I am a jaded old man and I found myself tearing up at a number of points and crying at the ending.īarry plays with perceptions as well as realities, surprising both the characters and the reader on a regular basis.

There’s also a power play moment reminiscent of a controversial scene in The Hateful Eight.Īnd while the violence in Monsters could also be compared to Tarantino, Monsters has something that’s in short supply in any of those movies-heart. Incidents bounce around in time and we later see connections to earlier moments and characters á la Pulp Fiction. It pulls you in and drags you along for a ride reminiscent of a Tarantino film. Overall, the NSFW Monsters is something new, unlike anything I ever read. There are also ghosts, and Nazis, and angels, and the true horrors of war. At its core it’s about an abused boy who gets turned into a misshapen “hulk” as part of a “super-soldier” experiment. Well, it isn’t easy to describe in a straightforward way.

There’s a section of the book that feels very much like a Hulk story, in fact. I do know it’s been in the works for more than three decades and apparently started out as a Hulk story. I don’t know the full story behind this book but it will be revealed this summer in the next issue of Comic Book Creator. Sound effects, foreign languages, special fonts, and some of the most creative usage of word balloons I have ever encountered all serve to remind the reader that this is a master at work. No, what we have on view here is nothing less than a first-class master storyteller at his peak, telling a novel-length story in a novel’s length, slowly and deliberately paced with stunningly beautiful black and white line art every step of the way.

In Monsters, the long-awaited new BWS graphic novel from Fantagraphics, we see no massive style transition of that type.

I recently had an article in Back Issue where I wrote about how much fun it had been to watch young English artist Barry Windsor-Smith progress so quickly from his Steranko/Kirby-influenced Daredevil and X-Men to the lush neo-classical style he used for his ultimate Conan story, “Red Nails.” Written and Illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith

Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith