Jep. Mitä nyt pieniä viitteellisiä merkintöjä saattaa kirjata, kuten 'From Hell'in aloitussivusta.
From Hell: The Compleat Scripts
by Alan Moore
Illustrated by: Eddie Campbell
Edited by: Stephen R. Bissette.
Borderlands Press, Baltimore 1994.
ISBN 1-880-325-07-1
Prologue: The Old Men on the Shore
Page 1
Panel 1
Okay... Let's get out there and win one for the Ripper! (Actually, that's Robert Block's joke, but I thought I'd stick it in anyway.)
This first page has nine evenly-sized panels, all taken from a fixed point of view. The year is 1923, and we are in Bournemouth, down on the beach quite close to the tide-line. The month is Spetember; a leaden and overcast day with a blind white sky and grey tides sulkily coming in to the damp sand of a pale grey beach. The time is later afternoon or early evening, and if we could see the sun it woudl be going down. As it is, the sun sinks unseen and without spectacle behind the smothering, featureless duvet of cloud. Its only visible effect is thtat throughout this entitre eightpage episode, the light gradually worsens through dusk to the beginning of darkness.
We are looking down the beach, looking along the edge of the tide from a ground-level viewpoint. To the right of the picture, stretching away torwards the distance , we see the grey-black waves washing sluggishly in with their skirts of grubby white foam. To the left we have a smoky impression of the granite sea wall and the buildings of the Bournemouth sea front rising up stolidly behind it. This too stretches away into the distance, meethind with the line of the sea's \edge at the vanishing point, with a ragged ribbon of grey sand and occasional tufts of black maram grass lying between the two (I'm guessing here, Eddie, since I haven't yet tracked down any references for bournemouth during that period. When we finally do locate references, we'll just have to adapt these descriptions as best we can to fit the facts.)
The beach is deserted, and if there are any people strolling on the sea front they are much too far away to see as moret than indistinct dots. In the very foreground of the shot here, right under our noses as it were, there lies the inert body of a deomposing seagull. It lies there with the remains of one wing sticking up scraggly; a few ribs already jutting through the soiled white down of its breast. Its chipped beak hangs open stiffly, stupidly. Its straing eye is a tiny white blob of mucus that has become cloudy and opaque, reflecting ony blind white clouds. A number of sand-flies are hopping and picking over the corpse... little black dots with elgs that you see hopping around near the water's edge and at first mistake for the beginnings of some optical disorder. Since we have this rotting bird right under our noses for nine panels, making it pretty large and right up close in the foreground, maybe we can actually show the idiosyncracies of insect feeding habits going on: An insignificant little ballet going on while the real action gradually encroaches from the background. All I mean by this is maybe we have one fly up on the head who remains almost motionless throughout the entire sequence. Another hopes about all over the place, looking for the right dining ambience. A third seems to turn up half way through and presumptuously starts to tuck in right next to the second, who take umbrage and flies off... Just black dots moving around, to give the unpleasant impression of teeming bugs as naturalistically as possible, without overdoing it.
While this is going on in the foreground, we gradually become aware of two figures approaching along the beach from the background, following the line of the tide as they walk slowly towards us. Here, they are tiny black dots no bigger than the flies that we see feeding in the foreground. The title lettering, either in black on white or reversed, as appropriate, is superimposed somewhere in the centre of this first panel as if it were the opening title of a film. The letterint is that upon the heading of the note received by the Whitechapel police in the October of 1888: stark, simple and scruffy: a couple of tiny spattered ink blots to the right of the "F" and just above the "r" in "From".
Okay, so that's the set up for this first page. Before we carry on through, I should just reiterate what I was saying over the phone about how I work: none of this rambling junk is sacred. If there's stuff that doesn't work visually or that you think would work better another way then just go ahead and do it. I only put in all this laborious detail in so that you'll have an idea of the effect that I'm after. If you have a better way or a more practical way to achieve it then that's fine by me. For fuck's sake don't be intimidated by it, and please sling in all the ideas and suggestions that you want. I want you to have as much fun on this as I'm having, so just kick off your shoes, loosen your belt and relax. Just don't fall asleep..
LOGO: From Hell
PANEL 2
Same shot exactly , except the flies hav emaybe moved around a bit and the waves are either crashing in or rattling back across the shingle... whichever they weren't doing last panel, basically. The two black dots of the men approaching down the beach are larger here, thought not by very much. The sub-logo and credits are superimposed across the middle of the panel again, this time probably in an elegant and antiquated Victorian-looking typeface.
CREDITS: Being a melodrama in sixteen installments by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
PANEL 3
Same shot, the tides and the flies having moved accordingly. The figures, again, are a little closer here, although still very small. Once more, the title lettering is superimposed over the panel's centre, probably in the same pseudo-Victorian typeface used in the last panel.
