
The first several dozen pages of hard-hitting, monster-driven action and spy-story intrigue give way to a human story of the soldier’s wife and child awaiting his delayed return from the war, and how they deal with the violence, ugliness, jealousy and cruelty that emerges once he finally gets back. Monsters is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.Much of Monsters is a deliberate inversion of expectations. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, of redemption and sacrifice, and devastating violence. 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. As the monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, the story reaches a crescendo of moral reckoning.Ī 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. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control.



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. 35 YEARS IN THE MAKING: THE MOST ANTICIPATED GRAPHIC NOVEL IN RECENT HISTORYīailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfil his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office.
