Pick of the Week

Writer: Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden
Artist: Ben Stenbeck
Colorist: Dave Stewart

Size: 32 pages
Price: 3.50

I have rated every single issue of Baltimore: The Plague Ships at five stars. The concluding fifth issue of the miniseries was no different. The problem for me comes when trying to explain why. It’s certainly something I’ve done many hundreds of times. But with these Baltimore comics, I can’t exactly put my finger on it. If I were a different kind of reader, I could just say “Nazi vampire/zombie killer with a peg leg and an axe” and be done with it. Certainly lesser quotes have made it on the covers of books. But I’m not the kind of reader who gets sold with the promise of a “monkey pirate” or “alien robot gnome” or “zombie cockroaches” or other short hand for fantastical premises. A good book may include those elements, but there must be something else as well.  In this case, that element is craft.

To be perfectly honest, there’s nothing really all that new going on. The basic idea is that Lord Baltimore is one grizzled dude. He fought in the first World War, and and ended up losing all of his soldiers, and eventually his family to the ravages of vampires, and their leader the Red King, as introduced in the prose novel by Christopher Golden back in 2007, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. This story takes place years later, and he’s missing limbs and all his hair. He’s been scarred by continual vampire hunting over the years. He shows up in a small town where the “Plague” has already decimated the population. The last issue of the series finds Baltimore on an island surrounded by the dead husks of many warships, and plenty of dead bodies to be converted in vampire(-ish) creatures, whom he will fight. In his charge is a foolish young woman, Vanessa, who wanted to leave her town, and she decided to follow Baltimore to somewhere else, obviously landing where she definitely didn’t want to be. To be fair, Baltimore tried to warn her. You don’t need to read the novel to enjoy these comics at all, so don’t worry about that.

This issue finds Baltimore and Vanessa find themselves with their backs up against the wall, as wave after wave of monsters come after them. All the while, we’re shown flashbacks of earlier points in Baltimore’s life, and we get to understand how he became what he is now, which is essentially the Punisher, but many decades earlier, and focused on vampires. What makes the issue, and the series in general stand out are the little moments. These are the trademarks of Mike Mignola comics. You’ll see a page full of panels, often quiet panels, and in one of them is a quiet shot of an ominous group of crows. Or you’ll get a quiet shot of the spark of a campfire, and mood becomes king. Those moments are juxtaposed by incredible scenes of action and pulpy violence. Mignola has a way with these taciturn protagonists, and no matter how many times I read him spinning his old tricks, I’m always intrigued. The words and story intermingle, and their combination works perfectly, as it should in a comic book. Then, when you think the story is done, the end reveals more to the story and where the next chapter will lead. It’s all so simple, but well done enough that you can’t help wanting another bite.

Art duties in fell to New Zealand artist Ben Stenbeck and the master of comics color, Dave Stewart. Like most of the other comics associated with Mike Mignola, the artwork shares a tone with his own. While it doesn’t look identical to Mignola’s own art, it fits, like Duncan Fegredo’s does, and like Guy Davis’ does, in Hellboy and B.P.R.D. respectively. The glue between them all is the coloring on Dave Stewart. The guy simply knows how a Mignola comic is supposed to look, and he does it so well that it genuinely starts to look easy. Where Stenbeck shines in this series, and this issue in particular is the rendition of the creepy hordes of monsters that Baltimore spends the bulk of the issue killing. They’re no actually Nazis, to tell the truth, but German soldiers from the WWI era. But somehow it remains fun to watch Baltimore hack off their monster heads over and over again. At one point, our protagonists are assaulted by revived monsters still wearing their ancient deep sea diving equipment, working as de facto armor (think Big Daddy from BioShock), and Stenbeck completely succeeds in their rendering. It’s almost a combination of Mignola, Davis, and a dash of David Lloyd. It’s certainly not typical to the comic art we see in most Marvel and DC books, but it is perfect here, punctuated by the fact that every full body shot of Baltimore, with his wooden leg, laden with swords, axes, crossbows, and a few guns, is a complete joy. The image of Baltimore expresses a force to be reckoned with, and the story backs up that promise.

Baltimore: The Plague Ships surprised me in how compelling the whole thing was, and here in the last issue of this run, it proved its worth by wrapping up in a satisfying way. It’s a very simple, yet very well done story of a monster killer in Europe between the World Wars. If that sounds like it’s up your alley, you will not be disappointed, and you’ll get everything you want out of this comic book and more. Mignola has hinted in interviews that, as they worked on this comic, the ideas started opening up for yet another world, largely unexplored, like his other series. If that’s the case, I’m on board, and can’t wait to see more as soon as they can get it to me.

Josh Flanagan
Second vampire book in a row…
josh@ifanboy.com