TITLE: Prologue: The Old Men on the Shore
PANEL 4
Same shot. We can now see that the figures are those of two men, both wearing long coats and muffled against the cold. One of them is quite slender and delicate looking, a man of around fifty years old. He wears a scarf, topcoat and gloves, but is bare-headed save for his full and neatly groomed head of grey hair, his greying moustache and beard. He is the more genteel-looking and slightly the better dressed of the two men, but from his atti\tude he seems to be attentive and fussing in regard to the older man who walks beside him, as if concerned that the old man should over-exert himself for something, I don't mean that that's his physical attitude to the old man in this specific panel... I just mean that's the overall impression he gives off when we see him with the older man: respectful and solicitous, albeit occasionally prone to impatience when goaded by the old man's cantankerousness. Here they just walk side by side, hands deep in their greatcoat pockets. The younger man is called Robert Lees. His associate is Frederick Abberline. Abberline is the older of the two men, and more noticeably from yeoman stock than the rather effete Lees. He is pushing seventy, althrough he still looks a fairly sturdy and solid figure, if slightly inclined to portliness in these, his later years. I don't have a photo reference of Fred Abberline yet, but I'm guessing that he's the fairly stocky figure described above, with a mousey moustache and muttonchop sidewhiskers. His hair, though receding, seems to have kept at least some of its colour. As we see him here he is wearing a derby hat and carrying a gentleman's walking cane. He moves more stiffly than Lees, and it is his difficulty in walking that accounts for the pair's snail-paced progress along the beach towards us here. When abberline gets closer, I fancy that we might see his nose as being slightly red and bulbous, through not to excess. By all accounts he drank rather a lot , and walking round White Chapel in the fog swigging raw spirits wouldn't do anybody's nose a lot of good, would it? Anyway, we can't make out any of this detail yet since the pair are still too far away. The caption giving the place and data are somehwere up towards the top left of the panel. Since there won't be many captions at all throughout this entire book (just place-and-data captions, like here) the captions can either be lettered in the Victorian typeface mentioned above or in a more normal and prosaic fashion... I leave it entirely up to you. Whatever you think looks best.
CAP: Bournemouth. September 1923
PANEL5
The two figures continue to get closer. The flies continue to feed on the dead seagull and the waves continue to lurch against the shore. Abberline, who is probably the figure on the left of the pair as they walk towards us, appears to be saying something to his companion here: He sprouts a small word balloon, but there isn't any real lettering in it... just a bunch of tiny unreadable scratches that look like words and convey the impression of inaudible conversation
ABBERLINE (v.small)
...
PANEL6
The figures continue to get closer, more and more detail becoming evident as they do so. Here, they both have word balloons. The balloons are still very small, and the words in them are lettered as tiny as possible while still remaining just-about-legible, to give the effect of a conversation gradually becoming audible as the speakers get closer to us.
ABBERLINE (v.small)
...bloody shambles, this last six years.
LEES (v.small)
A shambles inflicted from WITHOUT. Foreign interferencehardly invalidates 'Capital's premise.
PANEL7
The figures come still closer. From their attitudes now we can see that they are debating. Lees looks the more agitated of the two, gesticulating as we attempts to make his point. Abberline continues to plod slowly and implacably forward, digging the end of his cane into the damp sand as he does so. He needs all his energy for walking and can spare none of it for extraneous hand movements. Their word ballons here are bigger than last time, althorugh still not quite as big as the full sized normal lettering we will see in our next panel.
ABBERLINE (small)
Oh DO come on, Mr Lees! Really! They've had nothing but war, poverty...
LEES (small)
Despite which they have SURVIVED! Surely that confirms rather than contradicts what Mr Marx has said:
LEES (small)
Socialism is INEVITABLE.
PANEL8
They are very close to us now, filling the whole panel. Abberline is a few paces ahead of Lees, and thus the closest to us here, walking along swinging his stick and then digging it down into the sand, so that its point, when visible, has a clining sheath of damp grey sand adhering to the last few inches of its tip, a few grains falling off here and there. As he walks towards us he doesn't look round a Lees. Rather he looks down at the dead gull in his path. A slight frown of distaste wrinkles his features as he stares at the decaying bird and flies feasting upon it. Lees, slightly behind Abberline as the pair walk towards us, does not appear to have noticed the bird and is looking at the back of Abberline's turned back . Lees' expression is very earnest, his sad eyes more or less begging Abberline to see reason and accept his argument. Lees has eyes like a spaniel, and looks sorry for the world, particularly himself.
LEES:
Why, I myself am testament to its increasing influence. I am undoubtedly a product of the middle classes, yet none espouses socialism more volubly than I...
Panel9
In this last panel, Abberline has moved so close that we can no longer see his upper body at all... We see him from around about the knee down here. In another step he'll be out of the panel entirely. With the end of his walking cane he swats the dead gull to one side so that it flies limply up into the air, spinning beak over tail with a miniature thunderhead of black flies billowing up from it in search of less haazardous pastures. Lees, still trailing a couple of steps behind the older man, is still not looking at the gull. Instead, he directs his gaze towards the point off panel above where Abberline's head must be. He looks puzzled, in a troubled sort of way, as he gazes at the back of Abberline's off panel head. Abberline's balloon issues from off panel above in the F/G.
ABBERLINE (off)
My point precisely, Mr Lees.
ABBERLINE (off)
My point precisely.
