Books I Think You Should Buy:
Baltimore: The Plague
Ships
by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Ben Stenbeck; Dark Horse, $24.99
Okay, I agree that vampires are overdone these days, but I do appreciate when writers put a new spin on the tired old bloodsuckers. In Baltimore, the debut comic that follows up on a novel written by Mignola and Golden, the vampires emerged on the battlefields of the Great War, bringing plague with them. This effectively ends the war, and leaves large areas of Europe undefended.
Lord Baltimore is hunting down one particular vampire, and over the course of this series, which begins with an exciting sequence in a small French town, we learn why. Baltimore is not your usual action hero – he has only one leg, and is not so quick with the exposition.
Ben Stenbeck draws the hell out of this book, creating creepy sets like the submarine graveyard where Baltimore and a young lady face off against a large group of zombies. This is a good book for fans of alternative histories, or the Mignola-verse comics like Hellboy and BPRD, although this is not connected to that world in any way.
Sweet Tooth Vol. 3: Animal Armies
by Jeff Lemire; Vertigo, $14.99
Sweet Tooth is an incredible book. Jeff Lemire has put together a strange post-apocalyptic world where human/animal hybrids are born, most people fall victim to a strange plague (it’s a theme week!), and civilization is on the outs. At the centre of this book are two people – Gus, the sweet-natured hybrid boy, and Jeppard, the man who sold him to a militia looking to engineer a cure for the plague.
This volume follows up on the two characters after they are separated. Gus is being held captive by the militia, and meets some other hybrid children. Jeppard decides to free him, and starts putting together an alliance that can do just that.
Lemire does some cool stuff with his layouts and visual approach to the book. In a lot of ways, this is the most unconventional book that DC publishes.
So, what would you buy Were Money No Object?
