LWIA 4.3: The Best of All Tailors

End of Act III. Omnibus to follow over the weekend.

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That apocalypse would form the sole content of Chapter ten, “The best of all tailors.” As Moore described it in his synopsis for Don Murphy, “over thirty or forty pages, in excruciating real time, we watch Gull dissect Marie Kelly.” This is, obviously, considerably more space than any of the previous four murders got, but this is consistent both with the murder’s status as the climactic act of Gull’s ritual and with the sheer horror of it. Unlike the other four murders, which were conducted outdoors on public streets, Marie Kelly was murdered in her home at 13 Miller’s Court, allowing her killer several hours to work—time he used to extensively and horrifically dismember her body. The autopsy report gives an awful sense of the scale of this: “The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.” But the clinical nature of this description elides the horror elicited by the actual crime scene photo. In it, Kelly’s body lies on her bed in what is still a recognizably human pose. Her legs are slightly bent, but around the knees give way to a sprawling pile of gore that does not even look like anything save the absence of what should be there. Humanity momentarily reasserts itself for her left arm, bent and folded over the remnants of her abdomen, but then one reaches her chest, which is horribly recognizable as muscles stretched over an exposed rib cage. Her hair is still in place, and even looks well groomed; below it, a bit of her forehead remains. But her face itself, which is turned directly towards the camera, is simply not there, replaced by a blur of carnal noise. It is an uncanny tableau—to a modern eye used to Hollywood special effects it looks frankly unreal, although in fact when it came time to actually depict it in the film the directors blanch from it, keeping the camera almost exclusively on Gull, with Kelly’s body, when it’s even in shot, blurred in the background. In the handful of shots where it is relatively visible, the directors ironically increase the level of mutilation so as to remove the awful sense of humanity that is, in practice, the worst thing about the photo.

It would not be accurate to say that Moore had spent the bulk of From Hell looking forward to this issue, but it’s clear that he had a certain professional relish about the prospect. Talking about it several years before he and Campbell actually reached it, he explained that “We’re going to show what it’s like to be in a room for two hours cutting up a woman,” agreeing when his interviewer suggested that this actually sounded strangely tedious, and adding that “given the restrictions we’re setting for ourselves with From Hell, there’s going to be very little dialogue. I presume that you don’t talk. It would be a bit phony to have the guy suddenly start talking. Perhaps the odd little words to himself, a mumbled snatch of a musical refrain under his breath, a couple of lines before it peters out. It’s going to be a big challenge.”[1] In practice, however, it was not the technical challenge but the emotional one that seems to have stuck for Moore. Describing it a few years after the issue came out, he notes that “to get into that mind-state, to be William Gull, if only for the two or three days it takes me to write such a piece, it’s a life-changing experience.”[2]

The scope of this is clearly born out in Moore’s annotations for the issue. These text pages had, for the preceding six issues of the Tundra/Kitchen Sink series, been divided up into sections for individual scenes. Here, however, Moore simply presents a single three and a half page essay, explaining at the start that “Appendix notes for this chapter seem almost unnecessary, given the singular and specific nature of the event described” before breaking down his rough reasoning on presenting the murder the way he did. He concludes by noting that “While no one can profess to know what thoughts went through the mind of whoever it was in Marie Kelly’s room that night, it seems to me that, at least on the level of the killer’s own emotional reality, some kind of Apocalypse transpired. Human experience went to the very edge, there in that sordid little flat, then stepped beyond. The depiction here is as close as I can get to a portrayal of what might have happened on that night. In that room. In that mind.

To be absolutely honest, it’s as close as I want to get.”

Moore based his approach on several factors. First and foremost is the simple historical fact of the thing, which Moore got deep into the weeds of. Writing in the introduction to the 1994 script collection, he related the story of being offered “newly-published post mortem details that related to Jack’s final victim, the hideously-mutiliated Marie Jeannette Kelly, including some previously undisclosed facial wounds.” Moore admits that this is a difficult offer to understand the appeal of. “’Does it matter,’ you ask, ‘if the first cut was made in the face? He made hamburger out of the woman, for God’s sake! Who wants to know the precise order he did it all in?’

I do. I know it’s a sickness, but I do,” he admits, before explaining the heartbreaking detail that the facial incision matches one found in the bedsheets, “which means that when she saw the man with the knife crossing over the dark, twelve-foot square parlour-room to her bed, she pulled up the bed covers instinctively, just like a small child afraid that the monsters will get her.” And sure enough, he includes that exact beat on the first page of the comic.

