Review time! with ‘Monsters’

“Howling ghosts they reappear in mountains that are stacked with fear”

Barry Windsor-Smith has been making comics for fifty years, and it’s not like he hasn’t done great work before, but Monsters, his first comic in 16 years (which is published by Fantagraphics), is so good that I’m not even sure I can do it any justice in a short review. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s very cool that Windsor-Smith, who turned 72 a few months ago, was able to finish it and get it out there, because we get to enjoy it!

Monsters is a fairly conventional story – if you squint, you can see the Hulk story Windsor-Smith originally wanted to do (Glenn Talbot even has a cameo!), but it’s more a “Frankenstein/Captain America” story, if you’re looking for analogs. (It’s probably good that Marvel never published Windsor-Smith’s original pitch … or, as is more accurate, that they published Bill Mantlo’s plagiarized version of it. Instead of a random Hulk issue, we got this, even if it took 35 years to get there.) We begin in 1949, and a mother finds a man beating on her son – we assume it’s the boy’s father, but we don’t know it, because whenever the man speaks, his speech is rendered in large Gothic script that fills up the word balloons so we can’t read it, and it makes him “sound” like an alien. Years later, in 1964, that same boy, Bobby Bailey, tries to join the army, and the recruiter sends him to a “special project,” where some sinister higher-ups begin experimenting on him, trying to turn him into Captain America. That they get Frankenstein’s monster – or the Hulk – shouldn’t come as a surprise, and neither should his eventual escape. Then Windsor-Smith, in the course of showing what happens to him after he escapes, dives back into Bobby’s past, the recruiter’s past, and the past of the scientist who experimented on Bobby. They’re all connected, in some nice coincidences, and of course Bobby isn’t the only monster wandering around!

So it’s not a story with a ton of surprises – the title is plural, after all, so we can figure out what Windsor-Smith is trying to say about monsters and what they really look like – but it’s done with such skill and with such patience that it’s just a pleasure to read. The recruiter, Elias McFarland, is a black man living in the 1960s, and Windsor-Smith gets into his home life and what he does to live in a racist society and why he feels so connected to Bobby Bailey. When Bobby reaches his childhood home after escaping, we get into his childhood and how he ended up in a shed with his father beating him. His mother, Janet, is a “war widow” – her husband, Tom, went to war and didn’t return until 1949, and Janet never really knows what happened to delay his return. We do, though, as Windsor-Smith shows us, and it’s a harrowing journey through a charnel house, one that scars Tom so much he has no idea how to live after that. Another character, Jack Powell, also cares about Bobby in 1965, and we eventually find out why that is so, as well. What Windsor-Smith does extremely well is structure the book so that we see monstrous actions by the characters – mostly Tom, who abuses both Janet and Bobby – and then we find out more about their history, so it becomes comprehensible why they might be that way (not forgivable, just understandable). It’s a good way to do it, because we turn against Tom early on, but then come to realize that he’s not just a monster – he, like Bobby, had to be created as one. We know what’s going to happen to the Baileys – early on in the book, Windsor-Smith reveals it – but getting there is a terrifying and intense journey. It’s not a fun book to read, but Windsor-Smith does an excellent job showing how a person could turn into what Tom and some of the other characters become.

Meanwhile, the art is staggering. I don’t even know if I can get into how good the art is, how intricate Windsor-Smith’s line work is, how painfully beautiful some of the images are and how disturbingly horrifying some of the other images are. He uses cross-hatching to amazing effect, like when Janet Bailey visits her sister-in-law, who smokes, and Windsor-Smith creates a haze of smoke simply through cross-hatching. His use of shadows and chunky blacks is masterful, as he’s able to show the darkness in certain characters without being unsubtle about it. He varies his line weight exquisitely, so some drawings are extremely delicate while others are far more severely “realistic.” His Bobby Bailey looks monstrous, of course, but like all Frankenstein analogs, there’s a pathetic childlike quality to him, too, as if he doesn’t know what happened to him and doesn’t like this world he’s living in. Windsor-Smith’s use of negative space to create bursts of light or turn something into a hazy memory is tremendous. His attention to detail is always wonderful, so Bobby’s home, the Nazi bunker where Tom discovers something horrible, and the woods through which the army chases Bobby are all places we get an excellent sense for, as Windsor-Smith makes sure they feel real. I mean, it’s Barry Windsor-Smith art. You know what it looks like, and this is BWS art turned up to 11. It’s simply transcendent.

It’s tough to write a lot about this because I’d be here all day. Monsters is a masterpiece, the best comic I’ve read this year, and it’s the kind of book you can just open to anywhere and get caught up with what’s on the page. I’m sure I’ll notice new things about it every time I open it, and that’s not a bad thing. Yes, it doesn’t shock us in any way, but that doesn’t matter when the storytelling is so good. It has a frightening, gripping inevitability that pulls you in and doesn’t let go, and while it’s tragic, it’s not completely hopeless, and it ends on a relatively positive note. It’s absolutely beautiful, and I’m very glad that Windsor-Smith was able to finish it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½

Well, that’s all for now for graphic novel reviews. I know, right? Since 1 July, I’ve reviewed 40 comics, which is … dang, that’s a lot. It’s just a coincidence that the best one is the last one (for now – I’m going to do this all over again with second half of the year, beginning probably in December) – Monsters came out in April, but my store didn’t get it for a little bit, and then they got a damaged copy that my retailer said he would sell to me for half off, or I could wait for a new, undamaged copy. I waited (I don’t care too much about the condition of my comics, but I do like them to look decent) and it didn’t get here until June, so it just happened to be the last book I read. So thanks for putting up with me posting every day for six weeks, and I’m sure my fellow bloggers will be happy that I’m not hogging all the space! Anyway, I linked to this below, and I strongly suggest you check it out. Even if you don’t, if you use that link, we get a tiny piece of it for upkeep here at the blog!