educated cultural elite,” but for all that they try to soften the pejorative, the fact remains that they describe Moore’s work as “heavily plagiaristic.”

In the case of White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings, this is plainly nonsense. While it and From Hell work with similar ideas, they are fundamentally doing very different things. Sinclair’s book is a complex and often willfully obscurantist novel that winds the Jack the Ripper material in with a contemporary plot about rare book dealers hunting an obscure copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Its point is, in keeping with Sinclair’s larger interests, largely about physical spaces—Jack the Ripper is used as a lens for understanding the subconscious of London’s East End. From Hell, in contrast, is a period piece primarily interested in understanding its time—less psychogeography than what one might call psychochronography, with the metaphors about history having geology and architecture serving largely to make the case that one can use the same methods to explore both.

This notion is essential to “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee,” which also highlights a different line of influence from Sinclair to Moore, namely Sinclair’s debut, Lud Heat, and particularly its first section, entitled “Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches.” Hawksmoor was a baroque era architect and colleague of Christopher Wren, best known for the design of a sextet of London churches, which are distinct for their novel revival of gothic architectural styles otherwise unfashionable in the period, making use of idiosyncratic shapes and sudden contrasts while constructing optical illusions that offer a misleading sense of scale. Sinclair reads into these designs a wealth of pagan and occult inspiration, theorizing that Hawksmoor worked “a code into the buildings, knowingly or unknowingly, templates of meaning, bands of continuing ritual,” and building a larger theory that the churches collectively impose an “unacknowledged magnetism and control-power, built-in code force” upon London, crafting with the help of the artist Brian Catling a map of the churches that noted how various locations like William Blake’s Lambeth home and Bethlehem Hospital (aka Bedlam) were situated upon the lines between them.

“What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” picks up directly on this work, having Gull direct his coachman Netley through the streets of London on a tour of Hawksmoor’s churches along with various other sites before illustrating that the locations visited form a pentagram with Saint Paul’s Cathedral at the center. This is not the same as Sinclair’s map, which doesn’t even include Saint Paul’s, but the influence is undeniable. Indeed, Moore ended up having to get in touch with Sinclair when his efforts to rework the map into the shape he wanted ran aground due to his inability to find a location on Sinclair’s map called “Lud’s Shed,” only to find out that this was an in-joke between Sinclair and Catling. Moore recovered by focusing instead on Hackney’s original name of “Hackon’s Ea,” named after a Saxon king, which allowed Moore to shoehorn in an entirely apocryphal story about the murder of the Teutonic lunar deity Mani. But the point of contact blossomed into a lifelong friendship with Sinclair, who would soon cast Moore in his 1992 TV film The Cardinal and the Corpse as a crazed book collector (wearing, comically, a Rorschach t-shirt) searching for a 16th century alchemical text that, as he repeatedly ranted, was “the key to the city.”

This proved apt. From the start, Moore had recognized that what he was trying to do with “What doth the Lord require of thee?” was going to be ambitious, and more to the point was going to ask a lot of Eddie Campbell. He admits as much at the start of the script, saying that “In terms of sustaining a conversation over thirty odd pages, I think you’ll agree that it presents some potentially serious storytelling policies,” musing over a variety of devices like flashbacks that they might use to enliven things before deciding “’naah’. The best way to do this story, I’ve concluded, is absolutely straight, without embellishment, rather like a dry vocal mix in a recording studio as opposed to lots of echo and reverb and whatever. Of course, this will also be the most difficult way to do the piece.”

Campbell and Moore decided to solve the problem by leaning into the length of Gull’s required travels through London, which went through a sufficient number of stops in the course of its pseudo-masonic pentagram that Moore took the trouble of going to London and travelling the route, noting in the appendix that “While I admittedly made the journey by car, giving me the advantage, Gull and Netley didn’t have to contend with twentieth century traffic congestion or bewildering one-way systems.” Campbell, accordingly, structured the issue around the passage of time (further emphasized by an eight page rainstorm in the middle of the issue), taking his cues from his childhood love of “Impressionism, with its focus on the optical appreciation of the contemporary world, the way light falls upon objects and landscapes and cityscapes, and the way smoke and rain and other atmospheric effects tend to obscure detail. I started on this chapter with a thrill of anticipation.”[6] He ended up further bolstering his approach with subtle touches like adopting a convention of having Gull and Netley face right when traveling east and left when traveling west. His attention to detail was so thorough that he ended up catching a historical error in Moore’s scrip, in which he sent Gull and Netley over the still under construction Tower Bridge; Campbell fixed the error by spreading the dialogue out over an extra page and taking a longer route, but not before teasing Moore with a photocopy of the under construction bridge featuring Gull and Netley plunging to their deaths off of it.

