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The cover to Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith, featuring the title in muted red and the author's name, plus the words "A Graphic Novel," in blue against a white background. In the middle third of the cover is an illustration of a crying grotesque figure with wrinkles and a cleft palate. Two flag-like items protrude from his ears.
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On sale date: April 27, 2021

35 years in the making, the most anticipated graphic novel in recent comics history!
2022 EISNER AWARD WINNER:

Best Graphic Novel
Best Artist/Writer
Best Lettering

The year is 1964. Bobby Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfill his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office to join up. Close-mouthed, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, it turns out that Bailey is the perfect candidate for a secret U.S. government experimental program, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control. As the titular monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, literal and ironic, the story reaches its emotional and moral reckoning. Monsters is the legendary project Barry Windsor-Smith has been working on for over 35 years. A 360-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters' narrative canvas is both vast and deep: part familial drama, part political thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey across two generations of American history. Trauma, fate, conscience, and redemption are just a few of the themes that intersect in the most ambitious graphic novel of Windsor-Smith's career. Monsters is rendered in Windsor-Smith's impeccable pen-and-ink technique, the visual storytelling with its sensitivity to gesture and composition is the most sophisticated of the artist's career. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, and devastating violence. It is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.

An image of a golden Eisner Award sticker, reading,


Praise

"For 365 large-format, black-and-white pages, Windsor-Smith conveys gruesome body horror and tender family scenes, nightmarish doom and quiet moments of connection. ... [The artist] feverishly traces the roots of a single violent act backward and forward in time, across generations and nations and the border of life and death itself." — The New York Times

"One of comics' great literary epics, a masterpiece of story and art and a generous, unexpected gift from a legendary creator in total command of his craft." — Forbes

"Windsor-Smith uses this vast canvas to explore wide-ranging questions about the nature of humanity and the scope of individual responsibility." — NPR Books

"Brilliant. A great, grim 365-page slab of postwar angst… forcefully told and thoroughly affecting." — The Guardian

"Achingly good, epically scaled, and impeccably designed, Monsters will leave you changed." — The Paris Review

Specs

Pages
380
Format
Hardback
Color
Black and white.
Dimensions
8.3" × 11.7"
ISBN-13
9781683964155
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