Here is a writer and artist who was part of Marvel’s “bullpen” when the physical office, as he has put it, “could hold four people sort-of comfortably, with liberal deodorant use”. He showed up fresh from art-school – more or less literally, to hear him tell it – on Marvel Comics’s doorstep in 1968 and he has been, sometimes turbulently, in and out of the funny books ever since. Before Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar, Dave McKean, Warren Ellis, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons and all the other UK creators who have had a disproportionate impact on the US comic book scene, there was Windsor-Smith. The reason that anyone is prepared to wait that long for it is the 71-year-old behind it. (Jan.In an industry that has, for most of its history, been dominated by fast art and on-the-hoof storytelling, owing to the ferocious pace of weekly production, to call Monsters an outlier would be an understatement. It’s a mess to untangle-gross but gorgeous. 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.

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. 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. 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. Much of the narrative focuses on two of Bobby’s allies: Sgt.

He becomes an enormous, malformed monster (“He can crush a tank with one goddamned hand!”), then escapes and is pursued across the country. Feckless young Bobby Bailey is recruited for the Prometheus Project, a secret military supersoldier program. 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.

Monsters barry windsor