Baltimore vol. 5: The Apostle & The Witch of Harju

Lord Henry Baltimore’s quest to rid the world of the Red King kicks off with the building of his party to do the job.  That’s the thread which binds these two stories, starting with “The Witch of Harju” and the introduction of the title’s new regular artist Peter Bergting.  In it, Baltimore and company find a town that is being plagued by the title witch as she raises the dead to do her bidding and transforms into a cat to spread her malice.  There’s some nice monster-fighting action and the final showdown between Baltimore and the witch is quite cool.  Yet this comes off as one of the title’s lesser stories as most of its supernatural tricks feel half-baked compared to what has come before.  We also have to contend with dialogue from co-writers Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden that feels decidedly more expository than usual.  I can’t quite explain how they managed that, but it could be down to the fact that this represents their first collaboration with Bergting.  The artist does solid work here, capturing the action well and displaying some decent monster designs.  Though the look of his art is creepy enough, his thin linework lacks the imposing moodiness of original artist Ben Stenbeck’s style.

Speaking of Stenbeck, he makes what could be his last contribution to this series for a while — after moving on to other Mignola-related projects like the third volume of “Witchfinder” and the current “Frankenstein Underground” series — with “The Apostle.”  This two-part series is more in line with what I expect from “Baltimore,” particularly since it picks up on a lingering thread from the previous volume.  The curse placed on Inquisitor Duvic by one of his victims has turned him into a werewolf and now his former brothers-in-arms have come to track him down in an abandoned castle.  It does not go well for them, but it’s still results in a compelling story for us to take part in as we find out about it along with Baltimore after the fact.  Stenbeck’s work is on excellent form here with the way he integrates shadow into his art, and keeps the goriest parts of Duvic’s exploits just off panel so that our imagination can fill in the blank.  Mignola and Golden’s dialogue also feels less obtrusive here, and I can only hope that this will become less of a thing as they continue to work with Bergting.

This isn’t the tour-de-force that “Chapel of Bones” was.  That was a climax point for the series and it was inevitable that the creators would want to scale things back some as they set things up for the next leg of the story.  Even with the growing pains involved in breaking a new artist to this series, this latest volume of “Baltimore” shows that the exploits of its title character continue to be worth following.