Better to leave off on the highest peak, twisting in the wind, than jump. It does go on at great length, and stops only after reaching such a frothing pitch of upset that any more might tip it into farce.

You could follow the line of narrative Windsor-Smith sketches out here endlessly, back to the caves, and such is the unsavory pleasure in feeling the trap door drop away with every rewind of the book's chronology, in seeing things get worse the further back you go, that in a sick way it's easy to wish it would go on forever. This cycle is repeated again and again as the story tracks back across the generations - it feels a bit like unpacking a ghastly Russian doll - and every trauma's root in a previous one is illustrated exhaustively. In Monsters, Windsor-Smith oars readers backwards in time over two decades of his characters' post-WWII family history, showing the shreds of lives destroyed after generational traumas have exploded, then sifting obsessively through the details of time's passage to watch the blasts themselves. than all but a few other comics are capable of. The mood that Windsor-Smith summons in Monsters is simply more intense, more impactful. more.

I myself found it an overpowering experience of simultaneous disquiet and awe.

How Monsters hangs together as a plot, I think, is less important than the feeling passed on to its readers as they push slowly through hundreds of densely gridded, intricately drafted, balloon laden pages. Half a century later the process peaks with Monsters, a massive tome intent on more intensity, more realism, more grandeur, a mixing of the stuff of life with baroque and overwhelming dread.ĭespite the deep focus his artwork strives for, Windsor-Smith feels less intent on presenting the specifics of his narrative than its tone - one most often sumptuously gloomy. Since his ornately embellished Conan run at Marvel in the early '70s, Barry Windsor-Smith has been resisting his art form's instinctive reach for simplicity, and making comics with more. In this respect, it must be counted a success. There's more to this one than most comics - more high points, more flaws, more time in the making, more lines on the page.

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