Today, April 27, legendary comics artist Barry Windsor-Smith finally released his graphic novel Monsters, a 360-page tour de force of visual storytelling that’s over three decades in the making.
Set in a timeline spanning the 1940s to the ’60s, Monsters centers around young Bobby Bailey, a naïve, emotionally fraught young man with a tragic destiny. The day he walks into a US military recruitment office, little does he know that he will become the subject of a top secret, experimental genetics program with loathsome Nazi origins. Thus kicks off a dizzying chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone’s control as friends, foes, and others are swept into his orbit and must grapple with the earth-shattering ramifications of what this unholy experiment has wrought. As the titular monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, literal and ironic, the story reaches its emotional and moral reckoning.
Deeply disturbing and frequently beautiful.― Publishers Weekly
Monsters’ vast narrative canvas is part familial drama, part espionage thriller, part metaphysical journey — in sum, an intimate portrait of individuals and an epic political odyssey spanning two generations of American history. Trauma, fate, conscience, and redemption are a few of the themes that intersect in Windsor-Smith’s Monsters. Rendered in Windsor-Smith’s impeccable pen-and-ink technique, this graphic novel is surely one of the most intense and gripping works of visual storytelling ever drawn.
I’ve not gotten a copy to review yet, but from the art that we were given, this graphic novel looks exquisite. Considering the rough subject material, the terror the art shows is well done and I’m definitely looking forward to getting the chance to read this story. This story was over three decades in the making, and you can see the heart and the soul that Windsor-Smith breathed into it.
