EXCLUSIVE: Mike Mignola And Christopher Golden Talk Baltimore: The Cult Of The Red King

On Monday, ComicBook.com exclusively revealed a teaser image, announcing “There is an absolute evil” and that “The Red King lives.”

Today, ComicBook.com is happy to reveal that the teaser is for Baltimore: The Cult of the Red King, the next chapter of Lord Baltimore’s struggle, from creators Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, and artist Peter Berting.

Mignola and Golden both joints us for a joint interview to discuss the new Dark Horse Comics series, and what it means for Lord Baltimore and his crew.

We debuted a pretty stunning cover image yesterday, teasing Baltimore: The Cult of the Red King. Besides the stuff of nightmares, can you tell me what I’m looking at in this image?

MM: I think it came entirely from Ben [Stenbeck]. It’s like a symbolic image rather than something – unless I’ve missed something – something that happens in the book. I don’t know what led to that cover, it just seems like it showed up out of the blue, along with a couple other of his sketches, and we all went “oh, we like that!” That’s as much as I know.

CG: Yeah, you know, what’s happening with the story – the ship is in the story, and what’s going with the ship is in the story, but what’s happening in this story is the presence of the Red King, that’s sort of been bubbling under the story of Baltimore since the beginning, is really coming to the forefront, and that, I think, is what Ben was going for.

I keep saying, every time I talk about this series, that we’ve been going somewhere from the beginning, and we’re arriving at our destination, so that’s sort of symbolic of what that is.

MM: But at no point during this story does the Red King take a bath and play with a toy boat.

CG: No. That’s the next issue.

MM: Yeah. We got to build to something.

I would pay the cover price for that.

MM: Well, the end of the series isn’t written yet. If nothing else, we have an ending.

You mentioned that you’re arriving at Baltimore‘s “destination.” Is The Cult of the Red King as far as you had originally planned to go with this series? Have you past the pre-planned point of the narrative, and are now creating new stories as you go? Or are you still moving towards something else?

CG: I don’t know Mike, what can we say about that?

MM: I was strange, but exciting, to get past the end of the novel, to stop adapting a novel and kind of go, “oh, well, what are we going to do?” And, unless I don’t remember a conversation, I think that we know where we’re going-

CG: Yeah.

MM: – but, as with all these things, not everything is written in stone. There’s still a little bit of flexibility. But I think, as I recall, we were really quick to kind of come up with a direction and, again, to kind of say “let’s not drag this thing out forever, but if we’re going to go someplace let’s figure out where we’re going and then figure out how to get there.”

CG: Yeah, it was really a case of the first four volumes being the story that we set out to tell from the beginning. There’s a big gap of time in the novel, and we wanted to fill in a big portion of the events that happened in that gap. Then, at the end of the fourth volume, we told the story that happens as the end of the novel. Then, as we were moving forward, it was really sort of open-ended when we talked about what we were going to do after, and when we explore this world further, and how the circumstances of it, and the evils that are rising, and all of the things that are going on because of the Red King’s influence.

And then, one day, we were on the phone, and I think I said “Hey, I think we have an ending here.” So we discussed exactly how it was going to end, and once we knew that it led us to the story we’re talking about now, which is The Cult of the Red King, and that leads to everything that comes after, towards that ending that we’ve got in mind.

MM: I find that very exciting, about plotting things when you realize – because I’m doing with Hellboy and the BPRD at the same time – you realize, “oh, we’ve got all the pieces on the board.” Sometimes it surprises you when you look around and go, “oh wait a minute, all the guys we need,” or “all the situations,” or “all the characters we need are here, now it’s just a matter of arranging them in the right places so that the dominos will fall.”

CG: And what’s great about a situation like that is, yes, you could go on and tell, ya know, we could spin these stories for another 10-15 years. But I love working towards a specific ending, and not just spinning your wheels. Just because the characters are great and you can continue to tell stories doesn’t mean you should. I think it gives the story added vitality.

