When writer and artist Mike Mignola sets out to create a new story, there are a few things you can expect an overall foreboding landscape, high concept and blood. In <a class="zem_slink" title="Baltimore" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.2833333333,-76.6166666667&spn=0.1,0.1&
;q=39.2833333333,-76.6166666667 (Baltimore)&t=h” target=”_blank” rel=”geolocation”>Baltimore, what he and his writing partner Christopher Golden has done is given you all those things and vampires, but before you say to yourself “fuck! Another one?”… you must give the writer of Hellboy a second with this seemingly over saturated genre, cause what he comes up with is an impressive and eerie storyline, that after the first read, had me intrigued.
The story follows Lord Baltimore, a slayer of vampires, as he travels to a vampire ridden Budapest to hunt down and destroy Vampire Haigus. It’s during his quest that he receives word from his associate Simon Hodge, that there’s someone also trying to kill him, a priest/judge from the new inquisition.
The set up, although they don’t out right mention it, leads me to believe that Baltimore may have been apart of this new inquisition himself, but has since gone his own way, thus the reason he’s being hunted down. The story takes the vampire epidemic from a plague stand point, but introduces vile and super sinister forces at work, who are profiting from the outbreak. Case and point, the Helen Keller looking Lucreza Fucinelli whose latest invention super incinerates dead bodies for fuel, which we learn earlier doesn’t only include the diseased dead, but the diseased living as well. Who and why she’s doing this may have something to do with the eerie seance that Baltimore discovered upon the train containing the deadly furnace.
It all builds very well and as always, tastefully takes from other neo-gothic writers like Mary Shelly and H.P. Lovecraft, but it’s still all Mike and Stephen. Caring enough to take bits from our past and intelligently twisting them to your liking has always been a particular interest of mine.
I love comic books that are so well written you suspect that it’s been adapted from another novel, Baltimore does that with a clever arch and so far, very likable characters. This one is highly recommended.
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- Real-life gothic horror: The Vampire of Saint-Ouen in L’Écho de Paris (1886) (poisonouspens.wordpress.com)
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Whoa. This one passed right by me. Must read this. Have you read the BPRD: Vampire books at all? Thanks, Jeffrey!
Maybe one of them…I get stuff from Dark Horse all the time so there’s a good chance I’ve read it and totally forgot. Is it good?
Yeah, not bad. Drawn by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. Starting to get good. I also have BPRD: Hell On Earth lined up to read, too. I know they started another storyline but it escapes me a the moment. I loved the recent BPRD: 1948. Good stuff.
Yeah…it’s the Abe Sapian storyline, which is okay.