When the decent Inspector Abberline, a working-class detective who hails from the East End, uncovers this conspiracy-mainly because Gull confesses to him-a Masonic cover-up ensues, and the Ripper passes into legend, his apocalyptic violence birthing the subsequent century with its orgy of war and cataclysm. Furthermore, the Royal Surgeon, Sir William Withey Gull, is a Freemason who turns this murder-for-hire into a series of occult rites meant to reinforce men’s reign over the matriarchy overthrown with the establishment of solar deities at the dawn of recorded history. In Moore’s telling, an imposingly evil Queen Victoria herself commissions her Royal Surgeon to murder a company of prostitutes who are ineffectually trying to blackmail the Crown with knowledge of a princeling’s illegitimate baby, sired while he was slumming in the East End. Moore borrowed his historical graphic novel’s central conceit from a sensationalist conspiracy theory of yesteryear (see this Adam Curtis essay for the details). The first achievement of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s great Jack-the-Ripper saga, From Hell (1989-98), is surviving its ridiculous premise.
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