Book: Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampires

Author: Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

Review: This book caught my eye because it appeared to be a graphic novel.  Mike Mignola is the Hellboy guy.  It took a few chapters for me to get into this one.  The idea of the book is to take several fairy tale stories and weave them into a Vampire story.  Baltimore is Lord Baltimore, who is also a soldier during WWI.  One night on the battlefield, his platoon is killed in a night attack against the Hessians.  He awakes underneath a pile of corpses with a serious leg wound.  So as you may have guessed the novel is pretty graphic, but so are fairy tales and comic books.  I was thinking that this was a great idea for a book, but might have been executed better.  I was not impressed with the illustrations either.  Anyway, Baltimore crawls out of the grave just before dawn only to see horrible evil creatures feeding on the dead.  He ends up attacking one when it comes near him.  This unleashes their vengance upon mankind in the form of a Vampire plague.  We then skip ahead to Lord Baltimore calling together three friends, each of whom has a fairy tale like story of evil.  The three stories were probably the best part of the book, but then I love a good fairy tale.  I found this book a nice change of pace, even though the end was a bit anti-climatic.