There is a pervasive evil in this world, some original sin that infects nearly every character. In many of the characters, we see moments of good and moments of evil in that way, they're ultimately very human as they exist on a spectrum of morality. The book is about men and women who succumb to the world, who fight for as long as they can before being beaten down and transformed into some corrupted thing. Whatever force that leads him on his path infects everyone, including his mother, a woman who struggles to rise above her troubles. Tom Bailey and Leon McFarland walked into the heart of darkness in 1945 not knowing that their families would be living in the shadows of that darkness for the next twenty years.īobby literally becomes the monster in this book but nearly every character acts like a monster at one point or another. Tom Bailey brought those horrors back to his family in the states but the McFarland family, another one caught up in these events, had to live with the death of a father during the war. He examines an evil force that travels through generations, bringing the sins of the fathers to their sons and daughters. World War II may be the catalyst for this story but what Windsor-Smith explores is a much larger and even more pervasive evil than the horrors of war. But these monsters existed even before the war but spread like an infection after the Allied Forces declared victory and thought that they were going to be heading to their homes soon. That war was the result of monsters, but it created its own monsters who carried an evil spirit back to their homes and families. Monsters is built on the connections of Bobby Bailey and his family to the closing days of World War II. But after that amount of work, he has now created a work that his legacy will be forever tied to, melding his stylistic artwork with a story that explores trauma and grief in ways that he has never been able to before. His work over many different comics created a body of beautiful and fluid drawings.
From Conan to Solar to Rune, Windsor-Smith always brought a high degree of craft to all of his work, creating beautiful illustrations that served the needs of corporations and their restrained views of what comics should be.
Windsor-Smith appears liberated from the constraints of the kind of 20+ page comics that he built his career on. Bobby Bailey, the most obvious of the titular monsters, gets to be a character we see at the beginning and near the end of his life, becoming this tragic figure who was destined to be nothing more than a victim of life. On each of the more than the nearly 360 pages that make up this work, Windsor-Smith settles into a pacing where each sequence allows the story and the characters to breathe. This is a story that needs a lot of space. (Image credit: Barry Windsor-Smith (Fantagraphics Books)) (opens in new tab)
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