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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