In March, 1984, when I was seven, I got my first regular comic. It was Scream! (exclamation mark always included) and it was not for the nervous. Possibly a little too scary for its target audience, Scream! was conjured up by artists and writers familiar to readers of Battle, Eagle and 2000AD, and was a comic that I loved with the special passion reserved for that which both fascinates and frightens the hell out of you. But the affair was sadly short-lived - Scream! lasted only 15 issues, before falling victim to an industrial strike that saw its subsequent cancellation. Yet two stories refused to die with their host comic, escaping instead to find new life in the Eagle. One was The Thirteenth Floor, probably Scream!'s finest hour. The other, almost as compelling, was Monster.
Monster is the tale of two Cormans, though neither is named Roger - instead, we follow the misadventures of twelve-year-old Kenny and his grotesquely deformed, brutish Uncle Terry, a hideously ugly hunchback with the strength of a gorilla and the mind of a four-year-old. Terry has been locked in the attic all Kenny's life, but when Kenny discovers his uncle's existence (after Terry kills Kenny's abusive father) it's time for burials in the garden and a flight from the law. On the run, trying at first to reach a doctor who Kenny mistakenly thinks might be able to help his uncle, the pair form a kind of 'George and Lennie' couple - if George was an oddly stoic child, that is, and Lennie enjoyed doing bad things with a lot more relish.
The opening chapters of Monster are probably the strongest, and certainly the most disturbing. The first four pages are by the legendary Alan Moore and Italian artist Heinzl, but after that the baton is passed to Judge Dredd scribes John Wagner & Alan Grant, and Spanish superstar Jesus Redondo Roman. Some of the imagery in these parts is the stuff of nightmares, and has stayed with me all my life - the panel of Kenny's father advancing up the stairs to deal with Uncle Terry once and for all, an expressionless Kenny burying said father in the garden, and the torrential rain that raises corpses out of the mud like the living dead - all unforgettably and gloriously grim. Even though a vein of black humour starts to creep into the story - Kenny is frequently and comically exasperated by his uncle's murderous ways - for most of the tale the underlying tragedy and hopelessness of the situation is never far from the surface.
However, as Kenny eventually drops out of the series, it does start to get a little broader, and by the time Uncle Terry's biting (rather than jumping) a great white shark off the coast of Australia, it's hard not to feel that the story should probably have ended sooner than it did. The only truly satisfying conclusion would have to be a sad one, and we're certainly told at one point that Terry's spell of happiness Down Under is to be short-lived - but does that fit with what actually happens? Have a read and see if you think horses were changed midstream. (By the time we reach the prose stories from the specials, Terry seems stuck in a cycle of thwarting evil men who threaten his peaceful existence with the saintly Digger Muldoon.)
Art-wise, however, Monster is a tour de force by Redondo, and possibly the story he's most strongly associated with. There are shades of Amtrak from 2000AD's Return to Armageddon in Terry's design, but there's a consistently grimy, menacing, sinister vibe to the artwork: crumpled corpses abound, and the environment is bleak and unforgiving. Redondo's work is all shadows and fingerprints and scratchy lines, creating an ominous vibe from the off.
Overall, kudos once more to Rebellion - this isn't a 2000AD strip, but it's presented with the care and diligence that has characterised the rest of their collected editions. Buy it, and remember.... boook nod hurd yooou....
...but Uncle Terry might.
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Top reviews from other countries
MJP2
Possibly the finest comics series you've never heard of!
Reviewed in the United States on 14 September 2016
DEEKUSS
Alan Moore, Deformed Monster being taken under the wing of a young adult/teen. What could be better?
Reviewed in the United States on 18 November 2016