Greetings friends,
I have something a little different for the podcast today. Instead of a creator interview, I review Barry Windsor-Smith’s first published book in 16 years, Monsters. For those that don’t know, Monsters began as an idea in the mid 1980’s for The Incredible Hulk that ultimately did not materialize. The idea stuck with Windsor-Smith and he turned it into an epic 365 page graphic novel that worked on over the span of 30 years.
Check out the video review here. You will notice that the video has been heavily edited and the reasons for that are two fold. First, this was an impromptu, somewhat improvisational review. It was not written beforehand and I was mostly just riffing on my thoughts after having recently finished reading the book without getting into any of the story or plot details. Second, I am still getting over Covid and have retained a bit of a cough that kept interrupting my speech and had to be edited out for obvious reasons.
I’m a big fan of Barry Windsor-Smith and it’s a true tragedy that he has such a relatively small bibliography of original work considering he started drawing comics professionally in 1969. So, I was very excited to see Monsters finally released. If you don’t want to watch the video, I would sum up my opinion in this sentence: I enjoyed the book a great deal, though it does feel a little dated.
This is one of those books that is going to sit on a lot of comic artists’ shelves based purely on Windsor-Smith’s reputation. I don’t think it’s going to rock the comic industry, but it is a very thoughtful and somber tale of tragedy that lives up to Windsor-Smith’s well earned prestige.
Thanks for reading,
-Aaron Walther