Baltimore: The Curse Bells Intro by Joe Lansdale

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Baltimore: The Curse Bells Intro by Joe Lansdale

05/31/2012 11:30am

THERE'S NOT A LOT THESE DAYS creepier than politics, but here’s something that is, and the good thing about it is when it’s over you can enjoy it again without it messing with your life, unlike politics.

But that’s not entirely true if it hits you the way it hit me. The Curse Bells will continue to mess with my life, my head, but the messing is of a darkly entertaining kind: hot-flash visuals like someone pulling an old strip of film through the brain, flossing into it eerie images so deep they leave scar tissue. What we have here is a perfect dark wedding of word and picture with the shade of Bram Stoker as best man, for the feelings I had while reading The Curse Bells were akin to the feelings I had when I first read Stoker’s Dracula on a wet day in Austin, Texas, in the early seventies. I was living in a co-op then, a few months away from a collapsing marriage—thank goodness, or I wouldn’t have met my current, wonderful wife. The co-op was a kind of shared housing where we had our own rooms but did chores to keep the place up. I remember I was alone that day and I also remember being sick of school and sick of the fact I was going to the University of Texas instead of writing, which is what I knew I was born to do, and sick of washing other people’s dishes who didn’t wash mine, so I skipped class and hid out in my room, settled into bed with Dracula (the book, not the creature of the night) on a wet day with the air conditioner turned up so high it was as cold as a polar bear’s nose. I cocooned myself beneath the blankets, my head and book and hands barely poking out, opened the book, and was instantly invited into Bram Stoker’s gothic world through the aid of what Tarzan called little bugs—meaning words, of course.

This series, The Curse Bells, puts me in the exact same frame of mind as Dracula did on that fine and wonderful day so long ago, though it uses both words and visuals.

I don’t mean the story reminds me of Dracula altogether, though they are kissing cousins, and may in fact be more intimate than that. But like Dracula, The Curse Bells is the kind of narrative that grabs and pulls you into the tale, pulls you down deep and dark as a child that has fallen into a well.

Reading it also brought to mind the Universal horror films of old, with their wonderfully gothic sets and shifty-eyed peasants and shambling monsters and fluttering bats. This film on paper, this comic, goes where your mind went when you saw those films as a kid, goes where the film didn’t, but you think it did, because at that age your mind is fresh and open and full of light and shadow, all of it moving about in savage flickers, having not yet settled and found its civilized position. For everything you see with your eyes at that age, your mind’s eye sees a hundred times more. Our personalities and imaginations are forming then; there are open doors through which light and shadow come. None of those doors have closed due to age and experience.

When we get older it’s said that nothing is as fresh and bold and enticing as it once was, but I beg to differ. Not all of us closed those doors. The creators involved with this beautifully tantalizing creep of an adventure certainly did not close theirs. And frankly, though my imaginative doors are still wide open, if they weren’t, this beautifully strange work would kick them wide open again. Isn’t that the job of all great art, to kick open doors to light and shadow and let us view something that otherwise we might not see?

And this fine piece of work sure does it. I was absorbed by the story written by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, entranced by the art of Ben Stenbeck, the setups, the simple use of color. No cute and weird angles and a story you can’t follow because you don’t know which panel you’re supposed to be reading. No real tricks are used or are needed here. You don’t have to distract from your limitations when you have pure storytelling in your grasp.

There’s a lot of cool characterization and attention to detail, and I want to point that out, but this is one of those magic things. Somewhat inexplicable and wonderful and strange: a beast from within. The best thing I can say is the appeal of this kind of story is primal. It’s tapping into something that comes not from purely conscious consideration, but from the depths of the subconscious. A lot of internal human fears are here, made into story without obvious intent of sculpture. No chip marks are on the statue.

My only dislike of this series is how swiftly it ended. I was so caught up in it I breezed through the first four issues breathless; then realized, my goodness, they forgot to send me the fifth. I wrote Chris Golden a hasty e-mail, and he was able to supply me with the last issue via return e-mail, and I promptly read it, sitting at the computer.

Man, what a finale.

Okay. I’m starting to sound like a child that has discovered his first piece of candy.

So, enough. I dislike discussing a story too much, mine or anyone else’s. I think it’s like handling something beautiful, freshly painted, and having the paint come off in your hands. You don’t want to do that. You want it to stay clean and bright, or in this case, dark in your mind.

Mike Mignola. Christopher Golden. You have a beautiful story. Ben Stenbeck. Dave Stewart. You have made simple sublime. Clem Robins, you cool letterer, you. Listen up, you guys. I just want to say one thing to you: You done good.

Oh hell, make it two things. The other: More, please.

Joe R. Lansdale

Nacogdoches, Texas

December 2011

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Baltimore: The Curse Bells Intro by Joe Lansdale

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