User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I am a big Barry Windsor-Smith (BWS) fan; his Conan for Marvel is one of the first books that showed me that there was more to comics than just SH. This GN is powerful: of course the Nazis would have their own 'Super Soldier Serum' - but what would they do to see it come to fruition? We (USA) think that we would draw that bright ethical line that they could never see - but in 1964 we cover it in over - and the monsters come home. This book deals with EXTREME issues that may not be for the faint of heart - but I believe it will be one of the few GN that transcend 'Comicdom' - highest recommendation.
Rating: really liked it
Probably best known for his seminal 1980s Wolverine miniseries Weapon X over at Marvel, Barry Windsor-Smith is back with a new story... about the military hiring mad scientists... to secretly experiment on people… with disastrous results. Hmm. Well, I don’t want to say Barry Windsor-Smith is a one-trick pony but, from what I’ve read of him anyway, he’s 2 for 2!
Maaaaaaaan, what a project reading this was - 370 pages of densely-worded, BORING garbage! The first 120 pages is a lot of tedious military characters talking about experiments and whatever, the next 140(!) or so pages - the worst part of the book - is about a sad wife/mother getting knocked around by her abusive husband, over and over, and then, for the last 100 or so pages, we’re in the final days of WW2 where Nazi scientists try to figure out how they’re gonna explain their insane experiments to the Allies who’re hours away from rumbling them.
For such a pain-stakingly put-together work, I’m sure Windsor-Smith was trying to say something “important”, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. As far as I can see, the “monsters” the title is referring to are, 1) abusive men, 2) genetically-modified people made to look like Quasimodo, and 3) Nazi scientists (or just Nazis generally). And so… what? Don’t most people already think those three things are monsters? It’s not like Windsor-Smith is telling or showing us anything mind-blowing.
Nor do I see what the allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein did for this book. The project to transform Bobby Bailey into the monster on the cover is called Prometheus and the subtitle to Shelley’s novel is “The Modern Prometheus”. The final part of the book takes place in Schongau, which is near Ingolstadt, a prominent place in Frankenstein. Other pointlessly derivative literary allusions is having a couple of characters who essentially have the Shining in all but name.
Neither do I see the point of the experimentation. The Nazi scientists horrifically deform their test subjects - to what end? Who wants an oversized, lumbering creature with the mind of a child who can barely walk? Why would any military pour so much money into such a useless end goal?!
Windsor-Smith uses lots of dates and places to set up scenes but they add nothing to the context - who’s really going to remember that this scene is taking place three months after the one before last?
The Jan Bailey section - the battered housewife part - had far too many pages full of cursive handwriting that were a chore to slog through. Not just because of Jan’s whiny voice, or that deciphering cursive slowed down an already ploddingly-paced read, but because these pages never added anything to what we already knew. We see her husband drinking, knocking her around, being a dick, and then we read a page or two of her telling us her husband has been drinking, knocking her around, and being a dick. Ugh. This book didn’t need to be anywhere close to 370 pages long. This entire section is absurdly repetitive.
McFarland, the dude with the Shining, is less of a character and more of a plot device - so much so that you could say this character IS the plot because without him there is no book. He happens to have an extremely contrived connection to the Baileys and he just happens to recommend Bobby Bailey for the Prometheus project and he just happens to have the Shining which helps resolve the whole story that he set in motion. I just found everything about this character far too convenient.
We also never find out what drove Tom Bailey (the abusive husband/father) looney tunes. We’re told that he lost it in the war, when he was a German interpreter for the Allies, so, when we finally get to that part of the book with Tom discovering the Nazi scientists’ lab and what they’ve been doing, I thought we’d see the descent into madness - but no. He’s basically crackers from the get-go. What a rubbish, anticlimactic cop-out.
I will say that I was always impressed with Barry Windsor-Smith’s black and white art. As near-comatose with boredom as I was while reading most of it, I always found something to appreciate with the artwork. I particularly loved the scene with Jan Bailey and Jack Powell in the rain - you really feel the power of the rain and to draw in black and white convincing wetness is really something. And parts of the fall of Schongau were mildly interesting - how the surviving Nazi scientist came to be the only survivor had some actually compelling moments.
Still, I can’t recommend this bland block of a book. It’s nowhere close to entertaining, has nothing to say, and the overwritten pages were always dreary to read. Barry Windsor-Smith is an incredibly talented artist but not much of a writer or storyteller - that was the case back in the ‘80s and he’s not gotten any better since. Monsters is a monster-sized book but also unfortunately monstrously dull.
