There are shades of Frankenstein here, but also of Windsor-Smith’s celebrated 1991 Wolverine origin story Weapon X (evil scientists torturing a drifter into wretched superhumanity), and even a hint of The Shining. But for all the horror, Monsters is drawn and inked with extraordinary delicacy, its pace is often meditative and it is just as interested in family relationships as it is in superpowers. The plural title is pointed the narrative spiders out to describe the protagonist’s abusive relationship with his father, and the grim origins of Project Prometheus in Nazi science at the fag-end of the second world war. He’s horribly tortured, shot full of God knows what, and ends up looking like a cross between Hulk and Frankenstein’s monster. Remember how weedy Steve Rogers gets the supersoldier serum and turns into Captain America? Yup: this isn’t that. Instead of being drafted into the regular force, he’s quickly earmarked for Project Prometheus. His new book Monsters tells the tangled story of a rootless and damaged young man who turns up at a US army recruitment office. He cut his teeth with Conan the Barbarian (his initial run on the sword and sorcery title has just been republished as a trade paperback), and though he has often dismissed his early work as clumsily imitative of his hero Jack Kirby, even then his dynamic way with the human figure and expressive cross-hatching seemed fully formed. Here is a writer and artist who was part of Marvel’s “bullpen” when the physical office, as he has put it, “could hold four people sort-of comfortably, with liberal deodorant use”. He showed up fresh from art-school – more or less literally, to hear him tell it – on Marvel Comics’s doorstep in 1968 and he has been, sometimes turbulently, in and out of the funny books ever since. Before Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar, Dave McKean, Warren Ellis, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons and all the other UK creators who have had a disproportionate impact on the US comic book scene, there was Windsor-Smith.
The reason that anyone is prepared to wait that long for it is the 71-year-old behind it. In an industry that has, for most of its history, been dominated by fast art and on-the-hoof storytelling, owing to the ferocious pace of weekly production, to call Monsters an outlier would be an understatement. I want to say to him: “Two days? Try 35 years!” For that is how long the world has waited for Barry Windsor-Smith’s new graphic novel, Monsters. H ow long would you wait for a comic? My 10-year-old son, staking out the letterbox (“Dad! My Beano still hasn’t arrived!”) has a limit of about 48 hours.
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