(Moore eventually returned the favor in the course of his lengthy interview with Dave Sim, repeatedly mocking Campbell for an inking error in the final issue that resulted in a panel in which Abberline’s head is inexplicably missing, including a riff on how people complain about his lengthy scripts, but just look what happened when he cut the bit specifying that “INSPECTOR ABBERLINE'S HEAD IS STILL ON HIS SHOULDERS DURING THIS PANEL. IT HAD NOT RETREATED TORTOISE-LIKE INTO HIS NECK, NOR HAS IT IN SOME FASHION MANAGED TO REFRACT LIGHT AROUND IT LIKE A KLINGON SPACESHIP SO THAT THE INSPECTOR RESEMBLES SOMETHING OUT OF MAGRITTE WITH HIS BOWLER FLOATING THERE SUSPENDED ABOVE THE EMPTY COLLAR OF HIS COAT,”[7] before finally paying off the bit with the anecdote of the bridge error and a complaint about how “It's not big to make fun of people's genuine and inadvertent mistakes like that; it's just childish.”[8])

The centerpiece of Campbell’s structure, however, was simply Hawksmoor’s churches. He reasoned that “the visually repetitive traveling sequences that Alan worried about are strung between a series of large open architectural studies that, if drawn in great detail, I felt would create a pattern to hold the reader’s interest in the chapter.”[9] And so, with the help of his then-assistant Steve Stamatiadis, Campbell embarked on a series of large panels, generally occupying two thirds of the page, in which the churches and a smattering of other major locations like St. Paul’s are rendered in all their monolithic weight, ensuring that Moore’s psychogeography remained well anchored in the city’s embodied corpus.

As for the actual lecture, the crux of Gull’s issue-long villain monologue is the idea that London is, on a structural and architectural level, a prison constructed by the male solar deity (who Gull identifies syncretically, naming him as, among others, Helios, Baal, Apollo, Lud, and Christ) to imprison the lunar feminine. The solar, in this account, is represented by obelisks, including Hawksmoor’s steeples, forming a “pentacle of Sn Gods, obelisks and rational male fire, wherein unconsciousness, the Moon, and Womanhood are chained.” Gull’s plan is thus to use his commission to silence Marie Kelly and her co-conspirators as an opportunity to ritually sacrifice them in order to reinforce the structure and keep women subjugated for eternity.

This advanced what was, for Moore, one of the major conceptual themes of From Hell. It is worth recalling that his initial interest in exploring a murder stemmed from conversations with Debbie Delano, whose own interest in true crime was heavily rooted in the sorts of feminist concerns that would eventually animate her novel The Saddest Sound. As Moore put it, the Ripper murders were “interesting because they were such terribly misogynistic acts.”[10] He was fascinated both by the wave of fake letters from the Ripper, noting the “men all over London that weren’t Jack the Ripper, but who wished they were,” and also the way in which sex workers in the East End “would apparently talk with a sort of glee about their prospects of being the next victim.”[11] And so this sexuality—implicit and indeed inextricable from the murder of several sex workers—became the conceptual center of Gull’s masonic ritual.

Gull’s monologue is, however, quite lengthy, and necessarily makes several digressions. Throughout the lecture Gull returns to the notion of religious visions, starting when he brings up William Blake, noting Alexander Gilchrist’s observation that it’s only “comparatively recently that seeing visions would call into doubt a person’s sanity.” He discusses the two hemispheres of the brain, associating the rational left side with the solar and the imaginative right with the lunar, declaring Blake “the voice of our Right brain, the mind’s Atlantis, singing over Bedlam’s clamour, where Blake claimed, the mad had locked away the sane,” and discussing his own vision of god, which he freely admits was a hallucination caused by his stroke. “I saw God,” he says. “I knelt before him and he told me what to do. And Gull the doctor says ‘why, to converse with Gods is madness.’ And Gull, the man replies, ‘Then who’d be sane?’” (“Most people,” rued Blake in a 2025 seance.)

