EXTRACTS: Illustrators Crime Comics Special © 2020 Book Palace Books (144 pages in full edition)

4 grisly fare. By the nineteenth century, publications like The Illustrated Police News were able to regale their readership with tales of poisonings, stabbings and a multitude of equally unsettling accounts of capital crime. The apotheosis of this trend was reached in the autumn of 1888 when a series of particularly grotesque and bloody murders of sex workers in the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, dominated the news. Dubbed BELOW & FACING PAGE: The Illustrated Police News , launched in 1864, was a direct descendant of the execution broadsheets and became compulsive reading for many people in the Victorian era. The image of Mary Nichol resting in her coffin is unerringly close to the morgue photo of the Ripper’s first victim.