My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Book One), by Emil Ferris: a masterpiece that transcends the medium

Most audiovisual works -whatever they are, films, comics or video games- can be reviewed by analyzing and breaking down each part (visuals, sound, structure, pace, script, drawing…) as separate pieces.

And there are others -not so many- that force you to change the methodology.

Because they are so intertwined and so well connected to one another that the sensations their enjoyment creates would not be the same if any piece changed.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters clearly belongs to the second group.

It is not just a comic: it is a cultural product, a creative anomaly and, above all, a work of art in the most literal sense of the term.

Let’s start with the context, because here the context matters.

Emil Ferris began this book at 40 after a mosquito bite infected her with West Nile virus and left her “good” hand paralyzed. She did not come from the usual commercial comics circuit or the most orthodox indie scene. She came from illustration, design and art.

And that shows from the very first page.

To make matters even more striking, the book took 15 years to be published, through all sorts of twists and editorial problems.

Fifteen.

This work is an act of obsession and resistance.

Formal aspects of the work

You notice it as soon as you open it: the visual density of the drawings made with ballpoint pens simulating a girl’s notebook, the recreation of works of art with this technique, the texts…

Everything gives off the sense of being faced with something worked to the limit, without concessions.

Curiously, a comic that seems niche ends up being universal, and it is rare for it not to appeal to anyone who enjoys art. Or a good story.

What My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Is About

And yet the story, strictly speaking, is simple: a girl, Karen Reyes, lives in dangerous late-1960s Chicago and becomes involved in an investigation around a death in her building.

From there, memories, traumas, fears, sexuality, identity, racism, violence and loneliness unfold.

Everything is filtered through the gaze of a girl who sees herself as a monster and finds in those monsters nothing Lovecraftian, but rather classic ones (from cinema, pulp magazines and popular imagination) as a way of analysing the world.

That said, the story matters, but it is not the main thing.

Or at least it does not seem that way to me.

What makes this comic so special

Because the weight of the work and its grandeur lie in the drawing. And when I say drawing, I mean everything: composition, texture, repetition, obsession, ugliness, beauty and horror coexisting on the same page.

Ferris draws as if every page were the last.

The school-notebook style, the lined pages, the margins, the stains, the crossings-out… they are not an aesthetic trick: they are part of the story.

This comic is not only “read”; it is explored.

You stop, go back, lose yourself in a corner, in a face, in a background that tells another story different from the one in the foreground.

There are pages that work almost like paintings. Others like emotional collages. Others like intimate diaries impossible to fake.

The result is deeply honest.

And for that reason, and despite its 400 pages (it is a proper brick), it is a book for people who appreciate art, wherever it comes from.

You may never have read a graphic novel in your life and still be trapped here until you finish it.

Ferris talks about monsters, yes. But the real monsters are not the ones with fangs and claws. They are broken adults, uncomfortable silences -and dialogues-, normalized violence, social hypocrisy, the fear of being different.

The monster as metaphor is handled with enormous visual and symbolic intelligence. Just like what it tells and what it lets each person’s imagination fill in on its own.

Conclusions

After all that, I do not think it will surprise you that I recommend the work to anyone who enjoys art, without labels.

Certainly to anyone who thinks comics are “only” a minor medium. So they can understand the heights that the conjunction of image and text specific to this medium can reach.

And also to anyone who thinks that by 40 everything in our life is already set.

Because after reading this book and what it has achieved, those ideas prove their irrelevance.

Field	Data
Title	My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Original title	My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Author	Emil Ferris
Script	Emil Ferris
Art	Emil Ferris
Translation	Montserrat Meneses Vilar
Spanish publisher	Reservoir Books
Original publisher	Fantagraphics
Year of original publication	2017
Year of publication in Spain	2018
Release date in Spain	April 5, 2018
Pages	432 pages in the Spanish edition / 416 pages in the original edition
Format	Paperback in the Spanish edition / paperback in the original edition
Genre	Graphic novel, auteur comic, mystery, thriller, horror, historical drama
Country	United States
Main characters	Karen Reyes, Anka Silverberg, Deeze, Marvela, Sam Silverberg
Setting	Chicago, late 1960s
ISBN / EAN Spanish edition	9788417125639
ISBN original edition	9781606999592