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DE: How did you first meet Alan Moore?
EC: I met Alan way back in 1981 in London, England.
In the comics business, well it's tough to call it a
business because it was so half-assed and very few of
the guys were making money. But everyone knew each other and
it was a hotbed of discussion and ideas. It was exciting when the work of our guys made it over to the States.
People like Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons had gone over
in 1982 and Alan in 1983. I think the perception at DC
was that these guys take so much time and take pains
to get the detail in whereas the American guys were
like, “What’s the page rate?” They were churning
the stuff out while someone like Bolland takes a week
to do a page and Alan Moore would take one and half
pages to describe one panel. Obviously you can't make a living from that under the old rules, but that never seemed to
bother the English guys because they just so dearly wanted to
draw those comics. I think that's because in England the
tradition is humor and kid’s comics. There are loads
of them. But we always wanted to do American comic
books.
But the American comic books were just starting to
change. The mini-series were getting big. They were
getting away from doing only monthly books. The
prestige format was getting big and royalties were
being given out.
DE: Any good stories between you and Alan?
EC: If you ever met Alan you would find that he is
the most brilliant person you ever met. But his daily
life is such a shambles; everything is all over the
place. He decided that he was going to renovate his
house and he kind of lost interest halfway through.
But he got this huge excavation going on in the
cellar. The cellar looks like the mouth to hell; it
gets damp and horrible as you go down. He said that he
did all this work turning his house into this Moorish
temple and now he can never sell it. Because he lives on
this working class road and anyone who wants a Moorish
palace wouldn’t want it on that road.
But stories like that are in my latest book. I and my contemporaries are having our mid-life crises. It's an interesting adventure. Like Alan turning to magic. Like
Alan Moore turning to magic.
DE: What are you doing with your mid-life crisis?
EC: [laughs] I’ve turned into a hypochondriac. And I
wake up in a blind terror every night thinking that
there are beasties coming to get me. So out of that I’ve
created the Snooter which is an insect that comes to
my house in the middle of the night and tries to talk
me out of drinking alcohol and things like that. The
Snooter is also a huge insect that flew through my
window in the middle of the night and bit me on the
hand. A bubbling rash developed, like porridge creeping up my arm but then it disappeared. I took
that as the signal that my life changed from that day
forward.
It then flies into a window where Bruce Wayne is sitting. He looks up from his book and pipe and sees this beastie and he went, AHHHH. That’s what I
shall become a creature of the night. From this point on I now have a humanoid snooter pestering me.
DE: You had some censorship problems in March
2000 when the
government of Perth in Western Australia seized a copy of one of the parts of
From Hell.
 EC: Well, Kitchen Sink Press had gone out of
business and somebody had gotten a hold of a lot of their
old books. It was a Kitchen edition of volume seven of
From Hell and was 32 pages of Mary Kelly being cut up.
And quite rightly they decided it was horrible and
that it couldn’t be imported. I mean, it'll be keeping people like me awake at night and we've got enough problems with the Snooter still at large. But I was able to
convince them to take a look at the entire From Hell
book and convince that it was merely a small part of
the whole. They came back with new advice that it was
all right to import it. But the customs officer told
me as he left that I still couldn’t import the
smaller book from Kitchen Sink [laughs]. Like I care,
it’s out of print.
DE: Why did the size of
From
Hell balloon so high?
EC: When Alan sold me on illustrating it, it was
supposed to be 16 chapters of eight pages each. But the
first one was eight, the second was twelve, the third
was nineteen, the fourth one was thirty two and we
have one chapter of fifty six pages. Because he said
there was going to be 16 chapters he felt compelled to
adhere to that promise. So any new material had to be
wedged into one of the chapters.
DE: Was there any point that you thought it would
never get done? I remember there were a lot of
readers who felt that way.
EC: It was ten years between getting the first
script and putting together the collected edition. And
seven years to get the movie done. We first got a
letter about the movie way back in March 1994. so I’ve
been living with From Hell since 1988. Living with
Jack the Ripper. It's no wonder I wake up in the night
screaming.
I didn’t mind that it was taking so long to do it
because we always had a publisher along the way. So we
always got a page rate. In my life as a freelancer
that’s the nearest thing I’ve had to a regular
gig. Five hundred and ten pages. Under Taboo it was only 75 bucks a page at first but once Tundra came on I pushed it up to double that.
DE: How long did it take you to research From
Hell?
EC: We did that as we went along. With the first
package Alan sent me a few books. When Alan starts a
project, he puts so much effort into it. The
first package that arrived was huge. It had the first
script, one book by architect Christopher
Wren, another architecture book and London A-Z,
the street map book. Usually towards the end Alan’s
mind starts to go to other projects and you start to
get the scripts one or two pages at a time. I was
talking to Dave Gibbons [Moore’s collaborator on Watchmen] about this last year. Dave was telling me
that at the end of Watchmen he was getting the script
in like two or three pages at a time being sent to him
by taxi. The taxi would arrive and on the passenger
seat would be an envelope with a few pages of script
in it and it would cost Alan like 50 quid, to send it all the way from
Northampton to St. Albans.
