Barry Windsor-Smith worked on Monsters for thirty-five years, and I didn’t read it until two years after he published it. It was worth the wait in both cases, though I still wish I would have gotten around to it sooner. The work is primarily set in and around 1940s America, especially World War II and the effects it has on one particular family, as well as about a decade later. Bobby Bailey’s father was a soldier in the war, and he comes home quite different than when he left. Readers see Tom and Janet—Bobby’s parents—and their relationship both before and after the war, as well as their interactions with Bobby in the 1940s. The work contrasts those interactions with a later story about Bobby, as he signs up for the army. He suffers physical and mental scars from his childhood, so the recruiting office puts Bobby in a special program, one designed to create super soldiers.
While Bobby is the center of the story, Windsor-Smith mainly uses him to reveal how the monsters around him treat him. His father verbally and physically abuses him, and the army attempts to turn him into a weapon—an object—in their experimental program. As the story progresses, though, the reader learns more about what happened to his father during the war, an experience that helps the reader feel some sympathy for Tom, even if they can’t quite forgive the way he treats Bobby. That passing on of trauma is one of the main ideas in the work, as Windsor-Smith wants to explore not only how monsters behave, but how people create them in the first place. That theme isn’t surprising, given Windsor-Smith’s work on such works as Project X for Marvel, another work explaining how a government entity turned a person into an object, though Wolverine is able to retain his humanity, even if he has to constantly battle his abuse to do so.
Bobby, on the other hand, has had more and more of his humanity removed, figuratively for much of his life, but then literally when he enlists. Similarly, before the war, Tom is a caring, even poetic, soul, though what he encounters removes his humanity, as well. Violence, cruelty, and the desire for power debase whoever comes into contact with them or destroy them altogether. While it would be easy to categorize the Nazis as those who enact the worst dehumanization in this work, Windsor-Smith clearly connects the American experiments and desire for power as equal to what the Nazis have done, reminding readers that, though those of us in the U.S. want to believe our nation would never go so far as genocide, our country is guilty of equal crimes against humanity.
There are exceptions to this quest for power and dehumanization, as Windsor-Smith has two characters who have some sort of power and ability to work against evil. While Janet wants to protect Bobby, as a woman at the time, she doesn’t have the power to do so. However, she relies on Officer Jack, a local police officer who was once a government official—though his role is never exactly clear—who promises to protect her and Bobby. He originally contacts Janet to explain why Tom doesn’t come home immediately after the war, but then he falls in love with her. He becomes disgusted with the government’s lack of ability to care for the Bailey family, so he becomes a police officer to stay near and try to protect the family himself.
Similarly, Elias is an army officer who rebels against the system when he discovers the experiment the military is performing on Bobby. He tries to free Bobby, to help give him at least some sort of positive way to live, even after all that people and systems have done to him. Elias also has a mental/spiritual gift of some sort, as he is able to see events and speak to the dead, a gift his young daughter also shares. He and his daughter both use this gift to help bring some sort of peace to a story that knows almost none of it, but, as with Officer Jack, he has to work outside the system in order to do so.
The artwork here is quite realistic, both in terms of how Windsor-Smith portrays the characters and in the background/scenery. The details in each scene are important, and Windsor-Smith has invested time and energy into helping the reader see the scene as clearly as possible. In an interview with NPR, he comments, “Boiling comics down to simplicity is fine if you are producing a simple narrative. Monsters is realistic and complex and is therefore rendered that way.” He wants his readers to live in this monstrous, complicated world—so like the world we live in already—and he uses his art to reinforce that immersion.
Windsor-Smith doesn’t deny the monsters who exist in this world, but he also wants readers to see beyond them. Though there are governments, systems, and people who seek nothing but violence and power—like the Nazis and the U.S. and the people who willingly work for their ends—there are also those like Officer Jack and Elias who try to save those whom those systems and people damage. Windsor-Smith is also wise enough to know that, sometimes, those innocent people—Bobby and Janet, even Tom, to an extent—don’t survive. That’s even more of a reason to produce works like Monsters, to remind us all that our actions have consequences for those on the margins, that we should not only do what we can to stop the monsters, we also need to stop ourselves from becoming monstrous.
Bobby, on the other hand, has had more and more of his humanity removed, figuratively for much of his life, but then literally when he enlists. Similarly, before the war, Tom is a caring, even poetic, soul, though what he encounters removes his humanity, as well. Violence, cruelty, and the desire for power debase whoever comes into contact with them or destroy them altogether. While it would be easy to categorize the Nazis as those who enact the worst dehumanization in this work, Windsor-Smith clearly connects the American experiments and desire for power as equal to what the Nazis have done, reminding readers that, though those of us in the U.S. want to believe our nation would never go so far as genocide, our country is guilty of equal crimes against humanity.
There are exceptions to this quest for power and dehumanization, as Windsor-Smith has two characters who have some sort of power and ability to work against evil. While Janet wants to protect Bobby, as a woman at the time, she doesn’t have the power to do so. However, she relies on Officer Jack, a local police officer who was once a government official—though his role is never exactly clear—who promises to protect her and Bobby. He originally contacts Janet to explain why Tom doesn’t come home immediately after the war, but then he falls in love with her. He becomes disgusted with the government’s lack of ability to care for the Bailey family, so he becomes a police officer to stay near and try to protect the family himself.
Similarly, Elias is an army officer who rebels against the system when he discovers the experiment the military is performing on Bobby. He tries to free Bobby, to help give him at least some sort of positive way to live, even after all that people and systems have done to him. Elias also has a mental/spiritual gift of some sort, as he is able to see events and speak to the dead, a gift his young daughter also shares. He and his daughter both use this gift to help bring some sort of peace to a story that knows almost none of it, but, as with Officer Jack, he has to work outside the system in order to do so.
The artwork here is quite realistic, both in terms of how Windsor-Smith portrays the characters and in the background/scenery. The details in each scene are important, and Windsor-Smith has invested time and energy into helping the reader see the scene as clearly as possible. In an interview with NPR, he comments, “Boiling comics down to simplicity is fine if you are producing a simple narrative. Monsters is realistic and complex and is therefore rendered that way.” He wants his readers to live in this monstrous, complicated world—so like the world we live in already—and he uses his art to reinforce that immersion.
Windsor-Smith doesn’t deny the monsters who exist in this world, but he also wants readers to see beyond them. Though there are governments, systems, and people who seek nothing but violence and power—like the Nazis and the U.S. and the people who willingly work for their ends—there are also those like Officer Jack and Elias who try to save those whom those systems and people damage. Windsor-Smith is also wise enough to know that, sometimes, those innocent people—Bobby and Janet, even Tom, to an extent—don’t survive. That’s even more of a reason to produce works like Monsters, to remind us all that our actions have consequences for those on the margins, that we should not only do what we can to stop the monsters, we also need to stop ourselves from becoming monstrous.