RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books Comics stories that deal with Jack the Ripper

I just finished re-reading GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT by Mignola.

And the Elseworlds story JLA: ISLAND OF DR MOREAU by Roy Thomas and Steve Pugh

Both great stories, as are many others in comics form that deal with Jack the Ripper.

It's one of those historic mysteries like the Hindenburg explosion, or Hitler's death (or escape), or Amelia Earhardt's disappearance, or similar events, that lend themselves well to expansion in a well-told story (or sometimes not).

Jack the ripper often seems to draw in science-fiction elements and/or conspiracies.
So... maybe some of you know a few good ones I haven't seen. Feel free to list the best (or worst).

I don't know if it's the worst, but I tried to read From Hell but it got too complicated. I mean, I finished reading it, I even finished reading the extra stories and the notes at the end, but I didn't get much out of it. It felt like there was too much unnecessary info that didn't add much to the story or the mystery (much less give any answers). It's one of those times that made me wish Moore would know when to stop thinking and writing.

From Hell is incredible if you can get through it. great art by Eddie Campbell, as well.

Blood of the Innocent by Ricky Shanklin, Marc Hempel, and Mark Wheatley is also very good. pits Dracula against the Ripper. the same team would go on to create the also really good Dracula comic, Blood of Dracula.

I'm probably off, but in the Marvel Universe wasn't Mr. Sinister secretly "Jack The Ripper" or something in the late 1800's (where the "murders" were actually part of Sinister's kidnapping and experimentation on early mutants)?

I bought the first three issues of Alan Moore's FROM HELL when it was being serialized. It was heavily referenced and footnoted on the last page each issue, clearly Moore did extensive research on the known history of Jack the Ripper when he was doing this series.

But it was a long time between issues, very sporadic, and I just got bored and figured i'd wait for the trade when and if Moore finally concluded it.
And then when the trade finally came out (early/mid 1990's) I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to purchase it. Eddie Campbell's art doesn't hold any special appeal to me, a bit overly sombre and dark, a bit too sketchy and avante-garde for me, and it looks to be about 400 pages.

I sampled a big chunk of it, someday I'll pick it up and see what i'm missing.
It's very well written from what I sampled, when I get around to it.

I never heard of this one. I like pretty much everything i've read by Hempel and Wheatley. I'll have to check it out.

Another Jack the Ripper story I recall is WONDER WOMAN: AMAZONIA, an Elseworlds story published in 1997, By Wm Messner Loebs and Phil Winslade.

It's in a magazine-size format, the last 8 X 11" size graphic novel I've seen from DC. And the best art I've seen by Winslade (the other I liked a lot was an ANT-MAN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL)

"Doom Patrol: Crawling from the wreckage" by Grant Morrison had a villain who claimed to be Jack the Ripper. And God.

THE God.

Well, it's Grant Morrison...

(I still enjoyed reading it, because it could've been just a crazy super-powered freak who *thought* he was God.)

'Time After Time', the movie...

One of my favorite movies as a kid. Written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, a name you should be familiar with, Pro.

KHAAAAAAAAN!!!

Malcolm Mcdowell as HG Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. a classic, not a comic, but it should be!

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Two stories in the award-winning DANGEROUS VISIONS short story collection, edited by Harlan Ellison:

"A Toy For Juliette" by Robert Bloch.

and expanding from that,
"Prowler in the City At the Edge of the World" by Harlan Ellison.

Both self-contained stories that can be enjoyed individually.
Although Ellison's follow-up story was directly inspired by and expands on Bloch's, if you choose to enjoy the combination.

Great that, just a few years later with online libraries, we can not only recommend stuff to each other, but actually link the scanned full stories, for others to read at just a click.

https://viewcomiconline.com/from-hell-master-edition-issue-1/

I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd waited to buy it in collected form, rather than the serialized issues from 1991-1998. I thought the story was well told, and clearly well researched (with extensive footnotes by Alan Moore), but it just didn't engage me overly much. The Eddie Campbell art didn't do a whole lot for me.

But in a quiet, naturalist fiction way, and in parts a horrific way, it was a good story, just not one of my favorites. I read a good chunk of it in serialized form. But when the collected edition finally came out, I wasn't that enthusiastic about reading the whole thing.
I've always planned to purchase the collected edition and finish the story, but in over 22 years, I just could never work up the enthusiasm to pick the full book up and read it, based on what I've read in the serialized issues.


I above linked the colorized "master edition" version, broken into 10 parts, to allow reading a very long story (600 pages) in bite-size chunks.

