Emil Ferris
My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris is a graphic novel that serves a veritable feast for the eyes.
The narrative unfolds in the form of a fictional diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes. It takes place in Chicago in the late ‘60s and includes references to the deaths of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as to the race riots. Karen lives with her mother and brother in an apartment. She thinks of herself as a monster with a passion for drawing in her spiral bound notebook. When Anka Silverberg, her neighbor and holocaust survivor, is found murdered in her upstairs apartment, Karen decides to investigate the murder. She wears her brother’s raincoat and fedora to assume the guise of a detective.
Karen visits the Chicago Art Institute and various other galleries and museums with her brother, Deez. She rides buses, trains, and walks through some of Chicago’s seedy streets, encountering drug addicts, prostitutes, and the homeless. She suspects Anka’s murder may have something to do with her past. So she listens to tape recordings Anka made about her life in Nazi Germany. She overhears conversations, trying to piece together clues. When her mother dies of cancer, Karen is left alone with Deez. She suspects her brother is hiding secrets which he refuses to reveal to her. Anka’s murder remains unsolved as the novel ends with a cliffhanger.
In her block lettered hand-writing, Karen identifies different types of monsters—those who are different from the norm, are good at heart, and embrace their difference; those who discriminate against others for being different. Through a child’s lens, Karen observes racism, sexism, and homophobia while she interacts with society’s outcasts. She shows compassion for those deemed “other.”
What makes the novel stand out are the dense and intricately detailed illustrations and doodles that fill every nook and cranny of the page. Ferris draws in tiny, cross-hatched lines and does an amazing job with shading. Each page is choke-full of mesmerizing details that invite the eyes to linger. There are full page copies of monster comic covers, horror movie posters, recognizable recreations of famous paintings, sketches of her mother and brother, her brother engaging in sex with one of his many girlfriends, her classmates, nudity, characters she encounters in the streets and on trains, images of Anka raised in a brothel in Germany, the horrors of a concentration camp, full-breasted women bursting out of their tight outfits, gangster-looking men. Scattered throughout are Karen’s werewolf monster self-portraits. Each page is a work of art to be studied and savored.
This is a multi-layered graphic novel told through the voice of a child who is innocent, funny, perceptive, and who reveals a nascent understanding of identity politics.
As an accomplished story-teller and a truly gifted artist, Emil Ferris has produced a compelling graphic novel that is sure to delight.