It is in the course of these observations that Gull offers another one of the book’s seismic moments—the key thing that Moore made up only to have come true. The moment comes as Gull and Netley break for lunch and Netley, not unreasonably, asks Gull what all this stuff about solar gods has to do with the job Queen Victoria just asked them to do. Gull warns Netley not to scorn the gods, explaining that “The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” As Moore tells it, “I wrote that, and thought, ‘That’s ringing and resonant,’ and then I thought, ‘Oh Christ, that’s true, isn’t it? I can’t think of a way around that, so for the sake of this little speech balloon I’m going to have to change my entire life, aren’t I?’ I’m going to have to transform because it was true. I’d accidentally written something true.”[12] And so he did the only sensible thing and became a wizard.

The problem—and the reason the line does not ultimately challenge the one that prefigures it for the title of the most consequential Moore wrote—is that this story isn’t entirely true. For one thing, it contradicts the other story Moore likes telling about his magical awakening. In that one, “I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I m probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician. That would, at least, be more colorful. So, I announced, on the night of my 40th birthday party, probably after more beers than I should have had, that, from this point on, I’m going to become a magician.”[13] But Moore’s 40th birthday came in November of 1993, whereas “What doth the Lord require of thee” was published in November of 1991, and Moore mentions Campbell was drawing it in an interview conducted in 1990[14], so it was plainly several years before.

This is not a case of Moore changing his story. His earliest account of the birthday story dates to a 1994 interview with Rapid Eye, while he first relates the “grandeur and monstrosity” story in a 1995 interview in Hero Illustrated, and he has relayed both anecdotes repeatedly in the years that follow, sometimes in the same interview. In one, he describes the “grandeur and monstrosity” line as “the beginning of a chain of thought which, as I say, led me to a very serious immersion in what I suppose would largely be referred to as magic[15],” a chain of thought that culminates on his fortieth birthday.

But even that story elides the basic fact that this chain is some three years long. Clearly there are further details to be gleaned. Crumbs of these exist in other interviews—one where he describes how “I found I couldn’t progress any further with writing by strict rationality. If I wanted to go further with my writing, make it more intense, more powerful, make it say what I wanted to say, I had to take a step beyond technique and rational ideas about writing, into something that was trans-rational if you will, this being magic.”[16] Elsewhere he remarks that becoming a magician was “something that had been coming for a while; it seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer.”[17] And the seeds can certainly be found in his early interest in William S. Burroughs and the cut-up method, which was, after all, developed as a magical practice.

What all of these accounts omit, however, is the role of Steve Moore in the decision to become a magician. Writing together on the subject of their magical order, the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyprian Theatre of Marvels, the Moores place the earliest event in the chain of circumstances leading to its founding as “Steve Moore’s seemingly spontaneous adoption in the middle 1970s of the Greek Moon-goddess Selene as a personal deity” in the course of an impromptu magical ritual using a sword fashioned out of Chinese coins, and describe how “through almost the next two decades as the pair frequently fraternised and worked on projects either separately or together, a slowly-evolving theory of the occult, divination systems, dreams, unusual phenomena and similarly liminal concerns would gradually congeal.” It’s also notable that in 1992 Steve Moore was affiliated with Peter Carroll’s Illuminates of Thanateros, although the association was brief and unfruitful. Writing about it in Unearthing, Alan Moore recounts his compatriot’s asking why the order used black ceremonial robes, only to be told that “it shows colossal ignorance to even ask. God, what if everybody questioned the most basic principles of ritual like that? It’d be chaos.” Presumably some poetic license is being employed, although one still suspects that his compatriot’s negative experience in the IOT formed part of Moore’s rejection of his great rival’s preferred system of Chaos Magic. The more interesting detail comes slightly later, as Alan Moore enters his own narrative to admit that “in the early 1990s with a three-lane pile-up of a marriage still receding in the rear-view mirror, following him into magic seems a good idea, a way to steer the vehicle of writing off the speedway of career into fluorescent wasteland. His forays in organized contemporary magical society, all his New Cross necromantic nights, are watched with interest.”

This, rather than a drunken decision at a party or a startling reaction to a line of dialogue, seems the most plausible account of Moore’s magical turn. His best friend and closest colleague was growing more involved, and Moore ultimately decided to follow suit. By and large, this wasn’t a process of paradigm-shattering revelations; those would come later. His bon mot about gods and demons undoubtedly stuck with him and developed into further thoughts, but he did not sit bolt upright from his typewriter sometime in 1990 and realize that he needed to become a wizard any more than he had a magical awakening at his 40th birthday party. His thought just developed inexorably in the direction it had always been progressing until it reached its inevitable destination.

