Elizabeth Sandifer and Penn Wiggins

LWiA 4.4: Sebastian O

At its core, Sebastian O is very much the sort of thing Moore was describing when he talked about his Image work aiming to be “better than average stories for 13-to-15-year olds.” Its central narrative engine is simply an adventure story—a fellow named Sebastian O escapes from prison and co...

LWiA 4.3 Act IV Omnibus

The From Hell Act IV omnibus. I'll get a full chapter post out in a bit and give it the tag so that it's findable with the other full chapters, but I don't wanna spam you all.

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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Drill...

LWiA 4.3: Gull, ascending

And that's Act IV. Omnibus forthcoming. Thanks for your support and patience as I worked my way through this absolute beast of a chapter. It may not be the longest of the project (it's currently fourth, behind the first V for Vendetta chapter, Swamp Thing, and, of course, Cuddled Little Vice), bu...

LWiA 4.3: 1. Outside

I can have little a 1700 word digression, as a treat.

(One section to go, I think?)

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Much as he had picked up on the same fluctuation of Ideaspace as Shinya Tsukamoto when crafting “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does” in 1989, Moore was exploring similar ...

LWiA 4.3: The Dance of the Gull Catchers

The end of the chapter, though not, obviously, the last section I have to write.

Some two years later Kitchen Sink Press released an eleventh issue of from Hell entitled “The Dance of the Gull Catchers.” This was not a complete surprise—Moore first alluded to the possibility back in t...

Penn: Insomnia

It was really only a matter of time before I came out with a work of psychogeography. I’m married to El Sandifer, and my favorite Alan Moore is Unearthing, for god’s sake. Insomnia is a spoken word essay about sleepless nights and childhood magic, haunted by the loss of Home...

LWiA 4.3: The Downslope

Amazingly, the fact that "The unfortunate Mr Druitt" does not have a period after "Mr" while "The apprehensions of Mr. Lee" does is not a typo. I'm sure there is a typo, which someone will inevitably point out in comments, but that's not it.

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At the end of “The best of all tailo...

LWiA 4.3 Act 3 Omnibus

Beat Silksong. Back to work with me.

This

LWIA 4.3 Act 2 Omnibus

I've got like four more bosses left in Silksong, and I'm honestly quite eager to get back to work, but while polish off the last couple murder bugs, I figure I should actually catch up on the omnibi. So here's From Hell, Act 2, picking up where 2025-10-23 00:15:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Penn: Purpose Poetry Performance

I got a comment on Patreon from Weronika on my ritual self-immolation, “I Feel Flames,” noting that she appreciated the chance to look at the construction of a ritual, and somewhere around the thousand word mark of my reply I decided maybe I should just make a standalone Patreon post about it...

LWIA 4.3: The Best of All Tailors

End of Act III. Omnibus to follow over the weekend.

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That apocalypse would form the sole content of Chapter ten, “The best of all tailors.” As Moore described it in his synopsis for Don Murphy, “over thirty or forty pages, in excruciating real time, we watch Gull dissect Mar...

LWIA 4.3: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

There's a story Brian Eno tells about being commissioned to create the startup sound for Windows 95, whereby the agency provide a huge list of adjectives about how the music should sound—futuristic, inspiring, sentimental, etc—before specifying that the whole thing had to be three and a quart...

LWIA 4.3: Chapter Nine ("From Hell")

Probably a few days before the next section, as there's research to be done.

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Magic was far from the only thing, or even the main thing that “From Hell” is concerned with, however. In his outline of the remaining chapters prepared for Don Murphy at the beginning of the year, ...

Penn: a self immolation ritual and Wardruna, World Tour 2025 review

So, I recently got another lesson in believing people when they tell you who they are, and found myself pushed out of yet another religious community over principles. This was the community run by the person I've been describing as my mentor. She'd asked me, in that context, for a creati...

LWIA 4.3: "Love is enough"

This is actually two separate chunks of chapter, which will be interrupted by another section. They read perfectly fine as a contiguous stretch, however, so I'll leave the interleaving for the omnibus.

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The first part of From Hell to be originally produced for Kitchen Sink and not...

