By Zack Quaintance — Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith is a massive feat of a graphic novel some 35 years in the making, grown from ideas originally born during the artist’s time writing and illustrating the classic anti-military industrial complex Marvel Comics story, Wolverine: Weapon X. For those familiar with Windsor-Smith’s work, Monsters will perhaps most directly read as a grand expansion of the seeds planted within its forebear, epically freed from corporate IP constraints in ways that enable Windsor-Smith to pursue similar questions with a much more intricate and wider brush.

It is, of course, so much more than that too. Simply put, Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith is a disturbing tour de force of a book, as rich as any novel, moving and poetic in a way that ultimately asks far more questions than it answers, which is the mark of great fiction, at least as far as I’m concerned. Monsters is a book that lays out its people and plot in compelling fashion, subtly forcing readers to contemplate ugly questions about their own role in the world, an activity would most certainly otherwise avoid.

That aside for now (we’ll return to this line of thought later), the Weapon X connection is perhaps the place to start discussing Windsor-Smith’s 360-page pen-and-ink opus, which delves deeply into a set of nuanced, powerful, and varied thematic interests. In a recent interview with NPR, Windsor-Smith shared the connection between the two works, noting, “The fact is that I was writing Monsters during the same period I was creating Weapon X. It often happens that ideas or imagery from one project might migrate into another.” In the most surface-level sense, what specifically has migrated here is an exploration of the cost of military ambitions enacted on the individuals asked to partake in the machinations at the ground level.

One will find the shadowy military operatives, the sacrificing of the down-trodden at the alter of militaristic tech, and the loss of control it all engenders for everyone involved. It’s all here. That’s the familiar territory. Monsters also, of course, deviates significantly from its Weapon X predecessor, doing so with a new focus on domesticity and family, on the metaphysical and the unexplained, on destiny, and on — as reductive and cheesy as it sounds — love.

The story is centered most on a pair of families and the other characters that shape their lives. At its center is Bobby Bailey, perhaps the most tragic of all the characters in this book. To tell Bobby’s story, Monsters jumps through time, adeptly doing so in ways that sow a heightened sense of connection between plot points, heightening the story’s significance rather than making it feel excessive, novel, or contrived.

When we first see Bobby, he is a child being severely beaten and scarred. When we next see him, he is an innocent seeking a military recruitment office for guidance, for help. By the end of the book’s first act, he himself has become a hulking, unintelligible monster on the run. The next 260 pages or so, shows us not only how Bobby got to this point, but why we should both care and feel for his plight, why what becomes of him should matter to all of us. Bobby is, essentially, played out in Monsters as a blank, as a cipher who goes from a house of love to a horrific hulk of exploited mess on the ground. How — the books wants to know most urgently — does this trajectory occur? How have we all become complicit in a society that even makes this sort of outcome possible?

It’s heady stuff, complex and dense, to be certain. And it’s augmented through character-driven intersections with auxiliary themes, including trauma, fate, conscience, subterfuge, deception, and redemption (that’s it, just that little ol’ set of interests). This can sound intimidating and messy, and it certainly is both. It’s also disquieting and difficult, yet at the same time, Windsor-Smith is such a skilled storyteller, that the book — as unpleasant and challenging as it may at times be — is compulsively readable and supremely engaging. Simply put, you’ll know quickly that it will be hard to watch Windsor-Smith at work, and also that you won’t be able to look away.

In that sense, Monsters is a towering success, a feat of thoughtful and bold storytelling that manages to hold together through the rockiest of storms. There are missteps, to be certain, yet the narrative’s grander impact remains impossible to deny.

The question next becomes the book’s place within the medium writ large. The book’s size, scope, and grandiose prolonged production demand that it be evaluated on the level of other outsized works within the graphic novel medium. For better or worse, it begs to be evaluated on the grounds of whether or not it is a towering masterpiece, destined to be read for generations to come. As with the stories of the people in Monsters, the outcome of this examination is a messy one.

The 35 years spent making this book have left it feeling outside of time, at once both classic and anachronistic. This doesn’t hinder Monsters, not really, but it does make it almost impossible to conduct a meaningful comparison to any work that might be seen as contemporary. Monsters was, essentially, created in the era of Watchmen guiding the entire medium, yet finally put to press in an evolving and fragmented industry, perhaps defined to the largest number of readers by either billion-dollar superhero movies or the YA graphic novels of Raina Telgemeier. Take your pick, neither gives a clear indication of how a work like Monsters might influence future creators or audiences.

Instead, Monsters feels like a masterpiece for an increasingly insular audience (an audience that I am very much apart of), one that will rank as an all-time favorite for certain veteran readers, even if its wider spiderweb of impact never spreads too far. It is, essentially, a lost masterpiece that after being rumored and whispered about for so long, we finally have a chance to read and experience. And we should count ourselves very lucky for it.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith

Monsters
Writer/Artist: Barry Windsor-Smith
Publisher: Fantagraphics
In this pen-and-ink graphic novel, in 1964, Bobby Bailey is recruited for a U.S. military experimental genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany 20 years prior. His only ally, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes to try to protect him, which sets off a chain of events that spin out of everyone’s control. As the titular monsters multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, literal and ironic, the story reaches its emotional and moral reckoning. Windsor-Smith has been working on this passion project for more than 35 years, and Monsters is part intergenerational family drama, part espionage thriller, and part metaphysical journey. Trauma, fate, conscience, and redemption are just a few of the themes that intersect in the most ambitious (and intense) graphic novel of Windsor-Smith's career.
Release Date: April 27, 2021
Price: $39.99
Buy It Here: Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.