Monsters

by Barry Windsor-Smith

Overview

35 years in the making, the most anticipated graphic novel in recent comics history! 

The year is 1964. Bobby Bailey doesn’t realize he is about to fulfill his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office to join up. Close-mouthed, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, it turns out that Bailey is the perfect candidate for a secret U.S. government experimental program, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey’s only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone’s control. As the titular monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, literal and ironic, the story reaches its emotional and moral reckoning.

Monsters is the legendary project Barry Windsor-Smith has been working on for over 35 years. A 380-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters’ narrative canvas is both vast and deep: part familial drama, part political thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey across two generations of American history. Trauma, fate, conscience, and redemption are just a few of the themes that intersect in the most ambitious graphic novel of Windsor-Smith’s career. 

Monsters is rendered in Windsor-Smith’s impeccable pen-and-ink technique, the visual storytelling with its sensitivity to gesture and composition is the most sophisticated of the artist’s career. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, and devastating violence. It is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683964155
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Pages:	380
Sales rank:	220,650
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 11.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Barry Windsor-Smith began his career by drawing mainstay Marvel characters such as the X-Men and Daredevil in 1969 in the traditional Marvel style. However, in 1971 he broke from the Marvel formula when he started drawing the Conan series, turning heads with a fresh and controversial stylistic approach and winning numerous industry awards. Part of a young generation of artists that included compatriots Berni Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, and Jeff Jones, Windsor-Smith proceeded to carve an independent path for himself. In the ‘90s, he conceived, wrote, and drew three independent series, The Freebooters, Young Gods, and The Paradox-Man. In 1999 and 2001 Fantagraphics published Opus volumes 1 and 2, autobiographical coffee table art books. Monsters is his first book since The Freebooters (2005). He currently lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

10/26/2020

Eisner Hall of Famer Windsor-Smith (the Conan the Barbarian series) began this obsessive epic in 1984 as a concept for a Hulk comic; over the next three and a half decades, the 22-page story mutated into an ambitious behemoth packed to the gills with graphic violence and body horror. Feckless young Bobby Bailey is recruited for the Prometheus Project, a secret military supersoldier program. He becomes an enormous, malformed monster (“He can crush a tank with one goddamned hand!”), then escapes and is pursued across the country. Much of the narrative focuses on two of Bobby’s allies: Sgt. Elias McFarland, haunted by guilt and psychic visions, and officer Jack Powell, who knows about Bobby’s traumatic childhood with an abusive father with PTSD. The story keeps moving back in time, uncovering layers of trauma, constantly changing tone, and flying off on unpredictable tangents that include ghosts, psychic projection, Nazi mad scientists, and cosmic coincidences linking the characters’ fates. Fans will pick up the book for Windsor-Smith’s ornamental artwork, which, though deeply disturbing and frequently beautiful, sometimes shows the unevenness of work executed over a 35-year period. Windsor-Smith aims to make grand statements on everything from child abuse to veterans’ issues to the workings of fate, but despite impressive scope, the volume has trouble pulling them together into a cohesive story. It’s a mess to untangle—gross but gorgeous. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Brilliant. A great, grim 365-page slab of postwar angst… forcefully told and thoroughly affecting."

The Guardian

"Any time Barry Windsor-Smith decides to put pen to paper, it's worth paying attention, but the publication of Monsters feels especially momentous even when you consider his illustrious career. ... Barry Windsor-Smith remains a master of the form, and Monsters is proof."

Syfy Wire

"The illustrations are in black and white and finely detailed, with shadows enhancing an ominous tone, and readers of political and supernatural thrillers, sf, and historical fiction with a vein of forbidden love will all enjoy this book."

Booklist

"Barry Windsor-Smith has for over three decades been working on Monsters. Almost twenty years ago I read an unfinished version and was shocked and astonished at the power and delicacy of the storytelling, by the honesty of the family relationships, by the feeling that this was being created by someone willing to reveal too much and go too deep in order to tell the story he had to tell. That it is completed and that it will be released to the world is something that's genuinely exciting for any of us who care about comics, or stories, or the place where art and imagination meet."

Neil Gaiman

"Barry Windsor-Smith has undoubtedly earned his reputation as one of the comic book industry's finest living artists. He has kept a fairly low profile for the past two decades, but that promises to change very soon with his haunting new book, Monsters."

IGN

"For 365 large-format, black-and-white pages, Windsor-Smith conveys gruesome body horror and tender family scenes, nightmarish doom and quiet moments of connection. ... [The artist] feverishly traces the roots of a single violent act backward and forward in time, across generations and nations and the border of life and death itself."

The New York Times

"One of comics’ great literary epics, a masterpiece of story and art and a generous, unexpected gift from a legendary creator in total command of his craft."

Forbes

"Achingly good, epically scaled, and impeccably designed, Monsters will leave you changed."

The Paris Review

"Windsor-Smith uses this vast canvas to explore wide-ranging questions about the nature of humanity and the scope of individual responsibility."

NPR Books

★ 10/01/2020

In 1964, Sgt. Elias MacFarland identifies Bobby Bailey as a candidate for a secret military program dedicated to creating superhumanly powerful soldiers using research stolen from Nazi scientists at the end of World War II. After a series of agonizing procedures, Bobby is transformed into a hideously deformed, hulking beast. When he escapes the military facility where he's being held, the stage seems set for a thrilling sf/horror-infused manhunt, but Windsor-Smith (Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years) defies expectations by flashing back to the late 1940s in order to focus on the abuse Bobby and his mother, Janet, suffered at the hands of his father, a veteran haunted by the atrocities he witnessed during the war. Further leaps back and forth through time detail Tom's wartime experience, reveal the intertwined fates of the Baileys and three generations of the MacFarlands, tracing the tragic arc of a doomed romance between Janet Bailey and a man she meets while Tom is overseas with aching tenderness. VERDICT This exquisitely illustrated epic bursts with emotion, insight, and empathy. Five decades into his already influential career, Windsor-Smith has created his magnum opus.

Library Journal