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Equally humorous and horrific, Monsters explores the physical and emotional traumas of learning to live, and love again, with herpes.
Gabby Schulz, otherwise known as Ken Dahl, cemented his status among the best cartoonists of his generation with Monsters. The multiple Ignatz Award–winning and Eisner Award–nominated graphic novel returns to print in a larger format with a deluxe, stitched binding. Part autobiography, part deranged educational film strip, Monsters is a brutally honest, frankly hilarious account of life with herpes.
"Dahl's excellent cartooning and humor make this book required reading for anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex." - Jeffrey Brown, author of Vader and Son
"Monsters is possibly the funniest, most heartbreakingly honest herpes memoir ever committed to print. Dahl’s penwork is lyrical, at once detailed and light, never weighing down the humor—no easy feat. He’s brutally (and graphically) honest about the affliction without working the gross-out factor too much." – Print
"Ken Dahl confronts his herpes affliction through comically grotesque drawings and tongue-tied dialogue with prospective dates in Monsters (Secret Acres, 208 pp., $18). The virus itself grows into a large blob that mutters, “I’m just another lifeform trying to survive in this weird, fucked-up world.'" – The Village Voice
"The information Dahl parcels out as he spills his misery—almost entirely psychological and unnecessary, though he spun it out for five years—is sound, and his self-flaying humor throughout is marvellously ludicrous." – Booklist
"This is definitely the most entertaining book you’ll ever read about herpes... ...Expressive and often explosive black-and-white art creates well-defined characters and brings Ken’s interior world to life (the monstrous talking sores that follow Ken around are particularly effective as his inner voice of doom and misery)." – Library Journal
"In the end it is the end that sews up Monsters as a real aesthetic piece of work. There’s a decisive, encouraging conclusion that honors narrative convention and common sense. This is followed by two clinching toppers, an epilogue in which medical science has its final say, and another where Dahl demonstrates a humorous, hard-won, more substantive understanding of the world, micro and macro, with a crowning, profoundly human gesture." – The Comics Journal