Elizabeth Sandifer and Penn Wiggins

LWiA 4.4: Sebastian O

At its core, Sebastian O is very much the sort of thing Moore was describing when he talked about his Image work aiming to be “better than average stories for 13-to-15-year olds.” Its central narrative engine is simply an adventure story—a fellow named Sebastian O escapes from prison and confronts the man who put him there after working his way through a motley of underlings and meeting up with the other surviving members of his and his betrayer’s old gang. It is plainly a book whose ...

LWiA 4.3 Act IV Omnibus

The From Hell Act IV omnibus. I'll get a full chapter post out in a bit and give it the tag so that it's findable with the other full chapters, but I don't wanna spam you all.

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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does” in 1989, Moore was exploring similar conceptual space here with another artist, namely David Bowie, who, just five months after the release of “The b...

LWiA 4.3: Gull, ascending

And that's Act IV. Omnibus forthcoming. Thanks for your support and patience as I worked my way through this absolute beast of a chapter. It may not be the longest of the project (it's currently fourth, behind the first V for Vendetta chapter, Swamp Thing, and, of course, Cuddled Little Vice), but it was by some margin the hardest, with so many desperately complex topics and major structural aspects that only made themselves clear when I got right up to them in the writing.

Onwards to ...

LWiA 4.3: 1. Outside

I can have little a 1700 word digression, as a treat.

(One section to go, I think?)

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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does” in 1989, Moore was exploring similar conceptual space here with another artist, namely David Bowie, who, just five months after the release of “The best of all tailors” in From Hell #7, released 1. Outside. This was his return, after...

LWiA 4.3: The Dance of the Gull Catchers

The end of the chapter, though not, obviously, the last section I have to write.

Some two years later Kitchen Sink Press released an eleventh issue of from Hell entitled “The Dance of the Gull Catchers.” This was not a complete surprise—Moore first alluded to the possibility back in the annotations to Tundra’s first collection of the series back in 1991, when he raises the possibility that Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, the book from which Moore’s enti...

Penn: Insomnia

It was really only a matter of time before I came out with a work of psychogeography. I’m married to El Sandifer, and my favorite Alan Moore is Unearthing, for god’s sake. Insomnia is a spoken word essay about sleepless nights and childhood magic, haunted by the loss of Home and set to an ambient soundtrack. 

Rather amusingly, the frame story of the piece is entirely honest. I did, in fact, start working on the piece on a melancholy rainy night where I despera...

LWiA 4.3: The Downslope

Amazingly, the fact that "The unfortunate Mr Druitt" does not have a period after "Mr" while "The apprehensions of Mr. Lee" does is not a typo. I'm sure there is a typo, which someone will inevitably point out in comments, but that's not it.

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At the end of “The best of all tailors,” as Gull returns to Netley’s carriage, he tells his coachman that “I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I h...

LWiA 4.3 Act 3 Omnibus

Beat Silksong. Back to work with me.

This

LWIA 4.3 Act 2 Omnibus

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 G...

Penn: Purpose Poetry Performance

I got a comment on Patreon from Weronika on my ritual self-immolation, “I Feel Flames,” noting that she appreciated the chance to look at the construction of a ritual, and somewhere around the thousand word mark of my reply I decided maybe I should just make a standalone Patreon post about it. It hits on a thing I’m doing with a much larger work that I’m still deep in research on, and I’ve long believed that one of the more ridiculous barriers to entry into the magical is the sense ...

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 w...

LWIA 4.3: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

There's a story Brian Eno tells about being commissioned to create the startup sound for Windows 95, whereby the agency provide a huge list of adjectives about how the music should sound—futuristic, inspiring, sentimental, etc—before specifying that the whole thing had to be three and a quarter seconds long.

Anyway, that's how covering the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in a thousand words felt.

With chapter nine, titled simply “From Hell,” Moore’s newfound dedication...

LWIA 4.3: Chapter Nine ("From Hell")

Probably a few days before the next section, as there's research to be done.

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Magic was far from the only thing, or even the main thing that “From Hell” is concerned with, however. In his outline of the remaining chapters prepared for Don Murphy at the beginning of the year, he described chapter nine as being about “the increasingly chaotic period of thirty-nine days from the double murder of Catherine Eddowes and Elizbaeth Stride to the even of Marie Kelly’s murder o...

Penn: a self immolation ritual and Wardruna, World Tour 2025 review

So, I recently got another lesson in believing people when they tell you who they are, and found myself pushed out of yet another religious community over principles. This was the community run by the person I've been describing as my mentor. She'd asked me, in that context, for a creative project based on a myth in our shared religious context. I'd been working on a poem for it. Instead I sent her the attached essay/ritual to double as my creative project and my resignation.

O...

LWIA 4.3: "Love is enough"

This is actually two separate chunks of chapter, which will be interrupted by another section. They read perfectly fine as a contiguous stretch, however, so I'll leave the interleaving for the omnibus.

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The first part of From Hell to be originally produced for Kitchen Sink and not Taboo was chapter eight, “Love is enough,” a transitional work in every sense. Campbell was drawing it in 1993, meaning Moore wrote the script prior to his magical awakening. Indeed, the timeline...