I actually think The Cult of the Red Kind, this particular story, is the best thing we’ve done so far with this book, and I feel like it’s the perfect opportunity – I feel like if you haven’t read anything, thus far, in Baltimore, you can absolutely pick up the first issue of The Cult of the Red King and get everything you need to know about what the story is, where we’re going, and how completely f**cked up it all is.

MM: Yeah, so f**cked up that you will definitely want to go and get the first four books [laughs]. Don’t think you want to skip those forever, but if you need to start someplace, this is fine.

Having read the first issue of The Cult of the Red King, it feels a bit like Baltimore’s allies are having a kind of crisis of conscience regarding their relationship to Baltimore and his mission. Can you talk a bit about where these characters and their relationships are at this point in their journeys?

CG: Let me just start by saying that, by the end of this story, our cast has been whittled down significantly. Not all of them are going to make it out of this miniseries alive. But what I will say is that they’re all at a crossroads, I agree, in the sense that you can go through each characters and that Judge Rigo is having his own crisis of faith, but he now accepts and realizes that he’s just as tainted by his experiences as Baltimore has been, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, who he’s going to be in the future. But what he does know is the battle that Baltimore is leading, the war that their fighting, is his war too. So he’ll stick around, and you could literally go through each character and examine them in that fashion.

But it’s interesting to me that the character who have known Baltimore the longest, they’re not questioning it at all. They’re out trying to do a job for him, to try to figure out how to win the long game, whereas Baltimore, had sent them on that mission, but is focused on the short term, battling things one day at a time. But he has put his faith in them, and that is something that he hasn’t done with anybody in a really long time.

So you see them all changing with this story, and they’re sort of coming into their own and asking the important questions, and then you see the sort of stolid face that some of them have.

MM: Yeah, I mean, I think there was a very interesting, I think, rhythm once we got past the end of the novel. Then it was, well, let’s change the dynamic. We end the novel with the creation of a sort of a team, and we said “well, let’s expand that team,” and as soon as you expand that team you go, “well, now we’ve got to pare it down.” So, there’s that idea that this is really kind of could be a very doomed enterprise. You have a lot of human characters around a character who isn’t really human anymore, and humans are always the ones who are going to take a beating. Not that Baltimore doesn’t take a beating, but there’s definitely a kind of doomed quality to this whole thing, which I’ve always really liked [laughs]. I like guys dying well.

CG: If you’re hanging around with a guy that can’t be killed, or essentially, at least at the moment, can’t be killed, then if you should catch some shrapnel, you’re done.

Actually, we go back to the plague ships, the very first story. We lay pretty thickly into that story this theme, essentially, that if you hang around with Baltimore, or Baltimore cares about you in any way, the chances are pretty good you’re not going to survive.

MM: Which he didn’t put on the poster when he was assembling the team. “Looking for guys who want to work with me temporarily.”

Join up, see the world, die young.

MM: “You tired of living? Hang with me for a while!” We’ll see some sights and then, you know…

CG: Something will bite your head off eventually.

What can you tell me about the Cult of the Red King itself, and Haigus’ relationship to this cult, if there is one?

CG: To give you the quick background, as succinctly as I can, the Cult of the Red King is referenced in many things. The very first, original sort of high priests of the Red King were Haigus and the other things that we now, in modern life, call vampires, but they were definitely more than that. And Baltimore killed most of them in our previous stories, so essentially that cult, the original cult, is gone.

But what you’ve got now is a whole bunch fo different cults, and especially what we’ve seen is a lot of witches and covens, that are beginning to worship the Red King because its powers are returning to the world, and they can gain power by worshipping the Red King. So they’re end goal is not the same thing as that ancient cult’s end goal. So when we say “The Cult of the Red King,” we’re talking in a larger sense, as well as, in a couple of ways, in a smaller sense. So there are individual cults, that aren’t necessarily connected, around the globe, and in this story you see two different groups who could fall under the umbrella of the Cult of the Red King and how our sort of dark heroes are encountering them.

MM: Well said!