Rating: really liked it
After reading this massive tome, I find myself speechless.
Monsters, which comic book industry veteran Barry Windsor-Smith worked on for 37 years, is his masterpiece. The pages may be black and white, but every panel bleeds red. In many ways, it feels like a monument to pain. This isn’t a book BWS wanted to create, it’s one he had to create. The sincerity and naked vulnerability is nauseating at times, with vivid depictions of cruelty and anger that can only come from someone who is intimately familiar with these things.
I don’t think many people will ‘enjoy’ this. I certainly didn’t. But, when I finally reached the last page, I felt like I’d gained something profound. Perhaps it was a deeper understanding of the stuff of humanity, or some similar cliche... or perhaps it was just another emotional gauntlet, adding to a lifetime of emotional trials that have shaped me into what I am. I could wax philosophical about it all day, but the bottom line is that this affected me severely.
Regarding the style and technique; Barry both wrote and illustrated Monsters. It’s clear that he used his 37 years wisely, as every single piece of every panel is completely necessary. There’s no fluff here.
It took me days to finish this, but not due to any lagging or slogging dullness... on the contrary, I had to force myself to put it down periodically for my own emotional wellbeing. This is a mentally and emotionally exhausting read. Parts of it are also terrifying. Not in a creepy, spooky way... in a very real horror of life sort of way. It’s frightening in the same way an angry adult about to lose their temper was scary to me as a child. It’s a mostly joyless read.
I recommend this to everyone, but with a massive CW. This is triggering shit. My recommendation is because I believe it’s important literature, and a someday iconic classic of our time. It’s an example of just how serious, mature and transcendental a comic book can be. I think it made me a better and wiser person.
Anyway, when you’re ready...
Rating: really liked it
What a disappointment! It took BWS 37 years to create this and it felt like 37 years for me to read this 370 page story. This is such an overwritten slog that could have been edited down to half as long and still gotten BWS's idea across.
The story is told backwards with a young man being turned into a monster by a Nazi working for the American military in the 60's. There's also a Scatman Cruthers character named McFarlane who has the Shine although it doesn't fit with the rest of the story at all. I'm not sure what the character with supernatural sight adds to this story at all other than BWS must have read a lot of Stephen King over those 37 years.
Then we flash back to the young man's family as a boy. The story is told from his battered mother. She writes in her diary and there are pages and pages of diary entries written in cursive that add zero to the story. BWS illustrates everything in the diary entries in the preceding pages so I don't see the point of these entries at all other than adding to the page count and boring the reader to tears.
The final section flashes back to the final days of the war and how the Nazi scientist escaped Germany and started working for the Americans. It's only goal seemed to be to show the Dr. Mengele wannabe was a monster. Surprise. Surprise. Like I couldn't infer that.
I will say this. Barry Windsor Smith is still an extremely talented artist. The artwork is fantastic. His pen and ink drawings are meticulous, drawing you in.
Rating: really liked it
The saddest book I’ve ever read. Like a Frankenstein retelling through an Incredible Hulk lens, if it were an indie comic. Trauma, heartbreak, war, and families pulled apart by it all. And poor little Bobby.
Rating: really liked it
Congratulations to Barry Windsor-Smith for winning the top award at the recent 2022 Eisner Awards (the Academy Awards for comics), though part of me thinks it is like one of those LifeTime Achievement Awards, as he took 37 years to finish it and he’s 71. But many aspects of it are impressive, certainly.
Let me explain: Well, apparently I have my limits. I bought this epic, 360-page book, billed as Barry Windsor-Smith’s magnum opus, 37 years in the making, when it came out a year ago, and I could barely take it, so over-the-top in misery, madness and ultra-violence that I wasn’t able to read more than a few pages at a time, and I couldn’t quite begin to write about it when I was done. And trust me, I read a lot of bleak things. It made me recall Ingmar Bergman’s 1977 film, The Serpent’s Egg, which was among other things about German inhumane “experimentation” in the twenties, presaging Nazi “medical” experimentation in their murder camps in WWII. Some scenes were almost completely unwatchable. I also thought of John Wagner’s graphic novel, The History of Violence, which was so brutally violent and cruel as I read it that, while I knew it was telling a truth, I actually gave it away, never wanting to see it again. I’m not saying it wasn’t well done, but it just made me sick. Which I think was the point, to help you see something about human nature. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian territory. Some dystopian books give this impression, too, of course.
