![]() Oversized compared to the usual comic or graphic novel formats, each page rings with meticulously placed ink to vary from intimate conversations through action scenes and malignant science and back around again and again, cycling through time and the astral world to wind every loop back together. I didn’t, and even to my average eye it was clear that this was the work of someone absolutely in charge of their craft. ![]() You don’t need a slice of Windsor-Smith’s bibliography on your shelf to immediately appreciate what’s going on with this opus, a book that reportedly took him 35 years to complete. The monsters are given shape, indisputably outlined.īut Barry Windsor-Smith is a veteran of superhero comics, and as such, knows that you can’t title a book Monsters without a menagerie of such. The first few pages lay out exactly what’s going on with Monsters: a boy is beaten half-blind in a shed by an adult man shouting in black letter gothic German, the boy’s mom saves him, if you can call it that. ![]() ![]() A graphic novel so confident from page to page that there are no omniscient explanations, no breaks, no titles, no section breaks to speak of. Here we have a lavishly inked non-stop thread of the grotesque, the domestic and the systemic selection of monsters. This is not a tome full of the fun monsters. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #156. ![]() Barry Windsor-Smith’s Taxonomy of Monsters ![]()
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