CG: Thank you.

The first issue has ships at sea, but also a creeping sense of darkness around the edges, creating a kind of special adventure-horror blend. What’s your approach to balancing those two elements of the story and the atmosphere, to create what Baltimore is?

CG: So much of this is about Mike’s philosophy, and I share it, about telling these type of stories, and it was why I was excited to be working on this to begin with.

MM: What philosophy is that?

CG: I just mean that combination of telling these stories that are, on the one hand, adventures stories inspired by classic adventure stories from other eras, but seeded through with dark folklore, dark mythology, and building our own mythology.

MM: Exactly. That’s exactly what I do. I do think that, fortunately, Chris is a novelist, and both of us have read a lot of old, supernatural fiction, so I think the roots of everything we’ve done in Baltimore goes back to old literature, and not so much a comic book sensibility, which is a big challenge for an artist because it means you’re doing a lot of subtle stuff. You’re doing a lot of character stuff, you’re doing a lot of people walking down hallways, and talking, instead of just bombastic, superhero type action. So I think that the pace, in some cases, is much slower, and the kinds of payoffs are much different, which is why it’s actually difficult to find artists who can pull that off.

I think Peter’s doing a fantastic job doing stuff that, in other hands, could really fall apart. You need somebody who can do the people stuff, do that character stuff and not just “oh, god, punching a guy into a side of the building.” You need the little moments, and, uh, then I should stop talking, because I forgot what the question is…

CG: But I agree. I think that the art lends itself hugely to telling these stories, because all the things you’re reacting to are things that are in the script, but if they’re executed properly you’re not going to get the tension, the atmosphere, the suspense, the darkness that we’re trying to achieve here.

MM: There are so many places that you have to pull off a guy standing still, but the wind’s whipping his coat around. It’s those kinds of things – there’s a way to create that in prose fiction, but in comics you need a certain kind of stillness to the quiet moments. If it’s all action, all on all the time, then you don’t have that creeping mystery kind of stuff, and I think the quiet stuff is certainly as important as the explosion stuff.

CG: I’ll give you one quick example before we move on. In the first issue, right at the beginning, there’s a scene in Rome. It is in the panel description, it is in the script, that we see these three, I think they’re crows or ravens or whatever they are, sitting on a building, and one of them has this sort of a f**cked up face, like it had the plague or some kind of thing wrong with it. That moment sets such a tone, and again, I put it in the script, but it worked so much better in the art than I even imagined it would.

MM: Comics has a power that prose doesn’t have, and it can go both ways, but in a book or a short story or whatever you can reference that, but in a comic you are making one-fifth of a page that image. It’s hard to miss it, and it does kind of set a tone in a way that is radically different than anything else, so you can’t ignore it. In a film, maybe it goes by really fast, you didn’t pay attention, but in a comic tis there, it’s right in your face. SO you have to have an artist who knows how much weight to give something like that. If it had been half the page, it throws the balance of things off. There’s such a wonderful balancing act going on between the prose and the art, so we’re very lucky.

So closing things out, we here at ComicBook.com always love to hear what kind of music inspired the comics that we read and love, so what have you two been listening to while working on Baltimore: Cult of the Red King, and what might you recommend readers listen to while reading it?

CG: Mike, do you have anything?

MM: I have nothing. I generally don’t listen to music when I’m working.

CG: When you’re drawing you usually have TV or movies on in the background.

MM: Yes.

CG: For myself working recently, or actually for quite some time, the two things I tend to listen to the most are The Frames and Flogging Molly, but I’m not sure how appropriate either of those things are to reading Baltimore. I suppose if one of them is it would be Flogging Molly, because at least it has a somewhat older tone to it.

But, that said, I also like classical music, and I think that listening to some baroque music would go perfectly with Baltimore.

MM: The Carmina Burana works. It always works for this kind of stuff. There’s any number of scenes in Baltimore or anything else where you just go, “yeah, just run the Carmina Burana through these three panels, and it’s exactly what it should be.

CG: There you go.