Monsters
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
35 YEARS IN THE MAKING: THE MOST ANTICIPATED GRAPHIC NOVEL IN RECENT HISTORY
*A GUARDIAN 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*
The year is 1964.
Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfil his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office. Secretive, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, Bobby is the perfect candidate for a secret US government experiment, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control. As the monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, the story reaches a crescendo of moral reckoning.
A 360-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters' narrative canvas is copious: part familial drama, part thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey that plays across two generations of American history.
Monsters is rendered in Barry Windsor-Smith's impeccable pen-and-ink technique, the visual storytelling, with its sensitivity to gesture and composition, the most sophisticated of the artist's career. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, of redemption and sacrifice, and devastating violence. Monsters is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
