Publisher's Weekly Review
Eisner Hall of Famer Windsor-Smith (the Conan the Barbarian series) began this obsessive epic in 1984 as a concept for a Hulk comic; over the next three and a half decades, the 22-page story mutated into an ambitious behemoth packed to the gills with graphic violence and body horror. Feckless young Bobby Bailey is recruited for the Prometheus Project, a secret military supersoldier program. He becomes an enormous, malformed monster ("He can crush a tank with one goddamned hand!"), then escapes and is pursued across the country. Much of the narrative focuses on two of Bobby's allies: Sgt. Elias McFarland, haunted by guilt and psychic visions, and officer Jack Powell, who knows about Bobby's traumatic childhood with an abusive father with PTSD. The story keeps moving back in time, uncovering layers of trauma, constantly changing tone, and flying off on unpredictable tangents that include ghosts, psychic projection, Nazi mad scientists, and cosmic coincidences linking the characters' fates. Fans will pick up the book for Windsor-Smith's ornamental artwork, which, though deeply disturbing and frequently beautiful, sometimes shows the unevenness of work executed over a 35-year period. Windsor-Smith aims to make grand statements on everything from child abuse to veterans' issues to the workings of fate, but despite impressive scope, the volume has trouble pulling them together into a cohesive story. It's a mess to untangle--gross but gorgeous. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
There are epic waits, and there's the wait for Barry Windsor-Smith's new epic. This great, grim 366-page slab of postwar angst began its life as a Hulk story that Windsor-Smith planned for Marvel in 1984. Now, 37 years later, it finally emerges, its striking cover bearing the ruined face of a man, a Stars and Stripes thrust in one ear, his torn lip exposing a cavernous jaw, a tear trickling from one half-open eye. This is Bobby Bailey, the young man at the centre of this forcefully told and thoroughly affecting drama. Windsor-Smith's return is big news. The Londoner got his break after sending sketches to Marvel in the late 60s. He drew staples such as the Avengers and Daredevil, and brought romanticism and style to the award-winning Conan series. But Windsor-Smith has always had his own vision, and his relationship with an industry that has historically kept creatives on a tight leash has rarely been easy. "The business," he declared in a 2013 interview, "stinks." In the 70s and beyond, Windsor-Smith spent spells within the industry - writing and drawing the Wolverine origin story Weapon X for Marvel, working on several series for Valiant and creating the Storyteller anthology for Dark Horse - and long stretches out of it. He has published virtually no new work for 15 years; his website's news section stops in 2011. Fittingly, the ambitious Monsters uses time lapses to great effect. It opens in 1949 with brutal violence, as Bobby's mother, Janet, defends her young son against his raging father, Tom. Fifteen years later, Bobby follows in his veteran father's footsteps, and walks into an army recruitment office. His claim that he has no family or qualifications sees him chosen for an ominous trial. A few months later, he is dotted with wires and suspended in a stinking pool, his skin swollen with muscles and gouged with scars. His chemically enhanced body is now an army investment, but Bailey has an unexpected ally with an escape plan. It feels a well trodden set-up, part Captain America, part Frankenstein's monster. The secret project begins with a Nazi scientist who adjusts his glasses with a claw-hand, while Bailey's noble saviour is an African American man with "hoodoo" powers. A lesser writer might crank up the cliches another notch, and focus on the violence and drama of a super-soldier on the loose in 60s America. Windsor-Smith does give us shootouts, stakeouts and chases, but Monsters is more interested in turning back the clock. It's a book about how we got here; a story about a lost boy, his put-upon mother and his brutal, traumatised father, about fraught dinners and PTSD, and about how it takes a monster to make one. And its telling is often brilliant. Windsor-Smith's brooding, dramatic panels later show a young Tom and Janet, happy before the war. The new father sends tender notes back from the front, his eye for a scene such that he "could describe the French countryside and the sounds of war in the same sentence". But after a shock discovery in the chaos of the German retreat, he returns a changed man. The hands that once penned love letters instead reach for the whiskey bottle, and lash out at his wife and son. Monsters hums with suppressed violence and regret, and Windsor-Smith renders both with real power. His command of pose and gesture - Tom's thick arms bunching with tension, Janet's shoulders slumping in resignation - brings his cast to life. Some images stay with you: a bike with buckled wheels in long grass, smoke oozing over a dinner table in an officer's mess, cross-hatched shadow stretching across a face like a cowl. Alongside the naturalism sits stranger stuff: sausages turn into severed fingers and memories swirl into the present, their echoes turning simple conversations into a deafening hubbub. At the heart of the book, the adult Barry relives his childhood traumas, his great, twisted face and freakish frame balled up on the stairs as arguments burst out around him. Perhaps inevitably, given its long gestation period and ambitious scope, Monsters can feel disjointed. Its mix of sci-fi, body horror, fateful coincidences, psychic powers and family drama isn't always coherent; at times the dialogue falls flat. Windsor-Smith's grotesque visions of butchered cadavers and dark experiments seem distant and almost comedic when set against the real menace and claustrophobia of domestic violence. Yet that dissonance helps illuminate the book. Pulp fiction has asked again and again what might happen if you could create someone who was more than human. Windsor-Smith's answer is that such a birth would be a trauma, not the spark for quips and pyrotechnics, but the heart of a very American tragedy. Fittingly for a writer who's never felt comfortable spending too long in the comics mainstream, he has created a tale in which wild moments of excess and scenes of superhuman strength form an unsettling backdrop rather than the main event. Instead, a family drama of kindness, cruelty and redemption takes centre stage, offering the chance for a broken man to shed his skin, and begin again.
Booklist Review
It's 1964, and Bobby Bailey wants to join the army. After being told he is unable to serve as a soldier, he is recruited into the top-secret Prometheus project, where he is subjected to an evil experiment that began with the Nazis in WWII. Through fate and supernatural forces, we follow Bobby's tortured childhood and all of the people, good and bad, who touched his life. Themes of life on the home front and suffering in the aftermath of war play large roles in the story, with many recurring characters and a complex story line that jumps between the 1960s and the 1940s. The illustrations are in black and white and finely detailed, with shadows enhancing an ominous tone, and readers of political and supernatural thrillers, sf, and historical fiction with a vein of forbidden love will all enjoy this book. The name of the project, Prometheus, is fitting and may stir thoughts of Frankenstein, so pass this along to those who sympathize most with the monster.
Library Journal Review
In 1964, Sgt. Elias MacFarland identifies Bobby Bailey as a candidate for a secret military program dedicated to creating superhumanly powerful soldiers using research stolen from Nazi scientists at the end of World War II. After a series of agonizing procedures, Bobby is transformed into a hideously deformed, hulking beast. When he escapes the military facility where he's being held, the stage seems set for a thrilling sf/horror-infused manhunt, but Windsor-Smith (Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years) defies expectations by flashing back to the late 1940s in order to focus on the abuse Bobby and his mother, Janet, suffered at the hands of his father, a veteran haunted by the atrocities he witnessed during the war. Further leaps back and forth through time detail Tom's wartime experience, reveal the intertwined fates of the Baileys and three generations of the MacFarlands, tracing the tragic arc of a doomed romance between Janet Bailey and a man she meets while Tom is overseas with aching tenderness. VERDICT This exquisitely illustrated epic bursts with emotion, insight, and empathy. Five decades into his already influential career, Windsor-Smith has created his magnum opus.