On the other hand, that isn’t nearly as much fun. Perhaps best to go with the birthday story then. It’ll come true eventually.

In any case, none of this undermines the idea that the “grandeur and monstrosity” line was important. Indeed, much of “What doth the Lord require of thee” straightforwardly prefigures Moore’s openly magical work. He would return to the psychogeographic template repeatedly over the next quarter century. Gull’s musings on the interplay of biology and mystical experience would be reflected in Moore’s own scrupulously rationalist approach to magic. And when it comes to gods and demons, as Moore’s repeated hyping of the line suggests, his thought did continue on those exact lines, arriving at the firm belief that magic is a phenomenon of consciousness. The chapter may not document the sudden moment of transformation, but it still shows Moore nearing a boil, his thoughts clattering forth like hoofbeats on Victorian cobbles as the wellspring of magic begins to burst forth.

As if all of this wasn’t enough for the pages of one soon to be out of business horror anthology, Taboo #5 also contained the debut of a second serial by Alan Moore called Lost Girls. This is often grouped with From Hell and Big Numbers as a sort of triptych of ambitious creator-owned works to contrast his contemporaneous Image cash-ins. Lost Girls is the youngest of the triptych—Moore first mentions it in passing in a 1990 Comics Journal interview, although it’s unclear when he began playing with the idea. He had been chafing against the practical boundaries of how sexuality could be portrayed in comics for some time, whether via the psychedelic vegetable sex issue of Swamp Thing or the furor that erupted around his portrayal of childbirth in Miracleman. As he later put it, “it struck me that I’d written by then an awful lot of characters, and yet none of them had been able to have fully developed normal, human sex lives. They may have had quantum abilities, or been plant gods, but this most common field of human expression was something that couldn’t really be addressed, except in a very seamy, under the counter genre where there were no standards, and where there was a pervasive ugliness about almost every aspect of the material.”[18] He began playing with a half-formed idea of a Freudian take on Peter Pan, but found himself unable to come up with any angle that wasn’t just a pornographic parody of the work, and the idea floundered for some time until he met Melinda Gebbie.

Gebbie was a respected figure in the American Underground Comix scene who got her start in Trina Robbins’ Wimmen’s Comix anthology before branching out into her own work, most notably her solo comic Fresca Zizis. Moore was familiar with her, giving her a shout-out in his “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies” essay for The Daredevils in 1983, describing how she “uses her very delicate stippling technique to depict some of the most unnerving and violent psycho-sexual visions one is likely to come across anywhere.” Around the same time, Gebbie relocated to the UK to take a job on the 1986 animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows. They first met in 1988 at a launch party for a charity anthology called Strip AIDS that they’d both contributed to—Moore with a page of Maxwell the Magic Cat reprints and Gebbie a two page comic called “Test Patterns” about safe sex.

Their collaboration, on the other hand, came together some time around 1989 when both were invited to contribute to an erotic anthology that everybody but Alan Moore thinks was going to be called Tales of Shangri-La. (Moore recalls it as Lost Horizons of Shangri-La, although given that it never came out the point is rather moot.) Neil Gaiman suggested that they might find collaboration fruitful and put them in touch, and Gebbie proceeded to spend a couple of weekends in Northampton discussing their views on the erotic. Moore described his floundering Peter Pan concept, and Gebbie noted that “she’d always enjoyed doing stories that revolved around a dynamic of three women.”[19] From this Moore made the obvious jump to include the protagonists of two other major works from the golden age of children’s literature, namely Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Starting from the rough idea that each of the three books took place around the time of its publication, Moore and Gebbie quickly realized that “there was a kind of an optimum window of two or thre years where Alice would not be too old and Dorothy would not be too young. And it seemed that those years were around 1913 and 1914.”[20] As with From Hell, Moore was quickly taken by the historical possibilities of this, as it meant that the timeline would run right up against the outbreak of World War I.

