Baltimore: The Plague Ships # 4
Written by Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden
Art by Ben Stenbeck & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics
I scanned the racks. I was yearning for something dark, something a little sexy and taboo. Yeah - vampires. I was searching for a good vampire comic that I haven’t read yet, that wasn’t too far into a storyline. And this week, there wasn’t much to choose from.
I don’t know what it is, but I want to explore this crazy dark edge that vampires seem to represent. It's been fun to read the various takes on vampires in these comics, fun enough that I want more. You know all the dark dirty parts of humanity? I want them wrapped up in one dark dirty package that can be hated or loved. Nothing in the middle. I want something extreme. But since there didn’t seem to be much of an offering this week, I decided to look for covers that seemed in the realm of the vampire aesthetic even if they weren’t about vampires.
And once again, as has happened many times before, I was completely seduced by Mike Mignola. (His cover, that is. Never met the man, so I don’t know what you were thinking, but I’m consistently seduced by his covers.) The art just jumps off of the shelves. When he's put side by side with anything else, I am always going to drawn to the Mignola cover.
So, I was happy to learn that, surprise, this IS a vampire story!! But I was unhappy to realize that Mignola did the cover and only the cover. (Wah wah, I know.)
I don’t know exactly what to say about this comic. The cover enticed me, it was about Vampires, and yet it did nothing for me. It certainly wasn't scary. It was far from sexy. And while it was gloomy, I can’t even go so far to say it's very “dark.” I don’t know what the first 3 issues were about, but there sure was a whole lot of story squeezed into one issue, so much that it read like one long recap. I learned that Lord Baltimore is seeking to find and destroy the vampire that wreaked havoc on his life by killing his wife. We never see this vampire doing what a vampire does though, and I think that might be part of the problem. See, although they do horrible things, they are fascinating because they are so damn attractive and draw us in. But if a story just tells me about that stuff, all the fascination and attractiveness never end up arriving. It's like reading about a phone call. Maybe there was a funny joke or a sad story told during the call, but I can't be expected to laugh or cry reading transcripts.
That visual quality is part of what vampire comics have going for them. But in this issue, I never saw an actual charismatic, charming vampire - only the death and pain he called, and even that was delivered in a vague way.
I don’t know, I’m just sort of annoyed by this. I was annoyed because I feel like it’s the same story of so many characters - Bill from True Blood, or The Punisher. It’s just another guy who lost everyone he loved at the hands of someone/something else, and now his life is consumed with vengeance towards that someone/something else.
And then there's the art, and there are little things about the art that bothered me. There seems to be a little bit of a problem drawing faces at different distances. The artist likes to have a different point of viewing each frame, yet there seems to be some difficulty when drawing these faces on a smaller scale. I really had to say to myself, “is that supposed to be the same guy?” And hey, I’m no artist. I can’t draw for shit, I certainly couldn't have done this better. It’s just something that really stuck out, more than once or twice, while I read this comic. Take a look at his then, like, his wife. The first picture I see of her I totally felt like, “Whoa, what happened? Did Baltimore marry a corpse?”
Yes, she’s supposed to be grief stricken, but oy! She looks like a zombie! It’s weird. I was expecting - maybe because I’m a product of too much television - that the first picture I was going to see of her would show her amazing beauty. Not that she has to be beautiful for us to understand why he loved her so much, and why he’s hurting so much now. No. In real life we understand that love is love. But in comics, TV and movies, the fastest way to have the audience “get” the specialness of a person is through portrayals of beauty. I hate to say it, but it works. So, it was surprising in this case to see her depicted so awfully.
It would have been fun to have seen a frame where the wife was getting seduced by the vampire. Her submission to him and the bite itself. But nope, we’re robbed of all of that. We just see her standing across from his chair in some room, and then the comic cuts to her dead on the floor with blood everywhere. Only the yuck, none of the yum. ;)
There's not much else to say about this one. I was looking for a Vampire Fix, and although I got vampires, I didn’t get my satisfaction. Think I’ll go eat some chocolate, or something else equally cliched.
-Nina Stone, 2010
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