But if you prefer, there are multiple other editions :
https://viewcomiconline.com/search/?key=from+hell

I couldn't find it in full form, but at least linked so you can see what the issues look like.

That's hilarious. I'm very Grant Morrison resistant, but willing to give it a chance. Morrison likes to show off how oh-so-brilliant he is, and I'm really not impressed with his bag of tricks.
Pariah, also not a Morrison fan, has multiple times parodied Morrisson's writing style perfectly. What Morrison does, on the surface, looks imaginative, but it really is very easy to do. Just ask Mark Millar, who has made a career of imitating Morrison's style.
Not my thing from the large slice of Morrison titles I've sampled, but clearly there's an audience for that. Maybe Morrison pulls it off better in this series.

I looked these issues up, in DOOM PATROL (2nd series) issues 19-22. Although it appears to have story threads that continue into later issues after.

https://viewcomiconline.com/doom-patrol-1987-issue-19/

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EDIT: Issues 19-22 don't mention this storyline, a completely separate story. The "Red Jack/Jack the Ripper" character appears in issues 23-24, and only really begins on page 19 of issue 23. And yeah, as you say, it reads so that it was very possibly not the actual Jack the Ripper (or God), just some megalomaniacal nut on a power trip pretending to be. And I frankly didn't like it. I kept reading on a few more issues after, to see if the storyline continued, but that was it. Really annoying dialogue, and a lot of dialogue that doesn't even make any sense, just made-up gibberish by Morrison. And very cynical, and pointlessly sadistic.
Possibly Capt. Sweden read this storyline in a collected trade or foreign reprint edition, where all these issues were merged together. But it's only in (barely) these last two issues, 23 and 24.
https://viewcomiconline.com/doom-patrol-1987-issue-23/
https://viewcomiconline.com/doom-patrol-1987-issue-24/

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Robert Bloch's above story "A Toy For Juliette" is also an expansion by Bloch on a story of his own from a few years prior, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper".
Which was adapted in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 2, Dec 1972, by Ron Goulart, with art by Gil Kane/Ralph Reese.
For me the story was disappointing, but I still enjoyed the Kane/Reese visuals.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY (1972 series) did a number of adaptations of Bloch, Robert E. Howard and other fantasy authors in its early issues 1-5, before it became strictly a reprint title of 1950's early 1960's monster stories in issues 6-19.



https://viewcomiconline.com/journey-into-mystery-1972-issue-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_After_Time_(1979_film)

After roughly 45 years, I finally saw this movie a week ago on TCM. It's a modest production, relative to director Nicholas Meyer's later Star Trek movies, but fun.
I think I saw pieces of it a number of times over the years, but was never able to watch the complete movie from start to finish until now.

It's a fun companion movie to the 1960 film version of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)

( and to director Nicholas Meyer's work on Star Trek movies 2, 4 and 6 :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Meyer#Filmography )

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Jack The Ripper In Fiction (literature, movies, television, comics, manga) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper_in_fiction#External_links


There are dozens of novels and science fiction short stories based on Jack The Ripper.

And even in comics, a number of stories I was previously unaware of.

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Regarding the JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 2 story, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", illustrated by Gil Kane/ Ralph Reese, here is the same story reprinted in a 1975 black and white Marvel magazine titled MASTERS OF TERROR, an all-reprint magazine that lasted two issues, collecting adaptations of Robert Bloch, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Theodore Sturgeon and other fantasy/horror authors.

https://viewcomiconline.com/masters-of-terror-issue-1/

It actually looks much better in black and white. The coloring in the original comics versions, were uninspired and functional at best coloring for the most part. Good coloring often makes or breaks a story for me, such as Steve Oliff coloring in BERNI WRIGHTSON: MASTER OF THE MACABRE.
Bad coloring can diminish a good story, and in the case of Wrightson elevate work I already love even more.

Oliff's coloring in the HULK magazine's "Moon Knight" back-up stories (issues 13-20) by Moench and Sienkiewicz (I believe Oliff's first professional coloring, at least at Marvel) is another example of color elevating already great work.
The preceding issues 10-12 are examples of colors that diminish what were supposed to be more sophisticated offset-printed issues, that were supposed to improve the magazine over its previous black and white RAMPAGING HULK magazine format (issues 1-9, which I also liked.)
But it took till HULK issue 13 to fully demonstrate the benefit of its new offset color format.

