Baltimore: The Plague Ships

Things are still good in the land of the Sanguine Diary. Tomorrow I am going on a three-day retreat to get some writing work done, and my story "Blood and Soil" is now available in the anthology Dark Light, from the good people at Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing.

So tonight, I am pulling myself away from Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts (feel free to wonder if that book is related something I might be working on) to present you with a review of Baltimore: The Plague Ships from Dark Horse Comics.

No doubt, Lord Henry Baltimore is the coolest vampire hunter with a wooden leg. He marks each of his kills by driving a nail into his prosthesis. The first nail was for his wife. Some call him a hero, others call him a curse, and Baltimore himself believes he is damned. In a simpler life he was a soldier, leading his men across the battle-scarred fields of France in World War I— until a chance encounter with a vampire unleashed a plague upon humanity. God may have forged him as a weapon to bring some light back to the world, but Baltimore cares for no greater purpose than vengeance. You see, blighting humanity was not enough for the vampire; he also had to murder Baltimore’s family.

Lord Baltimore’s story debuted in the excellent novel by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, titled Baltimore, Or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, and The Plague Ships is a comic-book sequel by the same authors. Those who haven’t read the novel would not be lost if they read Plague Ships first, though. It not only supplies the necessary back story, but is a solid work in its own right.

Plague Ships follows Baltimore through a Europe choked nearly to death by a vampire’s plague, The Red Death. Those who’ve not been turned into vampires have succumbed to a gruesome, highly contagious disease, and those who have survived live in suspicious isolation.Baltimore’s search for Haigus, the vampire who killed his family and unleashed the Red Death, brings him to a desolate coastal town in France. Ashe secures passage from the town, becomes shipwrecked, and battles a horde of undead German submariners, he also learns he is the target of a new, ruthless inquisition which believes the Red Plague can only end if Europe is cleansed of all sin. And the inquisitors see no difference between Baltimore and the monsters he slays. This is only a brief synopsis of The Plague Ships, which sets up a longer plot to be continued Baltimore’s saga in another collection, titled The Curse Bells (due out this June in trade paperback).

Whereas Mike Mignola (best known as the creator of Hellboy) illustrated the novel with elegant chiaroscuro, Ben Stenbeck, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robins— the artistic team behind Plague Ships— take full advantage of the medium, using single images to express ideas that could only unfold in several pages of prose. Take this image:

Art by Ben Stenbeck. Colors by Dave Stewart.

Here we see Baltimore recovering from his first encounter with the vampire. He is sleeping in a church the army has commandeered as a hospital. The stained glass above his head, depicting Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, is a perfect symbol of his transformation. Since the back story is told in flashbacks, the reader has already seen Baltimore as a vampire hunter: his dark, haggard features, the seemingly unbearable load of weapons, his lumbering wooden leg. So the reader already knows his fate. But this image shows that when he wakes up, life as he knew it is over. He has been damned by a terrible, new-found knowledge of evil.

Then there is this image:  

Art by Ben Stenbeck. Colors by Dave Stewart.

A skilled writer could describe this scene very well, but the art has a visceral quality that usually only conjures verbal epithets like “bad-ass!” or “god damn!”

Comic book aficionados will probably laugh at me here. Not only do they already know what I’ve described in the past few paragraphs, but I am sure they could give me a thousand other, maybe even better, examples. If that’s the case, then I say ‘please do’, because I will admit that I am only now really learning about comic books.

My greater area of knowledge lies in the vampire genre as a whole, and I have to say that the character of Baltimore is a welcome addition in any medium. Don’t get me wrong, I love the newer, more ambivalent breed of vampires. After all, two of my four tattoos come from Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I like that Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola are working in the vein of old school vampires who view the human heart as nothing more than the source of a meal.

And let’s face it, as a villain, Haigus is a serious badass. Dracula only molested a handful of wealthy Brits, but this guy unleashed a plague on humanity. But I also like the way the authors show how the nature of evil unambiguous while acknowledging that its faces are subjective and sometimes hard to detect. Baltimore is a force of good, but he doesn’t really look like one. Consequently, he is often persecuted by people he is willing to protect, and he'ss also the target of an inquisition whose sense of righteousness justifies violent atrocity. This is a very realistic portrayal of the evils most people encounter in their own lives.

In the final analysis, I think that the original novel is a little better, but the comic books still capture the spirit of the story. In whatver form, I hope that Lord Baltimore's dismal mission is far from over.