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.