LWIA 4.3: The Movie

I watched this while making grape jam yesterday, which was very funny.

A short time later, in February of 1994, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell took a meeting that would be crucial for the successful completion of From Hell. By this point Campbell had already drawn Chapter Eight, which would come out that June, and was at work on Chapter Nine, which would see print at year’s end. Nevertheless, there was the plain problem of how to make money off of the comic. Much of it had been produc...

LWIA 4.3: William Morris

In which a digression is taken so that about fifty others don't have to be.

Consider William Morris, for instance. One of the great British polymaths, Morris was a major nexus point of Victorian culture, working simultaneously as a writer, translator, designer, textile artist, printer, and socialist. Born to a well-off family, he developed an early love of architecture, which developed at Oxford into a specific love of the medieval. He was drawn from there into the cooling embers of rom...

LWIA 4.3: Act III Intro

And we're back. Act III is still a little unstructured and inchoate, and so I'm starting off chronologically, picking right up from the end of Act II. Which I'm just now realizing I never sent the omnibus of. I'll get that over the weekend unless I'm a dumb bitch with ADHD, in which case I won't.

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This was, however, a relatively slow process, especially if one dates its beginning to writing “What doth the Lord require of thee?” sometime in 1990. The two subsequent chapters...

America a Prophecy 6: From Mothman to Bob Murray (A Study in Appalachian Monstrosity)

Part six of an annual blog series on the worst comic ever created.

Every year I write an essay about the 9/11/2011 installment Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Thus far they’ve included Exegesis, The Devolution of the Funny Pages 1895-2022, The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion, Rose, and The Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes. That last installment went back to the beginning, looking at the origins of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith back i...

LWIA 4.3: What doth the Lord require of thee?

In which I hit a beat I've been working towards for twelve years.

This is the last part of Act II. I'll get an omnibus out shortly, but I'm traveling over the weekend so may not get to it until I get back and dive straight into the beginning of Act III, which is probably going to be much more crunchily focused on the actual comic than the first two acts have been.

Thanks for all the support. It feels really good to have finally done this bit.

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This proved apt. Fro...

LWIA 4.3: The End of Taboo

One more section of Act II to write after this, which will be an absolute doozy, though thankfully not in anything like the way that fucking Sinclair section was.

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,”[1] but these marked the end of the line for Bissette’s perpetually troubled anthology. This was inevitable—...

LWIA 4.3: Iain Sinclair

You ever have a 1500 word section that takes you two weeks? That isn't entirely the fault of the material—I had quite a bit of travel through there, and have just been swamped in general. But gosh this was hard. Hope you enjoy. I'd promise to have the next section faster, but that just feels like cursing myself.

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 M...

LWIA 4.3: Lost Girls

I will of course get back to this in Volume 6 or 7.

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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 ...

LWIA 4.3: Freemasonry

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 reenactm...

LWIA 4.3: Act I

Oh right, I never posted the omnibus of Act I.

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Moore, on the other hand, was a busy man indeed. This fact was largely why he found himself having to crank out silly Image comics on the regular. Or, perhaps more specifically, it was the fact that virtually none of his other projects at the time had any sort of commercial prospects. This was the basic dynamic of Moore’s Image period—a bevy of gigs writing high quality stupid comics taken entirely for the money, and a secon...

Penn: This is Not a Salad Recipe: An Exploration into Spiritual Practice

When I was a kid in the American South, my Just Grandma had a VCR and exactly three video tapes. I watched all of those movies until the tapes disintegrated. One was the live action Popeye (Meh, but Grandpa really liked Popeye), one was Who Framed Roger Rabbit (My favorite of the three, and a clear influence on who I became, in retrospect), and the third was a cartoon adaptation of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.”  I grew out of that one first, and barely rem...

Penn: Behind a Door

When I was reviewing Janis Ian's record Between the Lines for pride week, I came across an absolutely horrid interview where Ian was hounded about her sexuality. By 'came across' here, I mean "went to the university library and played with their microfilm machine," which meant I had the article all printed out. My scissors got itchy, and so I made this poem. It's been sitting on my computer just waiting for me ever since.

Today I'm waiting on edits for a couple things (an essay on salad...

Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 2: Morrison and Millar Omnibus

Morrison, for their part, spent considerably less time working for Image. Indeed, prior to doing the creator-owned Happy! with Image in 2012—by which point Image was a very different company—Morrison’s only Image work was a three issue run of Spawn beginning in December 1993. This came about largely by accident—Dez Skinn’s Comics International misreported that Morrison would be included in the initial wave of guest writers alongside Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and...

Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 1: Alan Moore at Image (Omnibus)

As promised, the omnibus version of LWIA v4 Cha

LWIA 4.3: Introduction

At last, the first.

I'll package this into an Act I omnibus and get that out in the coming days, along with revised omnibi of the first two chapters that balance the "comics industry implodes" material between them instead of putting it all in Chapter 1.

And from there it's on to Act II, which has what's probably the most fearsome research knot I've ever had to untangle in LWIA, so will probably lead to another planning notes document for the $25s and a couple weeks hiatus befor...