My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

by Emil Ferris

Overview

In this debut, which takes the form of a fictional graphic diary, a 10-year-old girl tries to solve a murder.

Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazines iconography. Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606999592
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	02/14/2017
Pages:	386
Sales rank:	57,783
Product dimensions:	7.70(w) x 10.40(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Emil Ferris grew up Chicago during the turbulent 1960s, where she still lives, and is consequently a devotee of all things monstrous and horrific. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute.

Editorial Reviews

Drawn entirely on blue-lined notebook paper, [My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is] a startling demonstration of Ferris's range, power and ambition. She has a portraitist's skill with tiny subtleties of expression and lighting and a New Objectivist's eye for the raw grotesquerie of bodies and their surroundings, and her illustrative technique extends from impossibly delicate hairbreadth shading to passionate marker-mashing scribbles.

The New York Times Book Review - Douglas Wolk

★ 03/13/2017
Karen loves monsters, comic books, and her tattooed, art-loving big brother, Deeze. She hates her mom’s cancer diagnosis, the cool kids at school, and being a little girl Chicago in the 1960s. She wants to be a monster, but when the upstairs neighbor, a Holocaust survivor left haunted and unstable by her experiences, dies under suspicious circumstances, Karen decides to become a detective. This stunningly ambitious and assured graphic novel, the creator’s first, slides gracefully between past and present, reality and imagination, and the shifting kingdom of children and the hard-concrete world of adults. Ferris’s writing, full of wordplay, elisions, and unpredictable revelations, suggests the cockeyed genius of Lynda Barry, comics’ most fearless chronicler of childhood. But her art, presented on lined notebook paper in the form of Karen’s own ballpoint-and-pencil sketches (though surely no real 10-year-old could draw this beautifully), is entirely her own. This is a book that surprises at every turn. It’s about the power of art, the nature of monsters, the way secrets keep unfolding, and everything else Karen’s investigations can uncover. It’s the best graphic novel to come along in recent memory. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"An extraordinary literary experience that tackles questions of racial, sexual, cultural, professional, and class identity with aplomb and aesthetic glory. Welcome to the canon, Ms. Ferris."

Vulture

"Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time."

Art Spiegelman

"No one has ever made a comic like Emil Ferris’s assured, superhumanly ambitious two-part debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. ... It threatens not merely to exceed established standards of excellence, but to set new ones."

The Guardian

"Drawn with Bic pen on lined notebook paper, this moody and ravishing graphic novel takes the form of a sketchbook diary. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, 10-year-old Karen Reyes investigates the suspicious death of her glamorous neighbor and finds troubling clues lurking close to her own home. … An eerie masterpiece of the monsters around and within us."

The New York Times — Critics’ Pick

"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris’s first graphic novel but also her first published work. ... Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form."

The New Yorker

"One of the most profound, ambitious and accomplished creative works to appear in any medium this decade. ... Rarely have words and pictures worked together so seamlessly in service of such a complex narrative."

Forbes

"A thrilling and surprisingly profound novel ... The book is a fine balance of stunning artwork and terrific writing."

Chicago Tribune

"Ferris' work fuses the style and atmosphere of noir godfather Raymond Chandler with the passionate moral intensity found beating beneath a good episode of Tales from the Crypt."

Paste

"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has all of the complexity of the finest literary fiction and breathtaking art. For what more could we ask?"

The Austin American-Statesman

"The novel tackles race, gender, and what it means to be 'monstrous' in big and small ways. It could not be more relevant to today’s climate."

Mother Jones

"This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them."

Terry Gross - NPR: Fresh Air

"An ambitious, emotional, beautifully illustrated exploration of a 10-year-old girl’s experience growing up late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is an astounding debut, weaving an intricate web of plot threads that keeps the reader compelled from beginning to end."

The A.V. Club

"Ferris’ artwork is astonishing, cross-hatching images upon images, creating a tome that feels homespun but looks consummately professional. This is an emotional, dark, visionary talent to watch."

Omnivoracious

"Each page of the book is a small masterpiece: detailed, passionate, leaking genius. Ferris’s artwork bullies and commands the reader’s attention, each page bringing her to the brink of exhaustion because the struggle between art and words is so great, and the whole is so sensorially overwhelming."

The Los Angeles Review of Books

"A graphic novel so immersive it feels almost four dimensional... A fantastical, densely cross-hatched world of Nazis and mobsters and neighborhood eccentrics, seen through the curious eyes of a 10-year-old girl."

Entertainment Weekly

"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters feels to me like a once-in-a-generation debut — a vision so clear and original that it will change the course of cartooning."