As with Big Numbers and From Hell, much of this shape was in mind before Moore began the project. Bissette’s introduction to the first chapter highlights the looming presence of World War I, while his introduction to the two installments in Taboo #6 highlights Moore’s intended length of 240 pages. Indeed, this was exactly the length the comic ended up being some fifteen years later when it was finally finished. But only a sixth of those pages ended up appearing in Taboo. Like From Hell, these pages are slow to establish what’s going on. The first chapter—the one that appeared alongside “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” in Taboo #5—only introduces Alice of its core cast, and doesn’t name her. The only substantive clue is the presence of a large mirror, which is used as the central image of each panel, with the action unfolding in its reflection. Things become clearer in subsequent chapters—it’s hard to miss what a character named Dottie Gale from Kansas might be referring to. But everything stays broadly in subtext for the first five chapters.

This is perhaps unexpected for a work that Moore repeatedly highlighted that he intended Lost Girls to be a work of pornography (“I insist on calling it that,”[21] he notes in one interview), a genre that’s not generally associated with allusive complexity. Moore talked plenty about his desire to “do some grand and ambitious work of humane pornography that would be beautiful and liberating,”[22] and even joked about “that sort of penis-brain blood ratio problem that you get when trying to write intelligent pornography,”[23] but there’s still an underlying disjunct between the expectations of the genre and the textual density that characterized Moore’s major projects of the period.

Which is not to say the comic does not have loads of explicit sex. Each of the five installments published in Taboo contain at least one sex scene, and Gebbie’s art is rarely invested in leaving much to the imagination. Instead it portrays everything in a lush and soft color palate achieved via a mixture of heavily layered colored pencils and occasional watercolors that Gebbie estimated “averaged to three days per panel.”[24] Moore, meanwhile, opts for a consistently joyous register for the sex, with the characters constantly seeming surprised and charmed by their own naughtiness. The result is a strangely innocent look at sex—one largely devoid of any particular fetish or desire for anything other than a sort of charmingly hippie free love.

The biggest legacy of Lost Girls, however, would prove to be the relationship between Moore and Gebbie, which quickly evolved from an artistic relationship to a sexual and romantic one, with the two marrying shortly after the publication of the complete Lost Girls. (Moore subsequently offered the perhaps overly specific advice to “anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a sixteen year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.”[25] The relationship clearly evolved slowly, with the two maintaining separate households until around 2005; nevertheless, between Lost Girls and “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee,” it is difficult to come up with a single issue of comics more transformative for the life of Alan Moore than Taboo #5.

Taboo #5 came out at the end of 1991. Two further issues appeared in 1992—an output that momentarily bested Eddie Campbell’s oft-repeated bon mot that it was “a quarterly anthology that came out once a year,”[26] but these marked the end of the line for Bissette’s perpetually troubled anthology. This was inevitable—as Bissette later put it, “Taboo was like a kamikaze plane going into the deck of the Midway. It was a defunct business model before it started! I lost tens of thousands of dollars. […] My family ate macaroni and cheese some weeks.”[27] Bissette would later identify the death blow as Moore and Campbell’s decision to begin republishing From Hell as standalone issues, saying that “it killed our numbers because the people that were picking up Taboo particularly to follow From Hell had no reason to pick it up any longer.”[28] In fact, Dave Sim, who served as Bissette’s advisor and financial backer on the project, had warned him that From Hell was a bad idea in the first place, claiming that “serialized stories kill anthologies.”[29] (Ironically, Eddie Campbell was just as displeased with the arrangement, repeatedly arguing that he “didn’t think an irregular anthology was the best place to be running an ambitious serial.”)[30]

But Bissette also just found that he disliked the job of publishing, concluding that “I just don’t have the mercenary instincts necessary” to do the job[31] and complaining that he found himself torn between the degree to which he “was not willing to continue to allow myself to be exploited as a selfless publisher on Taboo; that was a no-win situation. Nor was I willing to embrace the opposite.”[32] He also discussed the ugly emotions the job instilled in him, noting how From Hell “might not have been conceived without my vehicle. I suggested to Alan the collaboration of Eddie as artist, and worked hard to implement it. I fronted money when it was needed, even when to do so meant hard times for my family. But it is in no way my creation or property, nor should it be considered as such. I still wrestle with those emotions […]. When that marquee appears, if the film From Hell is actually made, that’s going to be a real rough night for me. I feel I have no right to have those feelings.”[33] Stepping into the role of publisher proved particularly rough for Bissette’s relationship with Moore. As he put it—in the interview that would ultimately end their friendship—“as soon as I sent that first check to him, I became the employer, and Alan became the employee, and that relationship began to assert itself.”[34]