So with all these works of art it’s not that I don’t know that human beings have the capacity for evil; it’s just that it’s sometimes very hard to read, when you struggle with so much of it every day in the present, as it is. It’s like brutal anti-war stories such as Johnny Got His Gun, which I also admire. Powerful statements, kicking us in the stomach, but you need a break afterwards. That’s what I felt about this, a powerful nightmare statement, just breath-takingly well-done as comics art, though sometimes I thought it was too relentless, too horrifying.
One of the things that I heard about the book that encouraged me to read it is that the original idea had its roots in Hulk, a kind of origin story, and maybe too was inspired by Frankenstein. The world creates Monsters, and we can’t quite control them. So that is interesting, or something we at least know and need to be reminded of from time to time. Violence begets violence, and you never completely leave it in the past. I recall My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, where a girl who loves monster comics encounters the monsters of racism of the late sixties in Chicago, while we also meet a woman in her neighborhood who survived various abuses of anti-semitism. Unspeakable cruelty in every generation. Though there is more hope and humor in Ferris’s book than in most of Monsters (one key exception might be the psychic insights of a girl and her father that may point the way to some redemption, maybe).
Monsters reminds us of Nazi “research” (torture) that took place in their attempt to chemically produce a super soldier, the cruelty of this ambition not exclusive to the Nazis, as Americans also did inhumane research, experimentation, testing on human beings.This is basically an anti-war book where Bobby’s dad goes to war, experiences unspeakable cruelty, is driven to madness, and comes home to pass on his madness in rage and violence to his wife, the lovely and innocent Janet Bailey, and especially, his son, Little Bobby. Bobby also goes to war, to become this Frankenstein/Hulk-typer monster. Abuse in war and obsession to win war leads to domestic abuse. Almost unreadable at times. Of course, I know war is Hell and that kids grow up abused in various ways, but it is hard to see this.
So, yeah, I both admired the artwork--found it brilliant, a pen and ink masterwork--and even admired aspects of the multi-layered, storytelling about a descent into madness, but I also found it very, very hard to read this story and look at.
I dunno, maybe Monsters is a masterpiece, such as is one of the grimmest Shakespeare plays, Titus Andronicus, unspeakably horrific. Man’s inhumanity to man. It is long, though, often a kind of slog of horrors, and I so often wished it had been half the length to make the same point. But my hats off to you, Mr. Windsor-Smith, who with the help of Fantagraphics and especially Gary Groth, saw his vision come to completion, now recognized by the highest court of honor of your profession, after more than half your life devoted to it. I can’t give it five stars, though, as I felt it was too grim, too long for what it had to say (ha, like this review!). And my four-star “liking” it is not really the issue here. Sometimes I admire things for their artwork or craft or politics. Here I give a point to the two good families the artist has empathy for, the family who have some members with psychic capacities, and of course Bobby and the book’s true main character, who is a stand-in for us, Janet Bailey, Bobby’s mother.
Rating: really liked it
When Bobby Bailey tries joining the army, he winds up being as a test subject in the Prometheus Project...
I'm a fan of Barry Windsor-Smith since his Valiant days and my wife got me this for Christmas.
Legend has it that this started off as Barry Windsor-Smith's take on the Hulk's origin for a graphic novel that was never made but elements made it into the Hulk mythos at the hands of other writers. However, this is far from a Hulk story with a lick of paint on it.
Monsters is a tale of child abuse, war atrocities, and Nazi science. Bobby Bailey's father encountered some harrowing shit in World War II and never got over it, lashing out at his family, even costing his son an eye. The story is mostly the repercussions of that event. Bobby Bailey joining the army. Jack Powell and Elias McFarland both find their fates entwined with Bobby's.
The story is dark, powerful, bleak, and emotional. The art is exquisite. I think it would still have been good if done in a classic Marvel style with color and conventional inks but Windsor-Smith poured years of his life into this book. The art is in a pen and ink style with lots of hatching and intricate linework. The result is a gritty, gloomy masterpiece.
I don't want to give much more away. If this is Barry Windsor-Smith's final comics work, it's a hell of a note to go out on.
Monsters is horrific, powerful, bleak, emotional, dark, and exquisite. Five out of five stars.
