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Jack the Ripper: Difference between revisions
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{{Useful Notes}}
[[File:Jack_the_Ripper_4878.jpg|frame|Yours truly, Jack the Ripper...]]
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The Ripper case is particularly tantalizing for writers who want to make [[An Aesop]] or [[Historical In-Joke]] about [[Victorian London]], as the case was never solved and much of the documentary evidence associated with it has been either lost or destroyed. It is also fairly common in stories whose pitches involve the phrases "[[Very Loosely Based on a True Story]]" or "[[But It Really Happened!]]". As a testament to his (in)fame, Jack the Ripper was voted the "[[wikipedia:Worst Britons (BBC History poll)|worst Briton of all time]]" by the BBC.
It has also attracted [http://www.casebook.org a reasonable number of dedicated students] called "Ripperologists" and also a fair number of guided walks in the East End on the subject.
'''<big>Related tropes:</big>'''
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== Anime & Manga ==
* Who could forget ''[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' and its Vampire Jack the Ripper, transformed by a super powered Aztec mask-awakened arch-vampire, of a sort bred by ogres to be consumed? No, really.
* The ''[[Detective Conan]]'' movie, ''The Phantom of Baker Street'' involves both hunting for Jack the Ripper in a computer game and the descendant of the real ripper.
* Ciel in ''[[Black Butler]]'' investigates the Jack the Ripper murders. {{spoiler|Turns out that the killers were his aunt and her flamboyant [[Shinigami]] butler.}}
* The protagonist in Hiromu Arakawa's short series ''[[Shanghai Youma Kikai]]'' is {{spoiler|is revealed to be a demon, and the original Jack the Ripper}} near the end of the first chapter.
* And in Nobuhiro Watsuki's ''[[Embalming]]'', along with Mary Jane Kelly and George Abberline.
* After the intro, ''[[Soul Eater]]'' opens with Maka and Soul defeating a version of Jack the Ripper, which was a guy in bondage gear with giant claws.
** Though if you want to get technical, that was actually supposed to be ''the'' Jack The Ripper, but turned into a kishin egg from eating human souls.
* ''[[Ghost Sweeper Mikami]]'' posits that Jack the Ripper {{spoiler|wasn't a single person, but rather a possessed shaving razor that could possess those cut by it, meaning that it was being wielded by the ''previous victims'' as it slew the women.}}
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* [[The DCU]]'s first ''[[Elseworlds]]'' graphic novel, ''Gotham by Gaslight'', features a Victorian era [[Batman]] tracking the Ripper to Gotham City. Surprisingly enough, no attempt was made to link him to any of Batman's usual villains.
** The [[Elseworld]] ''[[Wonder Woman]]: Amazonia'' is set in a world where Jack has become King, and the British Empire is a misogynistic dystopia.
** In the mainstream DCU, Jack the Ripper was Red Jack (a ''[[Star Trek]]'' [[Shout-Out]]), a godlike being who later fought the [[Doom Patrol]]. Or he was Mary Kelly's boyfriend, encouraged by the demon Buzz from Peter David's ''[[Supergirl]]''. Or he was posessed by a different demon, Calibraxis from ''[[Hellblazer]]''. Or, just possibly, he was [[Vandal Savage|Vandal]] [[Julius Beethoven Da Vinci|Savage]], and was stopped by Resurrection Man.
*** In an issue of ''[[Superboy]]'', Project Cadmus is hired to analyse the Ripper's DNA and find out who he was. Instead, [[Mad Scientist]] Dabney Donovan uses the sample to create a monster called Ripjak.
** In an early 1970s ''[[Superman]]'' story, the ghost of the Ripper fell in love with Lois Lane while she and Clark Kent were doing an extended visit with one of his descendants; the ghost arranged a form of mystical time travel to send Lois back to Whitechapel to be murdered by his earlier self so she could join him in the afterlife, only to be foiled by his own obsessions -- the earlier Ripper refused to harm Lois because she "was not like the others".
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* A ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' comic drove [[Phlebotinum Breakdown|holodeck problems]] about as far as they could go by having the alien Jack the Ripper (from the episode below) take over the system.
* An issue of ''[[The Maze Agency]]'' had a killer picking off members of a group of 'Ripperologists' (people interested in the mystery of Jack the Ripper) by cutting their throats, using a twisted interpretation of the poems the Ripper sent to the newspapers to determine the order.
* The first ''[[CSI]]'' graphic novel had a Jack the Ripper copycat killing prostitutes in Las Vegas during a convention of Ripperologists.
* The ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' comic spin-off "Tales of the Vampires" included a story in which the Ripper was a vampire, the twist being that the policeman investigating turned out to be a vampire as well, who eventually killed the Ripper for being too splashy and risking exposing the existence of vampires to the public.
* A ''[[Hellraiser]]'' comic reveals the Ripper became a Cenobite.
* An horror comic story (Astonishing #18) that [[Did Not Do the Research]] had an adventurer visiting the grave of Jack the Ripper (with the absurd inscription 'Jack the Ripper -- Murderer') and being killed by the Ripper's ghost.
* In the French [[Darker and Edgier]] [[Prequel]] to ''[[Peter Pan]]'' by Regis Loisel, Jack murders Peter's abusive prostitute mother apparently out of pity for him, but still clearly traumatizing the poor boy. Furthermore, it's implied that this event in fact launched the Ripper murders, as it apparently made Jack loathe all prostitutes as abusive monsters.
* The [[Marvel Universe]] offers several contradictory explanations of who Jack the Ripper was.