Alan Moore and Bissette/Tottleben's work in SWAMP THING, good as it was, I felt also was diminished slightly by often less than stellar coloring. Such as in issue 45, which is otherwise one of my favorite issues of the series. But that I felt could have been even better if it had more impressive coloring. And unfortunately, those same colors are used in all the various collected reprint editions of those issues.
Some of those issues are very well colored, such as 38-42, others are not.

Even back in the late 60's and early/mid 70's, where the printing technology was less, and before sophisticated offset formats came along, in circa 1981-1983 reprint editions, there are still many beautifully colored issues in the preceding 1970's era, such as the O'Neil and Adams/Giordano BATMAN and DETECTIVE issues.
Or in many of DC's mystery anthology titles, such as HOUSE OF MYSTERY, HOUSE OF SECRETS, WEIRD MYSTERY TALES, SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE and many others. From 1968-1975 or so, I think DC's main colorist was Jack Adler, and I love the look of DC's line in that period.

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A TREASURY OF VICTORIAN MURDER, by Rick Geary (issue 2)
https://viewcomiconline.com/a-treasury-of-victorian-murder-issue-2/

A straightforward telling of the Jack The Ripper murders in 64-page comics form by Rick Geary, linked here just in time for Halloween. In this, the 2nd issue of a 9-issue series on famous Victorian-era murders.

I've always enjoyed Rick Geary's quirky murder mystery stories, some factual, some fictional, and always with a bit of quirky off-beat humor, in magazines ranging from EPIC ILLUSTRATED, HEAVY METAL, NATIONAL LAMPOON, ECLIPSE magazine, TWISTED TALES, TALES OF TERROR, ALIEN ENCOUNTERS, VOYAGES and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Sinister

This post went right by me back in the day, because I was completely unfamiliar with the character.
He was introduced in X-MEN right around the time I lost interest and stopped reading, toward the end of John Romita Jr.'s run, circa X-MEN 211.
And Mr. Sinister was introduced and gradually unveiled right after, across X-MEN 212-221.

https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Uncanny-X-Men-1963/Issue-212?id=22901

A bit more easily accessed in the current era.
God bless the internet !

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https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Master-of-Kung-Fu-1974/Issue-100?id=29902

Another story I ran across, in MASTER OF KUNG FU 100, by Doug Moench, with art on alternating chapters by Gene Day and Mike Zeck. In this version, the Ripper is a creation of Fu Manchu, manipulated for his own dark conspiratorial purposes.

MASTER OF KUNG FU (in is first two issues, SPECIAL MARVEL EDITION ) is a consistently great series. Begun by Englehart and Starlin in 15-17.
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Special-Marvel-Edition/Issue-15?id=95378

Then by Englehart and a new-to-the-field Paul Gulacy from 18-20.
Then writing was taken over by Doug Moench, who with Gulacy brought the series to greatness in issues 21-50, with Moench becoming the guiding force of the series.
After Gulacy's departure, Moench and Mike Zeck did most issues from 55-101.

And Gene Day, first the inker on 76-101, then became penciller/inker on 102-120 with Moench, and brought the series to new heights of greatness. My favorite issues of the series.

Over a hundred issues, blending together elements of Bruce Lee-variety 70's martial arts pop culture, with philosophical introspection, resurrected Fu Manchu pulp adventure, and a cultured British MI-6 world-travelling spy adventure element.
You can nit-pick about when sophistication at points maybe went too far over the top and became either stilted or schlock, but when you're into it (and I was, and am) it's an engaging blend of story elements that is difficult to see flaws in, completely its own, a consistently engaging and fun series.
And like few series, was fortunate for virtually its entire run to showcase a steady stream of great emerging artists, most of whom stayed on the series for long runs.

Along with a MOKF ANNUAL, by Moench and Pollard.
And especially GIANT-SIZE MOKF issues, that have more Moench/Gulacy goodness,.
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Giant-Size-Master-of-Kung-Fu/Issue-1?id=112040

And some occasional MOKF work in the black and white DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU magazine, stories by the likes of Perez, Rogers, Giffen, Adams, Starlin, Weiss, Giordano, Gulacy, Nebres, Mashall Rogers, and many others. I was dismissive of this magazine at first, but a comic shop owner raved to me about this as one of his favorite series and all the great stories and art in this run. I especially like the last 2 issues, with a great 2-par story by Claremont and Rogers.
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Deadly-Hands-of-Kung-Fu/Issue-1?id=80907
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/The-Deadly-Hands-of-Kung-Fu/Issue-32?id=80975