Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

Campbell’s line is a neat little pressure-release valve for the whole From Hell enterprise: a story obsessed with Victorian monsters, told by modern creators who know they’re also in the room. On the surface he’s talking shop, nudging Alan Moore to include “Gull’s paper” (the faux-scholarly lecture the comic invents for Sir William Gull). Underneath, he’s puncturing the solemnity that kind of archival cosplay can generate. The joke lands because it’s a reversal of expected relevance. We’re supposed to worry whether Moore, the famously baroque wizard-author, is “relevant.” Campbell instead deadpans that Moore doesn’t have relevance “otherwise,” then yanks the rug: he meant Gull. It’s a double insult disguised as a clarification, and it flatters neither the historical murderer nor the modern mythmaker.

That’s the cultural point. Campbell frames “relevance” as something you can graft onto a figure by giving him a theory, a paper, an intellectual apparatus. The Ripper stops being just a brute fact of violence and becomes a text producer, an analyst, a proto-modern mind with a manifesto. Campbell’s aside exposes the moral queasiness of that move: turning atrocity into content is exactly how the present metabolizes the past.

As an artist, Campbell also signals his role as ballast to Moore’s maximalism. He’s the collaborator who can admire the ambition, then prick it with one surgical line, reminding us that the most “relevant” thing here might be the creators’ need to manufacture relevance at all.