** An issue of ''[[Doctor Strange]]'' had it that he was possessed by a servant of the [[Dimension Lord]] Dormammu.
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{{quote|'''Jack the Ripper:''' "Ninety years ago I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur."}}
* ''[[From Hell]]'', based very loosely on the [[Alan Moore]] comic book.
* [[Historical In-Joke]] (albeit an anachronistic one) in ''[[Shanghai Knights]]''. The reason the killings stopped? Jack tried to victimize Chon Lin and...
{{quote|'''Jack the Ripper:''' Nice night for a walk.
Chon Lin kicks his ass and dumps him in the river.
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* There is an entire cottage industry built around non-fiction "true crime" books identifying the Ripper. Over 200 such books have been published, and most of them identify wildly different people as the Ripper.
** One of the more notable was ''The Diary of Jack the Ripper'', supposedly written by one James Maybrick, a middle-class merchant type (who was himself subsequently, and famously, murdered by his wife Florrie) and later 'discovered' under some floorboards in the early 1990s. Now largely discredited, it nevertheless caused a huge sensation at the time.
* In ''[[Shadowrun]]: Streets of Blood'', the main characters encounter a crazed serial killer who is actually a clone of Jack the Ripper. Over the course of the story the characters solve the mystery of who the original ripper was.
** {{spoiler|That's what the antagonists want them to think. In reality, the Killer's psychosis was the result of severe conditioning. And the people who cloned him had no idea who the real Ripper was, they just cloned the person that would fit into their schemes to discredit the monarchy.}}
*** {{spoiler|Which is rather stupid, as it's an open secret that the reigning British monarch in [[Shadowrun]] goblinized decades ago, and was quietly dethroned along with all the other goblinized royals, to hide the fact that the bloodline is rife with troll genes. If ''that'' didn't discredit the monarchy, to bigots and haters of bigotry alike, who's going to care about some cheesy old knife murders?}}
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* The [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]] spin-off novel ''Beasts in Velvet'' by Jack Yeovil (actually [[Kim Newman]] again) features the Warhammer universe's version of the Ripper murders, investigated by the Warhammer universe's version of [[Dirty Harry]]. (It's better than it sounds.)
* In the [[Philip Jose Farmer|Philip José Farmer's]] novel ''A Feast Unknown'', Jack the Ripper is the father of the two heroes Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban ([[Expy|expies]] of [[Tarzan]] and [[Doc Savage]], respectively).
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] novel ''Matrix'' has the <s>Knacker's Yard</s> Valeyard become the Ripper, in order to feed the Dark Matrix, a Gallifreyan AI containing all the evil of the Time Lords. This creates an [[Alternate Universe]] where the Matrix becomes the "Spirit of Jack the Ripper" and exerts a baleful influence over Britain into the 20th century.
* ''[[The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray]]'' has a character named Stitch-Face. He's a serial killer who has murdered several women, before removing their tongues, eyes and kidneys, and in cases where he's interrupted he kills again shortly after in the same place- {{spoiler|although some of the cases are the work of a copycat and part of something darker.}} Did I mention that this guy aids the protagonist and is ultimately instrumental in stopping [[Cosmic Horror Story|the return of the local malevolent evil?]]
* Jack the Ripper shows up in the 1888 segments of ''[[Final Destination]]: Destination Zero''. Turns out he died when [[Grim Reaper|Death]] caused him to be crushed and ground up in the mechanisms of a bridge.
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* [[The Monstrumoligist]]: [[Complete Monster|Dr. John Kearns]] is actually the Ripper.
* Neil Gaiman's ''The Graveyard Book'' features a self-fulfilling prophecy set in motion by the murder of a family by one of the "Jacks-of-all-trades." While the murders maintain no similarity to the actual Ripper slayings, canonical or apocryphal, the name is a shout out, since in every conversation among them the killers refer to one another as "Jack."
* One of the [[Jakub Wedrowycz]] stories shows that the protagonist was [[Jack the Ripper]]. He accidentally travelled back in time to the nineteenth-century London, and the key to the time machine fell into a bowl of soup in a house inhabited by [[Time Police]] androids masquerading as prostitutes, seconds before dinner time.
* In ''[[Secret Histories]]'' series by Simon R. Green, [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|Mr. Stab]] performed several gruesome human sacrifices in Victorian Whitechapel in order to obtain immortality. It worked, but [[Who Wants to Live Forever?|this form of immortality]] had [[Can't Have Sex Ever|consequences for which he was not prepared.]]
* A central character in the later books of [[Time Scout]].
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*** A typo in the script led to Sheridan saying that Jack the Ripper was active in the West End rather than the East End; unfortunately, as the camera was focused on his face at the time, the subsequent dub to have him say East rather than West was extremely obvious.
* ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' -- In the Revival episode "Ripper".
* ''[[Special Unit 2]]'' -- Jack turns out to be an ogre, but one entirely unlike ''[[Shrek]]''.
* ''[[Sanctuary]]'' -- Jack the Ripper is given the name John Druitt (after Montague Druitt, one of the real-life leading suspects for the murders), is the villain of the pilot and Sanctuary head Helen Magnus' former fiancée. He later reappears as an ally, minus the insanity that caused him to murder...Maybe.
** And it was later revealed that the insanity was not, as first thought, caused by brain damage from his teleporting ability, but rather was the result of his body being invaded by a malicious energy creature in a [[Shout-Out]] to the above [[Star Trek]] episode. His teleportation was what made him vulnerable to the energy creature, so the initial theory wasn't wrong, just incomplete.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Criminals]]
[[Category:Historical Domain Character]]
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