For all Moore’s attention to detail, however, he did memorably slip up at one point, directing Campbell on page eight to draw Gull placing one of Kelly’s severed breasts on the bedside table. Some time later, however, he realized that he had made an error, and that the breast was supposed to be located on the bed near her right foot. Unfortunately, because of his practice of sending script pages in batches, by the time he’d realized this Campbell had already drawn page eight, along with several others in which there is, quite clearly, a severed breast sitting on the bedside table. Not wanting to force Campbell into the busywork of redrawing multiple pages, Moore hits on the clever solution of having Gull pause his mutilations to stare troubledly at the breast with “the exact air of an artist stepping back from his canvas for a moment to judge as to what further strokes are necessary. He regards the arrangement of the body and its organs critically: what else does the composition need?” And then, after a bit of consideration, he picks the breast up and moves it to its historically accurate location.

Gull’s flair for the artistic, however, created a distinct tension with the second major approach Moore took to the murder, namely his more general research into serial killers and their practices. Moore drew from contemporary understanding here, particularly citing Robert Ressler’s 1988 Sexual Homicide, although he also plainly draws from Joel Norris’s Serial Killers, published the same year, from which he takes his breakdown of the individual phases of a serial murder, particularly the hallucinatory “aura phase” that precedes a murder and Norris’s larger descriptions of serial murder as having a ritualistic element. But these sources seem to have, by and large, been more problem than help. For one thing, he found the descriptions “too sharp, too clinical: a virtual and digitised reconstruction of the murder scene that was mathematically accurate but necessarily bloodless.”[3] He was also stymied by the fact that the Ripper murders are outliers within the larger corpus of serial murder—as he notes in the annotations, “given that no semen was in evidence it would appear that sexual release was not the purpose of the murder… nor do the mutilations seem to have been carried out in rage,” these being the two primary categories of such mutilations.

More broadly, Moore had the problem that serial killers simply aren’t generally inclined towards the sort of baroque ritualism that Moore had made central to Gull’s approach. As he later put it, “serial killers are miserable little fucking things. They’re not Hannibal Lecter. That last Thomas Harris book was a pile of wank. You’re not going to get a serial killer sitting listening to The Goldberg Variations, because he might as well be listening to someone banging a tin can on a plate. They’ve not got more than us, they’re not Nietzschean supermen, they’ve got something less than us. You’ve only got to look at your Peter Sutcliffes, your Dennis Nielsens. These are grey little men with bad haircuts.”[4] Leaving aside the subjective matter of Gull’s hairstyle, this simply isn’t a description of Moore’s take on Gull. By creating a character who gives thirty-five page lectures on architecture in order to philosophically justify his murders Moore had created a situation that was fundamentally unlike anything in real life.

This left Moore with his third major approach to depicting Gull’s interiority during the long dismemberment of Marie Kelly: his own understanding of magical ritual. This does not mean that Moore created a symbolically coherent method of ritual sacrifice or anything along those lines. Even if he had for some inexplicable reason wanted to do this, it would be quite difficult given that the actual mutilation of Marie Kelly was not conducted under any occult principles. The one vaguely magically coherent point, drawing on alleged appearance in Masonic lore (Moore provides no citation on this point), is Gull’s burning of Kelly’s heart and scattering of the ashes, which had the helpful secondary effect of explaining why the killer had stoked a fire of such intensity that it melted the kettle hanging above it. Beyond that, the issue is characterized by what he describes in the annotations as a “vague sense of incoherent ritual.”

Instead Moore worked by a process he describes as “a kind of speculative seance-divination on my part.” (“Sus,” said William Blake in a… well, nevermind.) His most thorough account of what this entailed is the one he gave to Dave Sim, where he explained that while he’d had the broad idea of “The best of all tailors” in mind for some time, “what I didn’t have until comparatively recently was any clue as to how the occurrence in Miller’s Court might actually feel to the perpetrator,” and that in answering that question he drew “from my own experiences and ruminations concerning the non-ordinary consciousness; the magical state; the process of going mental; call it what you will.”[5] He describes this experience as akin to a psychological fugue state, using the analogy of “a twenty-four-track mixing disk with separate strands of complex information on each separate track. The engineer responsible for the final mix that is one's consciousness, unfortunately, is a baboon. Tracks (of thought) suddenly blast in out of nowhere or just as suddenly drop out of existence. Melody swells up, is gone, its presence only registered moments later. Both speakers cut out, and when they cut back in there are six of them. One is playing what sounds like Inuit opera, another broadcasts a debate on superstring theory conducted entirely in a Maori dialect.”[6] The experience is enough to break down the normal rational ego. “After that, it gets rather difficult to describe, firstly because what is going on isn't remotely human, and secondly because one's self isn't actually present while all this is occurring. Whoever is in control of the vertical and horizontal, as it were, isn't you. Recollection of the experience is necessarily non-linear, fragmentary. Time, mind, identity, cause and effect...all of these have been behaving in unusual ways. A certain confusion is forgivable.”[7]

