Probably best known for his seminal 1980s Wolverine miniseries Weapon X over at Marvel, Barry Windsor-Smith is back with a new story... about the military hiring mad scientists... to secretly experiment on people… with disastrous results. Hmm. Well, I don’t want to say Barry Windsor-Smith is a one-trick pony but, from what I’ve read of him anyway, he’s 2 for 2!
Maaaaaaaan, what a project reading this was - 370 pages of densely-worded, BORING garbage! The first 120 pages is a lot of tedious military characters talking about experiments and whatever, the next 140(!) or so pages - the worst part of the book - is about a sad wife/mother getting knocked around by her abusive husband, over and over, and then, for the last 100 or so pages, we’re in the final days of WW2 where Nazi scientists try to figure out how they’re gonna explain their insane experiments to the Allies who’re hours away from rumbling them.
For such a pain-stakingly put-together work, I’m sure Windsor-Smith was trying to say something “important”, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. As far as I can see, the “monsters” the title is referring to are, 1) abusive men, 2) genetically-modified people made to look like Quasimodo, and 3) Nazi scientists (or just Nazis generally). And so… what? Don’t most people already think those three things are monsters? It’s not like Windsor-Smith is telling or showing us anything mind-blowing.
Nor do I see what the allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein did for this book. The project to transform Bobby Bailey into the monster on the cover is called Prometheus and the subtitle to Shelley’s novel is “The Modern Prometheus”. The final part of the book takes place in Schongau, which is near Ingolstadt, a prominent place in Frankenstein. Other pointlessly derivative literary allusions is having a couple of characters who essentially have the Shining in all but name.
Neither do I see the point of the experimentation. The Nazi scientists horrifically deform their test subjects - to what end? Who wants an oversized, lumbering creature with the mind of a child who can barely walk? Why would any military pour so much money into such a useless end goal?!
Windsor-Smith uses lots of dates and places to set up scenes but they add nothing to the context - who’s really going to remember that this scene is taking place three months after the one before last?
The Jan Bailey section - the battered housewife part - had far too many pages full of cursive handwriting that were a chore to slog through. Not just because of Jan’s whiny voice, or that deciphering cursive slowed down an already ploddingly-paced read, but because these pages never added anything to what we already knew. We see her husband drinking, knocking her around, being a dick, and then we read a page or two of her telling us her husband has been drinking, knocking her around, and being a dick. Ugh. This book didn’t need to be anywhere close to 370 pages long. This entire section is absurdly repetitive.
McFarland, the dude with the Shining, is less of a character and more of a plot device - so much so that you could say this character IS the plot because without him there is no book. He happens to have an extremely contrived connection to the Baileys and he just happens to recommend Bobby Bailey for the Prometheus project and he just happens to have the Shining which helps resolve the whole story that he set in motion. I just found everything about this character far too convenient.
We also never find out what drove Tom Bailey (the abusive husband/father) looney tunes. We’re told that he lost it in the war, when he was a German interpreter for the Allies, so, when we finally get to that part of the book with Tom discovering the Nazi scientists’ lab and what they’ve been doing, I thought we’d see the descent into madness - but no. He’s basically crackers from the get-go. What a rubbish, anticlimactic cop-out.
I will say that I was always impressed with Barry Windsor-Smith’s black and white art. As near-comatose with boredom as I was while reading most of it, I always found something to appreciate with the artwork. I particularly loved the scene with Jan Bailey and Jack Powell in the rain - you really feel the power of the rain and to draw in black and white convincing wetness is really something. And parts of the fall of Schongau were mildly interesting - how the surviving Nazi scientist came to be the only survivor had some actually compelling moments.
Still, I can’t recommend this bland block of a book. It’s nowhere close to entertaining, has nothing to say, and the overwritten pages were always dreary to read. Barry Windsor-Smith is an incredibly talented artist but not much of a writer or storyteller - that was the case back in the ‘80s and he’s not gotten any better since. Monsters is a monster-sized book but also unfortunately monstrously dull.
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