From Hell

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The reason I got into magic was that it seemed to be what was lying at the end of the path of writing. If I wanted to continue on that path, I was going to have to get into that territory because I had followed writing as far as I thought I could without taking a step over the edges of rationality. The path led out of rational confines. When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all. From Hell won several Eisner Awards, including "Best Serialized Story" (1993), [8] "Best Writer" (1995, [9] 1996, [10] 1997 [11]), and "Best Graphic Album – Reprint" (2000). [12] It won the 1995 Harvey Award for Best Continuing or Limited Series, and the collected edition won the 2000 Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work.

If time is an illusion, then all movement and change are also illusions. So the only thing that gives us the illusion of movement and change and events and time is the fact that our consciousness is moving through this mass along the time axis. If you imagine it as a strip of celluloid, each of those individual cells is motionless. If they each represent a moment, they’re unchanging. They’re not going anywhere, but as the projector beam of our consciousness passes across them, it provides the illusion of movement, and narrative and cause and effect and circumstances.Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Martin credits his experience in Hollywood for helping him hold out, saying that many of his fellow novelists end up in a situation where their books are changed dramatically. Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course. I mean, in terms of politics I think that it’s important to remember what the word actually means. Politics sometimes sells itself as having an ethical dimension, as if there was good politics and bad politics. As far as I understand it, the word actually has the same root as the word polite. It is the art of conveying information in a politic way, in a way that will be discrete and diplomatic and will offend the least people. And basically we’re talking about spin. Rather than being purely a late 20th, early 21st century term, it’s obvious that politics have always been nothing but spin. But, that said, it is the system which is interwoven with our everyday lives, so every aspect our lives is bound to have a political element, including writing fiction. Dave Windett, Jenni Scott & Guy Lawley, "Writer From Hell: the Alan Moore Experience" (interview), Comics Forum 4, p. 46, 1993

Quotes [ edit ] Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless. Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course. I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium. There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well. The difference between religion and magic is the same as what we were talking about earlier – I think you could map that over those two poles of fascism and anarchism. Magic is closer to anarchism. De Abaitua interview (1998) [ edit ] Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Quotes from several hours of an "Alan Moore Interview" by Matthew De Abaitua (1998), later published in Alan Moore: Conversations (2011) edited by Eric L. Berlatsky Science looks at the universe, doesn’t see itself there, doesn’t see mind there, so you have a world in which mind has no place. There is only one awareness here, that is trying out different patterns. We are going to have to come to some resolution about a lot of things in the next twenty years time, our notions of time, space, identity. There is something strange looming on the human horizon. If you draw a graph of all our consciousness, there is a point we seem to be heading towards. I can’t see coherent political structures in the traditional sense lasting beyond the next twenty years, I don’t think that would be possible. The origin of money is something to do with representational thinking. I like a film where you can see every penny of the budget up there on the screen. To me, energy is information – I think you can make that bold a statement. Fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy. We haven’t got a king neuron that tells all the other neurons what to do. It seems to me to be a more emotionally natural way of working with other people. There is a certain amount of sham in shamanism. I understand that the word ‘occult’ means hidden, but surely that is not meant to be the final state of all this information, hidden forever. There is a channel that I have called the god Mercury, some sort of information source I have named. There is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is a late Roman snake god, called Glycon, he was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. I’ve known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that. There is a big event in the future and because time is not what we think it is, that event radiates in all directions. We are entering its field and have been for hundreds of years. We are starting to approach the core of it. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well. The difference between religion and magic … I think you could map that over those two poles of fascism and anarchism. Magic is closer to anarchism. Critic Gary Groth says the most elaborate theme in From Hell stems from Moore's statement that "the Ripper murders — happening when they did and where they did — were almost like an apocalyptic summary of... that entire Victorian age." [7] Awards [ edit ]It furthermore occurred to me that, basically, anarchy is in fact the only political position that is actually possible. I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice. All it means, the word, is no leaders. An-archon. No leaders. Body Horror: The fate of the final victim. At the very height of his derangement, Gull enters a trancelike state after cutting her throat and begins a meticulous, ritualistic mutilation of the body that leaves behind a mass of gore that can hardly be recognized as having once been a woman, all without the benefit of a Gory Discretion Shot at any point. The face and breasts are cut off, the thighs are flayed down to the bone, and the entire abdomen is cut open and the intestines removed. It's no wonder that Abberline proclaims the death of Victorian society after seeing the aftermath.