I haven't read Secret Wars, but I think I get the idea. I would take the claim that either book is a "real life act of magick" about as seriously.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "magick," doesn't it? Surely you're not arguing that "From Hell" is not real life merely because it uses the fanciful theory that Gull killed the women to cover up a secret wedding by the crown prince that endangered the Crown, are you? Not only has history shown such ridiculous plots and conspiracies to be anything but far-fetched, making it quite plausible and possibly true, but even if you allow for the likelihood that the entire Royal Conspiracy is a lot of bushwa dreamed up by the anti-Masonic Stephen Knight (Moore himself says that the idea Gull was the killer in real life is unlikely), the facts of the crimes themselves, the picture of London in 1888, the class distinctions, the buildings, even the mad theories of anthropology and magick spouted by Gull in the book are all real (and to be found in writings of the time where Gull could easily have read them). The book is very much "real life" even though it's fiction. The basic events at the core of the book, the brutal murders of Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, Annie Crook, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, all actually occurred, as did the fact that hundreds of letters were written to the police and to newspapers from at least dozens if not in fact hundreds of different people all claiming to be the murderer. None of other the weird things in the book, really, from the royal conspiracy to Gull's lunatic rantings to the supernatural elements like his visions of the future and strange post-death journey, are any more bizarre than the bare, undeniable facts.

As to magic, Aleister Crowley (who as a child is a minor character in "From Hell") gave a definition of magic that is pretty simple and inarguable, and includes all scientific accomplishment (remember that astronomy and chemistry were born of astrology and alchemy): "Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." Whether it appears to happen by so-called "supernatural" means or not, if you force your environment to alter itself to conform to what you want, rather than adapting to it, you are accomplishing magick.

Jack, whoever he was, did that at least by reducing the prostitute population (of which he seems to have had a rather negative view) by between 4 and 11 (depending on how you count -- usually the 5 mentioned above are considered "canonical" victims). If perchance he was Gull, he accomplished the elimination of a threat to the Crown by this means, which would be a species of magick by Crowley's definition.

Now, while I would certainly argue that "From Hell" is better than "Secret Wars," there is one sense in which they BOTH qualify for the description "a real life act of magick" and that is the sense in which ALL works of art, whether insipid or great, commercially successful or all but unknown, are attempts by someone to impose their will on a portion of the universe, if nothing else to have us think thoughts based on their thoughts for a few minutes while we read or view them. All art is magick, in this sense, and in this sense at least Alan Moore is one very fine Magician.

My best:

Gemma Bovery

Wig Wam Bam

Eightball #22

Jimmy Corrigan

Epileptic

Louis Riel

Safe Area Gorazde

Hate

Tintin in Tibet

Maus

Lists like these remind me of what a young form the graphic novel is. There are plenty of cartoonists who push my buttons as much or more than these guys who never did anything novelistic.

Yow! That's pushing things. The biggest problem with the conspiracy theory is that it's highly unlikely that the victims could have all been friends without the gossip mill in Whitechapel spreading the news and the media picking up on it. (In fact, that qualifies as a plot hole for the novel, since we never even see anyone trying to hush it up; I don't think that could have worked, but it's the only option an author who's trying to sell us on the conspiracy theory would have.)

From Hell is a work of fiction. Like a lot of period fiction, it exploits certain historical facts for its own dramatic purposes. Maybe it technically qualifies as "historical fiction", but my understanding of the term is that an author of historical fiction makes a sincere effort to dramatize what really happened, as best as we know. Moore's own idea, as expressed in interviews, that there's no important difference between history and fiction about a historical event is sophistic, pop postmodern nonsense.



Yes, so why bother calling it that? Crowley's definition, at least in the very literal sense that you use, is too vague to mean anything. (By that standard, farting around on message boards and mowing your lawn are magickckckal.) Change in accordance with the will by non-physical means would be better. Writing a book doesn't qualify because the mechanism of transmission is well in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them. Now, if Alan Moore had never published a word in his life but could plant the same vapid ideas in his audience's heads simply by concentrating, that would be magickkkckckck.

