Baltimore – or, rather ...

[tealin]

Making Money briefly interrupted my reading of Baltimore, a new sort of illustrated novel from Mike Mignola and some other guy (who is apparently named Christopher Golden ... likely story). There's a hint given of the appearance of most of the characters in the book, but there weren't any illustrations of one of Lord Baltimore's three friends, Dr Rose.


Okay, maybe there is one, at least it appears in the middle of the description of him, but in my opinion it looks a lot more like Childress (even though he is smoking) and I felt free to come to my own conclusions. Unfortunately the conclusions I reached were awfully hard to get on paper without other characters stepping in front of the camera, as it were.

I tried pinning him down in my sketchbook ...


... and on the back of meeting notes I had taped to my desk ...


... yeh. I'm sure I'm channeling an actor but I can't think who,* and I've been trying so many times that the drawings are beginning to overwrite the picture I had in my head originally. I need to find some new ways of drawing eyes. How does Milt Kahl do those sort of squinchy eyes that look like they're cinched at the tear duct rather than the other end, but are still round? My favourite so far is the centre one of the doodles which I might turn into a pale imitation of a Mignola portrait someday but AAAGH SO MUCH TO DO ALREADY.
*Current theory: Bill Nighy. For the eyes at least (not that you can tell), and the rest of the face just more stretched or narrowed. Definitely the mannerism. Yes, I think that's him.


~IMPRESSIONS~

First off, a sort of synopsis: Lord Baltimore, while fighting in the First World War, encounters some sort of feral vampire. He fights it off after it goes for his leg and, wounding it, sparks a fire of hatred in the vampire race that sees all of Europe (and perhaps the rest of the world) fall under the grip of a plague. People die like mad, and those left alive are usually pretty lifeless nonetheless. All color and joy and light and stuff fade from the world. A few years later, three people are summoned to meet Baltimore at an inn in a bleak city: Aischros, a sailor; Childress, gentleman of sorts and former soldier; and Dr Rose, former Army surgeon. They had all known Baltimore at some point and, while waiting for him, share their stories of him and of supernatural and often grisly episodes in their own lives. That's most of the book ... I won't go any further. The first thing that struck me about this book is how much it seemed to want to be a comic book ... the beginning sounded almost as if it had started out that way and then it was decided that it was far too ambitious, but the first few pages were already done, so the author just tried to describe the panels as best he could with words. This feeling fades off after a little while, thankfully, but it – combined with the present tense of the first chapter – threw me off a bit. Was I reading a zen comic, a narrative script, or a novel? Once I got into the 'present,' though, it felt more like a book and rolled along from there. Another thing that made it feel like it wanted to be a comic was the 'medley' feel of it all ... each vignette was of a similar length, coincidentally about the length of a comic book, connected by a brief spell (an end page, perhaps?) of chatting amongst the three acquaintances before one of them launches into the next story. While it was frustrating not to see it in comic form, which would no doubt have been magnificent, this did make it ideal for reading on the bus and at lunch (the only time I have for such things these days, alas). Now, I think I can safely say that Mignola is the only North American – make that non-European – comic artist* whose artwork I actually like. I don't just like it, in fact, I think it's fabulous. And on top of that, I love his taste in stories. He is the only person I know of, with the possible exception of Miyazaki, who really gets the creepy otherworldliness of folklore and can reproduce it convincingly in original stories. It's not scary, it's not overzealously surreal, it's not sentimental, or silly, or airy-fairy, it's just utterly alien, which is odd because folklore is in some respects the most human literature there can be. He does it right. It's no different in Baltimore. That said, the actual writing ... well. I shall endeavour to be diplomatic. I don't know how Mignola and Golden divided the labour when it came to actually writing. Did one write the outline and the other the prose? Did they trade off stories? (If so, they did a very good job of matching styles.) Whoever is responsible for it, well ... I was not terribly fond of the writing style. It sounded ... like a very talented student in a creative writing class in college who hasn't quite gotten over the decorative language. As much as it was a very visual book, it was always very clear that there were words between me and the story – in fact, sometimes I'd be reading for almost a page before I realized I didn't actually know what was going on, I'd just been looking at the words. I'm not vouching for purely utilitarian narration (otherwise I'd read nothing but scripts) but there are writers who get wrapped up in the words themselves, and there are ones who use them to establish a sort of direct mind transfer between writer and reader. I'm not a writer, so I don't know what the difference is, I just know when it works. JK Rowling, for the most part, is like this, and at the other end of the spectrum, Ray Bradbury can do it as well; his prose is some of the most poetic and lyrical I've ever read, but this somehow adds to the experience of the story rather than distracts. In another way, this book almost felt like a service project for Guillermo del Toro. I know it's been optioned for a movie, and I know he's not the one directing it, and I've only seen Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy of his. But something about it just looked, in my head, like it was his, to the point, sometimes, where it almost felt like I was watching the movie in a foreign language with subtitles. This might have been the international settings or perhaps the nature of the dialogue itself which sometimes seemed like the translation of an idea rather than something someone would naturally say ... an odd feeling, though, nonetheless. That said, this book was COOL. There was WWI, creepy stone villages, oppressive dreariness and despair, and FIGHTING VAMPIRES WITH MACHINE GUNS. omg. It was about 10x gorier than Sunshine, which I thought had altogether too much blood for me, and it wasn't the sort of hyper-violence that makes me uneasy, but it also wasn't the 'BOOYEAH!' sort of shoot-em-up high-adrenaline action gore either. It was just ... cool. There was action, but it came in little spurts – most of the time was spent setting up situations and atmospheres, but never too long, just long enough to keep you interested and draw out the tension. And the climax was climactic liek woah. V. nice. Hmm... this was supposed to be short. Oh well. *with whom I am at all familiar** **and who is not affiliated with Flight

Comments

[wicked-warrior.livejournal.com]

Wow, really like the face/attitude design of this character :) says much about his personality.
I'll have to read that book then. I love Mignola, discovered him with the Hellboy movie (which I haven't finished watching, but lead me to discover the comics and his other projects), and I coincide with you on the creepynes of his portrayal of folklore :)