Eddie Campbell Unveils The Comic His Daughter Drew While He Worked On ‘From Hell’

As Eddie Campbell collaborated with Alan Moore on the spectacular From Hell, his daughter Hayley - then just 7 years old - took inspiration from his work and created her own Jack the Ripper book called The Ripper File. With sections called things like "Being Basht to Death" and "Being bitten on the neck by a vampire," it's is every single bit as awesome as you'd expect it to be.Eddie Campbell shared pages from the book, as well as reminiscences of its creator and creation, over on his must-read blog:

The child had shown her talents quite early. During a visit from my old friend Daniel Grey esq. the child sought to emulate the attractive illustrations upon his arms, by copying in blue inks upon her own arms the hearts and roses, the proclamations of love and other mementoes. The wife, on returning from her day of drudgery and finding the two men full of alcoholic beverages, charged the errant husband with having drawn upon the child for his own misguided amusement. "I don't like you drawing on Hayley while I'm at work!" were the specifics of her accusation. And I narrate this episode in order to show the level of ability in the child's work, that it should have passed so easily for that of the father.

The Ripper File, he goes on to explain with the appropriate level of seriousness, "consists of 35 A4 size loose pages (regular typing paper to you Americans) on which wee Hayley Campbell, age 7, catalogued, with one or two digressions along the road, all the ways of dying." From the pages he shares, it looks like a fun read with some inventive murder ideas contained therein. Sure, we could all have imagined "When [you're] cut up while [you're] sleeping," but how many people would have thought to include "T-Rex's head" or "If someone chops off your head and [you're] skin rots, you look like this"?

"You can see how it has gone completely beyond the parameters of From Hell, and who could have put these notions in her little wee head is anybody's guess," Campbell notes.

I can only imagine what the now-grown Hayley Campbell makes of her early work being shared like this; I'm just glad that my childhood portraits of Robert Redford have been lost to history.

[Via Super Punch]