By the time of From Hell we've all got fax machines, so at the end of the project I'm getting the scripts via fax. I 'm working on the chapter where Mary Kelly gets cut up, Alan’s got all these notes, forensic
evidence all around him and I’m drawing it as we go
along. One page comes in, another one comes in and
Alan is working out where all the body parts were. The serial murderer , apparently, always starts by destroying the victim's personality, so Alan worked out that the face would be the first thing to
be savaged. Then he cuts her left breast off, puts it
under her pillow and then cuts the other breast off
and puts that one on the bedside table. Her liver is
down beside her leg and he goes back to the fire and
he burns some of her clothes. And I’m drawing each
page as I get it. then Alan realizes he’s got one of
the body parts, the breast on the night table, in the
wrong place. So what do we do? Am I going to have to
redraw a page? How are we going to fit this into it
now, am I going to have to have draw more pages to
figure that part in? Alan comes up with this brilliant
and very simple solution. Gull stops for a minute, he
looks at the breast, rubs his chin and moves it. That was
Alan’s solution and you can go check it.
Another one was when one of the points of the
compass in chapter four didn’t work. I did the
research and I found that Alan had Billingsgate, the
London fish market, in the wrong place. They had moved
it in the 20th Century. Alan had somehow thought
that the old one was where the new one is. But it was
actually down under London Bridge.
Since everything was already locked together so tightly I didn't think he'd be able to pull it off. He had to find a mythical significance for new location. I was waiting with relish to see him screw up. We're like that in Britain. There's nothing we enjoy more than seeing our pals fuck up. but no, he came through with a new bit of business. I was mightily impressed. The script books that
were published by Borderlands Press never got that
far. They wanted to publish a second volume but
Kitchen’s lawyers had a fit because of the book deal
they had done with Hyperion Books to do a bookshelf
edition. Hyperion never would have gone for there
being another book out there with the title From
Hell.
The lawyers came down heavily on Borderlands. That was
sour moment and there is still some bad feelings
there. Steve Bissette had engineered that but Steve
and Alan had fell out over something else anyway.
DE: What makes you describe From Hell as a feminist
work?
EC: There are a lot of feminist elements in the
book. I thought what Alan did was very clever. He has put a feminist critique of the patrarchal society into the mouth of the very one who is about to advance the suppression of woman. It created a very chilling effect. I think Alan's William Gull. I think
Alan’s William Gull is his most psychologically
complex character since Rorschach and possibly one of
the most interesting psychological creations in all of
comics. He’s not like the real William Gull at all.
DE: Did you and Alan Moore clash over anything in
the book?
EC: No, thank god, because when you fall out with
Alan he never talks to you again [laughs].
DE: Unless they buy the company that’s publishing
your comics.
EC: Right, but I just thought that it was my job to
take Alan’s script and turn it into drawings. If I’ve
got ideas of my own to express then I can go and write
my own story. I could just publish it elsewhere. There’s
no need for me to crush my ideas into Alan’s story.
DE: What did you think of the From Hell movie?
EC: It was fun. There’s a ten-minute
segment on the DVD where they look at the pages of the
comic and show how they convert it to the film. It makes for very interesting viewing. They compare actual panels against moments of film. I'm also looking forward to the variant endings. I know there was extra footage there.
DE: Did they interview you for the DVD?
EC: No, they didn’t.
DE: What was it like doing the Hollywood thing for
a while? Did they fly you to the premiere?
EC: No, that’s another disaster. The premiere was
a the first one to come up after the 9/11 tragedy. So
they didn’t really have a big gala event like they
normally would have. They just had a quiet buffet at
Spago's in Beverly Hills. 20th Century Fox was
originally going to fly us over but they reneged so I
flew myself over. The apologized for the inconvenience
but they said they couldn’t afford to do it. I
couldn’t miss it, I got some interesting photos that
I will put into Egomania. I’ve got a photo of myself
with Heather Graham.
When you see Heather Graham onscreen she looks
magnificent, colossal and gorgeous. But when you meet
her in real life she’s just a tiny little girl. But
when my photo was developed she was huge and
magnificent again. Heather has gotten some flak for the English accent she employs in the movie, but I wonder if those giving the flak know that the character was Irish. I found it acceptable enough and my mother is Irish. (Click
here for Eddie's premiere pictures)
DE: What was it like seeing your name up on screen?
EC: It was great. We nearly didn’t get up there
because it wasn’t on there at first. Contractually
there was some confusion.
DE: But you and Alan Moore own the property.
EC: We do but that’s just one thing that
happened. We actually lost the rights to it at one
stage. I had to hire a lawyer to get the rights back.
When Kitchen went bankrupt we lost the rights
temporarily. It was only the fact that they owed us
$15,000 that we were able to trade for the rights. But
that’s just one of the disasters I’ve had to see
us through. Three publishers have gone out of business
while we were doing the book. Plus LPC just went
bankrupt and Top Shelf had to scramble for a bit.
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