Moore appears to be drawing primarily from his experience in January 1994 here, while noting that his decision to become a magician a few months prior gave him at least some tools to process the experience instead of simply going mad, as did the fact that he was accompanied by Steve Moore and thus “we each had the other’s confirmation and validation for some of the more peculiar moments.” Gull’s experience, obviously, is different on almost every front. It is perhaps most accurate to say that Moore took the psychology of actual serial killers and his own experience of magical states and triangulated an experience between them.

But all of this elides what is perhaps the most remarkable thing about Moore’s treatment of Marie Kelly’s murder, which is that as a magical ritual it is at least broadly, if not completely successful. This is in some ways inevitable given the flashes of visions seen in Gull’s previous murders, and more broadly by Gull’s introduction all the way back in chapter two and the way fragments from throughout his life echo around in it. In the course of his butchering of Marie Kelly he finally becomes completely unstuck in time. In Moore’s account, “William Gull's progressive alteration of the text that is Mary Kelly's physical body shades into William Burroughs, maybe with Brian Gysin as Netley. Cut-up technique, they call it. The scalpel interrupts the normal linear continuity of things, allows new possibilities. Sometimes, intimations of the future leak through, luminous dribbles of the eternal. The consciousness of the artist, of the writer, or of the beef-sculptor, is changed along with the deliberate disruption of the work in question, of his successful and much-visited Dorset Street installation. Gull drifts in and out of different times, different texts, different identities. The mutilation he is carrying out unfolds in his mind, through escalating levels of metaphor, becomes all mutilations, all murder.”[8]

This results in a series of visions. First Gull is visited by James Hinton, with whom he repeats a conversation from back in chapter two. Subsequently he has a vision of himself giving an anatomical lecture to an audience made up of killers from the future, with Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and the Kray twins all watching intently as he explains about the four lobes of the liver whilst removing Marie Kelly’s. Finally he has a vision of Tiamat and Marduk, which Moore explains, saying that “Gull, momentarily and forever, becomes Marduk, just as his victim is translated, transliterated into Tiamat. For a moment the flash of becoming is too brief, too instantaneous to register on the doctor's mind. A second or two passes, and the comprehension of what has just happened to him starts to filter through. Enervated, palpitating from the rigors of the experience, he tries to assemble a jigsaw awareness from these burning fragments, but before he can do so the next voice in the fugue enters, the next wave of alien consciousness crashes in, carrying him away.”[9] Punctuating these various flights of fancy are a series of wide panels of Gull standing alone in the shabby and blood-splattered flat, emphasizing the sharp contrast between his visionary experiences and the squalid horror of what he’s actually doing.

As Moore suggests, the vision of Tiamat and Marduk is quickly followed by another—indeed, by the climactic vision of his entire reverie as Gull finds himself standing in the midst of a modern office building, surrounded by computers and alt girls on cordless telephones. Gull is at once stunned and dismayed, declaring that “this is dazzle, but not yet divinity,” and that “we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos—morose, barbaric children playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys.” He climbs upon one of the desks in the office building (seen to be a chair in Kelly’s apartment) and berates the workers. “Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I may not see the meanest spark! Your past is pain and iron! Know yourselves! With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. Its black root succours you. It is inside you. Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks its cuffs? See me! Wake up and look upon me!I am come amongst you. I am with you always!”

Nobody even looks at him, and he is left to embrace Marie Kelly’s blood-soaked corpse bemoaning how “time’s leveled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this listless world,” and telling her how “you’d have all been dead in a year or to from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.” And then, once again, Gull trails off, finding himself once again soaked in blood in a decrepit east London flat. He has a few subsequent fragments of vision—a momentary glimpse of his forthcoming Masonic trial and of his death. But the main reverie is largely over. He removes and burns the heart, staring rapt into the white-hot glow of the fire and the divine light within, then staggers out into the cold dark of a London night and back to Netley’s coach where he offers the comic’s only real verbal account of what has just transpired. “The twentieth century,” he explains. “I have delivered it.”

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

[2] R.F. Paul and Peter Whitehead, “An Authentic Fake,” Esoterra #6, transcript provided privately

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

[4] Simon Lewis, “Ripping Yarns,” Uncut #40, transcript provided privately

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

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

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

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

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