If you did, you’d get the standard answers: Batman, The Punisher, Daredevil. The less mainstream answers: Billy Butcher, The Goon, and Iron Fist…and the almost unheard of: Lord Henry Baltimore.
I fell in love with the character immediately after reading Baltimore Volume 1: The Plague Ships. I knew that the character would be returning in future volumes, and with the same creative team behind it I was beyond excited. After venturing the dark jungle that was Baltimore Volume 2: The Curse Bells I can offer, in short, two words: Home Run.
Picking up after Volume 1, we find Lord Baltimore still on the hunt for the vampire that killed his family. Much like the first time around his thirst for revenge lands him in many a hot spot, facing monsters and evils that can only be found dwelling in the mind of Mike Mignola. I often worry about a series that has implications of continuing antagonists, vampires in the case of Baltimore, but these fears were squashed and burned (at least for the future of this series).
If there is any part of you that has an interest in writing comic books look no further than this book here. Mignola and co-writer Christopher Golden have laid out a the perfect map for doing it. Story beats, pacing and character development are masterfully crafted and presented in this comic. The pair created such a unique and diverse world with the first volume and they’ve taken that mythos and expanded on it in the most subtle of ways. New monsters, new demons, new curses and magic, everything that you thought you knew about old school horror will change in one page turn.
Ben Stenbeck’s art is also phenomenal. I thought he really showed his merits in the first volume, but he has gone above it in the next entry. With more different looking monsters and beasts it would be easy for Stenbeck to be stretched thin, but he has exceeded all expectations I had. The detail of expressions on characters will have you drooling and the subtle differences in all the monsters that he could have just drawn all the same will have you admiring in awe.
Of course, Stenbeck’s art couldn’t florish as well as it does without the aid of Dave Stewart’s colors. His use of darkness and grays provide the perfect visual tone for the book, and the staggered use of eye popping reds are highlighted by their limited use.
This is the kind of storytelling that can cause readers to not enjoy other comics. It is so well written, drawn, developed, crafted and perfected that by comparison makes other comics look awful. I hope with all of my heart that Lord Baltimore doesn’t leave us any time soon. While it would be nice to have a definitive ending to his saga, the wealth of stories and the poise that the creative team handle them with makes it one of the best series around bar none.