LWIA 4.3: The Movie

I watched this while making grape jam yesterday, which was very funny.

A short time later, in February of 1994, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell took a meeting that would be crucial for the successful completion of From Hell. By this point Campbell had already drawn Chapter Eight, which would...

LWIA 4.3: William Morris

In which a digression is taken so that about fifty others don't have to be.

Consider William Morris, for instance. One of the great British polymaths, Morris was a major nexus point of Victorian culture, working simultaneously as a writer, translator, designer, textile artist, printer, and ...

LWIA 4.3: Act III Intro

And we're back. Act III is still a little unstructured and inchoate, and so I'm starting off chronologically, picking right up from the end of Act II. Which I'm just now realizing I never sent the omnibus of. I'll get that over the weekend unless I'm a dumb bitch with ADHD, in which case I won't....

America a Prophecy 6: From Mothman to Bob Murray (A Study in Appalachian Monstrosity)

Part six of an annual blog series on the worst comic ever created.

Every year I write an essay about the 9/11/2011 installment Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Thus far they’ve included Exegesis, The Devolution of the Funny Pages 1895-2022, The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy with...

LWIA 4.3: What doth the Lord require of thee?

In which I hit a beat I've been working towards for twelve years.

This is the last part of Act II. I'll get an omnibus out shortly, but I'm traveling over the weekend so may not get to it until I get back and dive straight into the beginning of Act III, which is probably going to be much m...

LWIA 4.3: The End of Taboo

One more section of Act II to write after this, which will be an absolute doozy, though thankfully not in anything like the way that fucking Sinclair section was.

Taboo #5 came out at the end of 1991. Two further issues appeared in 1992—an output that momentarily bested Eddie Campbell’s...

LWIA 4.3: Iain Sinclair

You ever have a 1500 word section that takes you two weeks? That isn't entirely the fault of the material—I had quite a bit of travel through there, and have just been swamped in general. But gosh this was hard. Hope you enjoy. I'd promise to have the next section faster, but that just feels li...

LWIA 4.3: Lost Girls

I will of course get back to this in Volume 6 or 7.

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As if all of this wasn’t enough for the pages of one soon to be out of business horror anthology, Taboo #5 also contained the debut of a second serial by Alan Moore called Lost Girls. This is often grouped with From Hell and ...

LWIA 4.3: Freemasonry

The use of “architecture” is, of course, far from accidental. Another of the structuring elements of “A State of Darkness” is Gull’s involvement in Freemasonry. Obviously the vision of Jahbulon draws on this, but Moore also spends time on Gull’s initiation—the source of one of the e...

LWIA 4.3: Act I

Oh right, I never posted the omnibus of Act I.

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Moore, on the other hand, was a busy man indeed. This fact was largely why he found himself having to crank out silly Image comics on the regular. Or, perhaps more specifically, it was the fact that virtually none of his other proje...

Penn: This is Not a Salad Recipe: An Exploration into Spiritual Practice

When I was a kid in the American South, my Just Grandma had a VCR and exactly three video tapes. I watched all of those movies until the tapes disintegrated. One was the live action Popeye (Meh, but Grandpa really liked Popeye), one was Who Framed Roger Rabbit (My favorite of th...

Penn: Behind a Door

When I was reviewing Janis Ian's record Between the Lines for pride week, I came across an absolutely horrid interview where Ian was hounded about her sexuality. By 'came across' here, I mean "went to the university library and played with their microfilm machine," which meant I had the article a...

Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 2: Morrison and Millar Omnibus

Morrison, for their part, spent considerably less time working for Image. Indeed, prior to doing the creator-owned Happy! with Image in 2012—by which point Image was a very different company—Morrison’s only Image work was a three issue run of Spawn beginning in December 19...

Last War in Albion v4 Chapter 1: Alan Moore at Image (Omnibus)

As promised, the omnibus version of LWIA v4 Cha

LWIA 4.3: Introduction

At last, the first.

I'll package this into an Act I omnibus and get that out in the coming days, along with revised omnibi of the first two chapters that balance the "comics industry implodes" material between them instead of putting it all in Chapter 1.

And from there it's on to Ac...