Example: the other day I tried to convince someone on this board that Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal was inspired by a Captain America comic. By that standard, my comment would not be a flat-out lie, but history. After all, how can I say for sure it wasn't?

Interesting you should say that, because you count Tintin, which is pretty old, and a Jaime Hernandez book that I would say qualifies as a "novel" only by the fact that right now that's what we call these things -- not to mention Eightball #22, which is a 36-page comic book that doesn't fit ANY definition of "graphic novel" I've ever heard.

So if there are people who push your buttons who've never done anything "novelistic" and you didn't bring them up, then why did you bring up, for instance, a non-novelistic work by Clowes instead of "Ghost World" or "David Boring"? Just seems weird to me.

I actually think Jaime Hernandez counts as one of those people who have never done anything novelistic. He has a series of short stories that connect to each other, and you some fairly long stories that I guess you could call "novels" if you want to. But none of them have the unity and sense of completion of, say "Love and Rockets X" or "Poison River" by Gilbert, much less "Stuck Rubber Baby" or, for that matter, "Secret Wars."

Don't get me wrong, there isn't a single "Love and Rockets" collection I wouldn't say is far, far better than "Secret Wars," but most of them aren't really graphic novels the way I think of novels. For one thing, very few people in North America not named Dave Sim have done anything long enough to really qualify as a graphic novel for my tastes -- if you can read it in one sitting it is, by Edgar Allen Poe's definition, a short story. But even aside from that, to be a "novel," a book must have a sense of unity and an ending -- not necessarily a final ending that precludes any chance of having a sequel, but something that feels complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end. That's one of the ways Dave Sim is right in calling "Melmoth" a short story, even though at 240 pages it's bigger than most so-called "graphic novels." It has a slam-bang "comic book" cliffhanger ending, leaving us breathless for next month's issue (or, in this case, the first book in the next novel, "Flight," which is part one of "Mothers and Daughters"). It's a very good big-long-comics-story-collected-in-a-book, but it's not a novel.

22 is pretty tightly packed. They're talking about cutting the pages in half so they can publish it as a book, making it 72 pages, if that makes a difference. Clowes has said that he's not willing to let it be reprinted as part of a collection; it has to stand alone. That says "novella", at least, rather than "short story" to me. (Besides, it's really a collection of interconnected short stories.) Also, I just think 22 is better than Ghost World or David Boring. It's not like I'm filing a legal brief...

I plumb forgot Stuck Rubber Baby. That would replace one of them.

Discussions of what constitutes a novel are inevitably sticky. I'll take narrative coherence and relative length as deciding factors, but won't demand that it take as long to read as prose novels because that would disqualify all but a very few comics that would be worth naming on a list like this. If someone said, "pick your ten favorite comics," my list would of course look very different.

I think Wig Wam Bam is coherent enough to be called a novel. Sure, it uses characters whose stories don't begin or end there, but it's all pretty much about the same thing (the inability or disinclination to grow up, everyone's fascination with an idyllic vision of childhood) and builds to a strong climax.

Well, of course, it depends on which prose novel you're talking about, but I go back to the Edgar Allen Poe definition of the short story as "a story short enough to be read in one sitting." Granted, there are obsessive Stephen King fans who read his massive books like short stories in one big 14-hour marathon "sitting," but realistically speaking most so-called graphic novels are in fact short stories, or collections of short stories. Watchmen is a novel. Dave Sim has written several of them. The Kindly Ones may be a novel, but I prefer to think of Sandman as one 10-volume novel that includes several shorter stories within it.

It doesn't have to be a page count thing. Some books are denser than others, harder to read. And it's going to be a subjective judgement at the boundaries between very long short stories and very short novels, unless you just choose an arbitrary count of some kind (like the Science Fiction Writers of America word counts for "short story" and "novelette" and "novella" and "novel" for the Nebula Awards, which have been followed by many other groups, including the Mystery Writers). Page counts are easily definable. I'd go for at least 200 -- I think Dave Sim's 500 page dictum is too much (one of his own novel's, "Jaka's Story," wouldn't make the cut), but I think it's just ridiculous for something 48 or 64 or even 128 pages to be called a "novel."

Wig Wam Bam is a graphic novel.