Michelle Gunn! Michelle Gunn! Michelle Gunn!

Give me Moore.

I have been re-reading Alan Moore’s superlative comic book From Hell. Taking the unsolved case of Jack the Ripper as their starting point, Moore and illustrator Eddie Campbell delve into the underbelly of Victorian society and beyond.

It is a gripping story, full of inventive twists and brutally depicted in black ink. The comic is wonderfully dense, yet at the same time eminently readable. Moore has an exceptional gift for processing a large volume of source material into a taut narrative.

One thing I noticed this time was the attention to detail placed on the typeface. This in itself is not uncommon. Comic books often employ multiple fonts, making the text part of the graphic narrative. It closes the distance between picture and word.

Emotion and characterisation can also be conveyed, expanded upon and reinforced through successfully combining the two aspects. No one wants to see a full-blooded Bwaahahahaha!! in ten point Helvetica. It’s just not enough.

In From Hell, subtle differences in the typeface not only help shape the voice of each character, but also the atmosphere of the work. The first line of the narrative occurs in the second panel, ‘Bournemouth September 1923’. The font is rounded, neat and regular, with the suggestion of being handwritten.

If we take this as the ‘standard’ typeface, we see over the course of the comic how it is stretched, twisted and manipulated to echo the events of the story. At times it is a thin scrawl, such as when Polly Nichols’ body is found. Here, the impression is of tense, hushed whispers at night. As the police and passers-by begin to realise the nature of the situation, the font size is gradually increased to reflect the growing commotion. Its thinness also begins to disappear.

By the time the body is transferred to the mortuary in the police station, the typeface is rounded and less scratchy. The characters speaking are more at ease in an environment they know and feel safe in as they go about their job. However, when the grotesque state of Polly Nichols’ corpse is revealed, the typeface once more begins to lose its neat form. As the narrative fall into the abyss, It too descends.

. . .

Private Hell