Add to the list MONSTERS (Fantagraphics, $39.99, 4.1 pounds), a 35-year labor by the British cartoonist Barry Windsor-Smith, and you have nearly a century’s worth of cartooning in just four books. (Jan.For this column, I’ve written in the past about Chris Ware’s “Rusty Brown” (356 pages, 18 years in the making, and weighing in at 3.5 pounds), Seth’s “Clyde Fans” (478 pages, 20 years, 3.15 pounds) and Jason Lutes’s “Berlin” (580, 22, 3.8). 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.
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