Allegedly, while working for Marvel in the 80's, Barry Windsor-Smith submitted a version of this as an origin story for the Hulk.

Marvel passed on it - they though it was too dark - so it kept kicking about in Barry's noggin whilst he created a reputation for writing gritty tales for some of Marvel's more feral creations, including Wolverine's Weapon X.

Thirty-five years later, this opus has emerged, somewhat fully formed - as much a misfit hybrid as its protagonist. It's Windsor-Smith's first published work in sixteen years.

In 1964, Bobby Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfil his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office. Secretive, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, Bobby is the perfect candidate for a secret US government experiment, 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.

As with the best Frankenstein-inspired stories, the monster is not the monster, and Windsor-Smith packs a lot of anti-war, anti-authoritarian anxiety (and not a little body horror) into 360 pages full to the brim with abusive fathers, nazi scientists, clairvoyant children and those weird old horror comics I used to read as a kid - like Scream, Tales from the Crypt, and the early Alan Moore Future Shocks.

The illustrations are beautiful, although the dialogue boxes are a little hard to follow at times.

It's an engrossing work of art that is beautiful and horrific in equal measures and worth the sixteen-year wait.

A sad reflection that wars do not necessarily end when they are over.