Rating: really liked it
Wow.
I just can't fathom how anyone could call this book "boring". I read it over three days, and I only stopped because of meals and time with my family. I could have easily read it in one sitting. I was completely absorbed and sucked into the world that Barry Windsor-Smith has created.
Windsor-Smith famously began this graphic novel in 1985 as a Hulk story for Marvel, but stopped work on it after Bill Mantlo supposedly saw some pages sitting around the Marvel offices and appropriated some of the ideas (Bruce Banner as an abused child) and used them in his monthly Hulk book.
It's easy to read this now, thirty-seven years later, and see The Hulk and Thunderbolt Ross as characters, but Windsor-Smith has added so much to what must have been the bare-bones idea that this massive epic is truly entirely separate from the original concept. The sweeping story is touching, horrifying, and devastatingly effective, and the art is staggeringly beautiful.
I can't recommend MONSTERS enough.
Rating: really liked it
Big book. If only it were as good as it is heavy . . .
A weird but ultimately boring mash-up of Captain America, the Hulk,
The Shining, and domestic tragedy begins with an army recruiter in the 1960s delivering up a prospective candidate for a dubious super-soldier program.
The first psychological sidetrack dumps us into the recruiter's mental breakdown as he struggles with his guilty conscience. Then a giant, powerful subject of the program escapes and we're dumped into a second psychological sidetrack as events flash back to 1949 and the diary of the behemoth's mother. She recounts how her husband has come back from the war different and dangerous, but it takes forever to actually reach the horrible moments of violence we are told about upfront.
Surely, now we're ready for the big finale? But no, now we must flash back to the final days of the Allied invasion of Germany to find out the bizarre and grotesque events that are the roots of all that has come before.
By the time we finally reach a conclusion the story is so full of forced coincidences that the author feels compelled to mention "fate" and "destiny" to make excuses for the ridiculousness.
I've enjoyed Barry Windsor-Smith's work in the past, but this one unfortunately left me cold and bored.
p.s., The history of how this book came to be is actually more interesting to me than the book. It probably would have been awesome at 30 pages and me still in my teens:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/multi...
Rating: really liked it
Windsor-Smith's novel has the feeling of an instant classic - a novel later in the author's life where he is trying to say it all. (Much like Brother Karazmozov was to Dostoyevski). Indeed, in an interview with the author, he said he had been writing Monster for over 30 years.
I first thought the novel was going to be a dark version of the Captain America super soldier story. Or a take Frankenstein (Prometheus serves as the name for the secret project in Monsters and the subtitle of Frankenstein). Monsters has elements of those two work on its focus of how what we create says the creator. Yet focus’ less on the titular monster created by a botch super soldier experiment than the monsters the lie with so many of us -the darkness that is inherently there that can be set off by others. Although there is true love and unselfishness, the monsters fate is poignant. So this is not a depressing book. Through he large format - both page size and number - allow Windsor-Smith to develop he story and character slowly. I can’t recall another graphic novel with pages of dialogue. The way time moves helps show the interconnected nature of the stories.
Rating: really liked it
Well that was disappointing. I got more and more annoyed with this the longer it went on. An initially interesting story spoilt by a series of long flashbacks that spell out the plot. Plus a massive amount of coincidences that stretched credibility to breaking point for me. Ah well, ever onward, the next book awaits.....
Rating: really liked it
This may well contend for greatest graphic novel of all time. Seriously. Believe the hype.
Rating: really liked it
Supposedly it took 30 years to make this crosshatched downer and I thought it might take as long for me to read it. The art is great in parts and other times I wanted a less-is-more approach. The story is depressing with a touching ending but it felt a little relentless. That’s me. You might feel differently. Regardless, it’s a masterwork and deserves attention.
Rating: really liked it
This is a big book and, admittedly, sometimes a bit of a slog to get through. But the artwork is sublime and the cumulative power of this sad story cannot be denied.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars-- The classic Frankenstein story gets a mid-century remake in this story of a tragic young man who becomes hideously mutated in terrifying post-WW2 experiments. While there are several familiar tropes in display here, the story is still affecting and a compelling read with amazingly detailed illustrations.
There are many monsters in this story, and most don't look like hulking otherworldly creatures. If you were expecting a superhero story or lighter fare, please put that assumption aside before opening this book. There are *very intense* scenes of family violence, war crimes, PTSD, etc.
