In the case of the fraudulent and press-generated "Ripper" letters, we see a clear prototype of the current British tabloid press in action, and for this reason it seemed poetically apposite that the letter be composed in Wapping, currently the home of Mr Rupert Murdoch's highly popular right-wing tabloid, which, unsurprisingly in this tale of obelisks and other arcane solar symbols, is called The Sun.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
On the 29th September, the Central News Agency forwarded the letter to Scotland Yard that we see Abberline reading aloud here to Thick and Godley (and if there were ever two names more emblematic of the police force of that period, I should certainly like to hear them).
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
Abberline's eerily precognitive comments on page two are my own invention. They are also, in their way, a form of shamefaced apology from one currently making part of his living wrapping up miserable little killings in supernatural twaddle. Sometimes, after all you've done for them, your characters just turn on you.
In Appendix I of FROM HELL
Everyone seems agreed that Kelly was the real target. She'd infected Dr Stanley's son, corrupted Olga Tchkersoff's sister. The underlying assumption remains unstated: she must have done something to deserve that.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
By Autumn 1988 I'm thinking of seriously about writing something lengthy on a murder. The Whitechapel killings aren't even considered. Too played-out. Too obvious. Publicity around the crimes' centennial, however, leads me to Knight's book. Ideas coalesce. Deciding on a serial in Steve Bissette's Taboo, I contact Eddie Campbell. The rest is dodgy pseudo-history.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting Wippers.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory's obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn't like books. Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
The grounds of the enquiry are a forensic sucking-bog; treacherous, obsessional. Fall in this stuff and you won't come out again.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Reputedly, many prominent Ripperologists never set foot in Whitechapel for fear of being mugged. Mugging's not the danger here. This place is authentically dreadful.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
It isn't getting drawn into Masonic Death Conspiracy that troubles me, you understand. It's getting drawn into the vortex of a fiction.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Some stories just don't have what it takes. The yarn that eventually survives to be accepted as history will do so by brute Darwinian mechanics. We'll lock all the suspects in a room together. They can fight it out.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Our detective fictions tell us otherwise: everything's just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive, and a means, you've solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
The greater part of any murder is the field of theory, fascination and hysteria that it engenders. A black diaspora. Our tireless, sinister enthusiasm.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Soon, somebody will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject's edge. Its area, however, can't extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888, Whitechapel. ... Koch's Snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
The complex phantom we project. That alone, we know is real. The actual killer's gone, unglimpsed. Might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don't we leave it there?
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
It's going. It's all going. Will anybody bother with a bicentennial in 2088? Might our pursuit, our quarry, already endangered, be by then extinct?
We were looking at the naked woman dancing when it flew away.
In "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" in FROM HELL
Childbirth is not a miracle. Life is not sacred. When you have twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East and that's it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, then childbirth is a miracle and life is sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in Philadelphia's housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity.
In the lettercol of Cerebus #142
Do not wander off without me. That's how we lost Amelia Earhart in here. Every day, about two in the afternoon, the thermals are right, and we hear her somewhere in here, screaming for peanut buttter and jelly sandwiches.
Harlan's our genial guide through HARLAN ELLISON'S DREAM CORRIDOR Special.
You'd have liked my father. He was a sweet guy. He died when I was fourteen, but when I was a little kid we used to sit together and I'd read my comic books to him. I don't think he cared much about the silly stuff in comics -- that was the '40s -- but he loved me and took pleasure in my reading aloud to him. I miss my dad.
Harlan remembers his childhood, in HARLAN ELLISON'S DREAM CORRIDOR #2
But, if you have a moment, if your heart is big enough to spare a moment, give a nod and a smile for all the good ones who spent their lives making great art and small art and even entertainment. When they're gone, there's only one way to tell them you miss them... Send them a moment of kind thought right now. The beam will pick it up and carry it across the stars to them where they wait. I've been sending good wishes to the ones I miss all evening. Now it's your turn.
Harlan's soliloquy in HARLAN ELLISON'S DREAM CORRIDOR #5
When I say that Seth will have his testicles torn off, I do not mean that his sac will always be a ragged void. If the gods are not exactly a law unto themselves, they can at least bend the rules. In other words, some balls bounce back.
Peter Milligan's opening sentences in EGYPT #1
I had it in me to be the Pierce Brosnan of my generation.
Vincent Me's past career plans in EGYPT #1
Vincent, you are a damaged person who uses sexual gratification as a displacement activity. Now get your hand off my behind.
Ooh, good putdown! in EGYPT #1
I simply reject the capitalist credo. I reject anything that ends in 'ist' or 'ism'. In fact, I reject anything that ends in 's'.
Is Vincent for real? In EGYPT #1
Years later I was regaining consciousness in America, which is no mean feat.
Waking from memories of a sister, in EGYPT #1
"The Order of Osiris, the Order of the Listless One, oh God of Yesterday, He-Who-Is-Awakened, Lord of the Chennet, the suffering god from whose inert body..."
"I've got Latin in four hours, Josh. Let's get on with it."
"Oh, sorry, of course. Got a little carried away..."
My college years weren't like this! In EGYPT #1
"We got to thinking: how did the priests know exactly how long to suffocate the new pharaoh for?"
"Ah, ah, preposition at the end of a sentence, Kim. You owe me a dollar."
Kim and Bobby in EGYPT #1
Three hundred years of tears have soured the very stones of this house. Drink deep, gentle reader: you have come too far to turn back now.
Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, in SEBASTIAN O #1
But we cannot disguise our abhorrence of modern communication devices.
Queen Victoria on teleconferencing, in SEBASTIAN O #1
The dandy has one unique advantage over the common herd. No matter what the situation, he will always be more exquisitely dressed than his enemies. Therefore, he has already triumphed.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #1
One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #1
We may be in the sewer, but there's absolutely no need for that kind of gutter profanity.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #2
If I know Sebastian, he'll find it impossible to continue his mission in soiled clothing.
Lord Lavender, in SEBASTIAN O #2
And now let us hasten to the station. I have commanded the rain to fall at exactly one-fifteen and I would hate to get my shoes wet.
Lord Lavender, in SEBASTIAN O #2
I do so loathe nature, don't you? All that dreadful rot and decay and procreation. Here, everything is so much more tidy. I simply wind the trees once a day and reset the flowers.
The Abbé does love his clockwork garden, in SEBASTIAN O #2
It would take days to catalog your sins, Abbé. I simply don't have the time.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #2
The Abbé, I'm afraid, has gone to meet his maker. Hard to decide which of the two will receive the greater shock.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #3
"Don't fret, Theo. The lad's simply stunned. He'll wake up in an hour, none the wiser."
"But his throat has been cut."
"Oh, dear, my mistake. My diagnosis regarding his recovery would appear to have been somewhat premature."
Sebastian and Lord Lavender, in SEBASTIAN O #3
First... a pardon. I should hate to be hounded further for acts which some might consider crimes, but which I prefer to think of as aesthetic statements. I have, after all, killed only the very dull.
Sebastian, in SEBASTIAN O #3