Indeed, the experience seems largely to have burnt Bissette out almost entirely. He moved on to his self-published Tyrant, a dinosaur comic about the life of a tyrannosaurus, but only managed to produce four issues before that venture collapsed, and his work on it gives every sign of being rife with self-sabotage. In one interview he talks about abandoning a plot point about the dinosaur being caught in the vicinity of an erupting volcano, but then “I saw on one of those shows, they had a whole episode about dinosaurs and volcanoes, and I went ‘Oh, there goes that story arc,’” a decidedly puzzling decision to make on the back of some nature documentary Bissette couldn’t even remember the name of a decade later. Eddie Campbell is positively withering on the matter, saying that “Steve has so many cockeyed justifications for not finishing his epic Tyrant, the biography of a dinosaur (he got four issues of the 24 page comic out in three years), that if you sit through a session of listening to them you will lose the will to live,”[35] noting that Bissette complained about the unsustainability of his order numbers despite Campbell managing to be perfectly successful on a third as many. As he put it, “the simple fact is that if Steve had continued to work on Tyrant for half an hour every day while making a living doing other things, he would have had a completed project years ago and publishers would have fought and still be fighting each other to have a part of it. But he would have to finish it first, because no publisher would commission it with an advance payment. None of them would hope to live so long.”[36] (Campbell goes on to predict that “Steve will write 500 words in the comments [of the blog post], during which time he could hypothetically drawn a panel of Tyrant”; in fact it was only 180 words, so probably only enough for layouts.) Bissette, in any case, retired from comics a few years later.

And so, as 1992 wound to a close, neither From Hell nor Lost Girls had any obvious home. The collected edition of From Hell that had been such a death blow to Taboo had come out in 1991 from Tundra, which was in about as rough shape as Taboo had been, and on the brink of taking Big Numbers down for the second and final time. Lost Girls, meanwhile, presented a massive challenge for any publisher due to being literal pornography. Just five years out from being on top of the world with the completion of Watchmen, Moore was all but without a career, all three of his creator owned epics having run aground. And all of this on top of a divorce in which his kids went with his ex-wife, leaving him alone in his house amidst the ruins of all his grand ambitions. Little wonder, then, that he went completely mad.

[1] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell,” Cerebus #217

[2] Screenshot of a “long deleted” message board discussion posted by Ben Hansome to Twitter

[3] Mark Pilkington and Phil Baker, “City Brain,” The Fortean Times, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080228120340/http://www.forteantimes.com/features/interviews/37/iain_sinclair.html

[4] Stuart Jeffries, “On the Road,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14

[5] Wil Self, “Iain Sinclair Interview,” Spoiled Ink, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060508072216/http://www.spoiledink.com/FEATURES/author_interviews_007.php

[6] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[7] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell,” Cerebus #217

[8] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[9] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[10] Gary Groth, “Last Big Words,” The Comics Journal #140

[11] Gary Groth, “Last Big Words,” The Comics Journal #140

[12] Interview with Paul Gravett at the Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8DL76WL6JY and subsequent videos

[13] Nisha Gopalan, “Q&A: Watchmen creator alan Moore,” Entertainment Weekly, https://ew.com/article/2008/07/21/qa-watchmen-creator-alan-moore/

[14] Published in The Comics Journal #140

[15] Alan David Doane, “Alan Moore Interview,” archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20040402035134/http://www.addblog.com/archives/2004_02_29_archive.html

[16] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” transcript provided privately

[17] DeZ Vylenz, The Mindscape of Alan Moore

[18] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part One,” Newsarama, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060814033943/http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html

[19] Gwynne Watkins, “The Brothers Freud,” nerve.com, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20061114074500/http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_alanmoore

[20] Dorman T. Shindler, “Alan Moore Leaves Behind his Extraordinary Gentlemen to Dally with Lost Girls,” archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060811174459/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw13282.html

[21] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part One,” Newsarama, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060814033943/http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html

[22] Ismo Santala, untitled interview, Ready Steady Book, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070220160434/https://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=alanmoore

[23] Peter Murphy, “Eroto-Graphic Mania, The New Review, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130622182813/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/alanmooreinterview.html

[24] Adi Tantimedh, “Finding the Lost Girls with Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie: Part 2 of 3,” Comic Book Resources, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080421102954/http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7160