The Seattle Review of Books

Ferris' work fuses the style and atmosphere of noir godfather Raymond Chandler with the passionate moral intensity found beating beneath a good episode of Tales from the Crypt.

Paste

A thrilling and surprisingly profound novel ... The book is a fine balance of stunning artwork and terrific writing.

Chicago Tribune

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris’s first graphic novel but also her first published work. ... Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form.

The New Yorker

Drawn with Bic pen on lined notebook paper, this moody and ravishing graphic novel takes the form of a sketchbook diary. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, 10-year-old Karen Reyes investigates the suspicious death of her glamorous neighbor and finds troubling clues lurking close to her own home. … An eerie masterpiece of the monsters around and within us.

The New York Times - Critics' Pick

This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them.

Terry Gross - NPR: Fresh Air

★ 06/01/2017
Combining elements of historical fiction, family drama, a coming-of-age-tale, and a murder mystery into an unforgettable and widely acclaimed debut, author/illustrator Ferris presents the graphic diary of Karen Reyes, an artistically inclined ten-year-old girl living in 1960s Chicago with her mother and troubled older brother. Drawing from Karen's sketchbook journal, Ferris fills each and every page of this weighty first volume of a duology (Vol. 2 releases in October) with stunningly beautiful and virtuosic illustrations, exploring Karen's fears, curiosities, and more through the lens of her fascination with pulp creatures and B-movie monsters. With an incredibly rich, sprawling narrative to match the luscious illustrations, Ferris creates an absorbing and demanding magnum opus that rewards every bit of effort it takes to comprehend the scope of her vision. VERDICT This debut has already netted Ferris comparisons to (and praise from) some of the lions of the graphic novel field, and it's the rare title that actually lives up to the hype. Readers are sure to welcome, discuss, and meditate on Ferris's accomplishment, anxiously awaiting what's next. [A movie of Ferris's work is underway, with Sony Pictures recently obtaining film rights.—Ed.]—TB

Library Journal

Drawn with Bic pen on lined notebook paper, this moody and ravishing graphic novel takes the form of a sketchbook diary. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, 10-year-old Karen Reyes investigates the suspicious death of her glamorous neighbor and finds troubling clues lurking close to her own home. ... An eerie masterpiece of the monsters around and within us.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris's first graphic novel but also her first published work. ... Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form.

This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them.--Terry Gross

A thrilling and surprisingly profound novel ... The book is a fine balance of stunning artwork and terrific writing.

One of the most profound, ambitious and accomplished creative works to appear in any medium this decade. ... Rarely have words and pictures worked together so seamlessly in service of such a complex narrative.

The novel tackles race, gender, and what it means to be 'monstrous' in big and small ways. It could not be more relevant to today's climate.

No one has ever made a comic like Emil Ferris's assured, superhumanly ambitious two-part debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. ... It threatens not merely to exceed established standards of excellence, but to set new ones.

An ambitious, emotional, beautifully illustrated exploration of a 10-year-old girl's experience growing up late '60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is an astounding debut, weaving an intricate web of plot threads that keeps the reader compelled from beginning to end.

An extraordinary literary experience that tackles questions of racial, sexual, cultural, professional, and class identity with aplomb and aesthetic glory. Welcome to the canon, Ms. Ferris.

Each page of the book is a small masterpiece: detailed, passionate, leaking genius. Ferris's artwork bullies and commands the reader's attention, each page bringing her to the brink of exhaustion because the struggle between art and words is so great, and the whole is so sensorially overwhelming.

The first volume of the story clocks in at 386 pages. But at no point in the course of reading it does it feel long -- a tribute to not only Ferris's ability to suck readers into the story, but also to her effortless ability to pace the story she's telling. The result is a piece of work that is as gripping as it is emotional.

Monsters feels to me like a once-in-a-generation debut -- a vision so clear and original that it will change the course of cartooning.

Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time.--Art Spiegelman

Ferris' artwork is astonishing, cross-hatching images upon images, creating a tome that feels homespun but looks consummately professional. This is an emotional, dark, visionary talent to watch.

Ferris' work fuses the style and atmosphere of noir godfather Raymond Chandler with the passionate moral intensity found beating beneath a good episode of Tales from the Crypt.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has all of the complexity of the finest literary fiction and breathtaking art. For what more could we ask?

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris's first graphic novel but also her first published work. ... Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters feels to me like a once-in-a-generation debut -- a vision so clear and original that it will change the course of cartooning.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters has all of the complexity of the finest literary fiction and breathtaking art. For what more could we ask?

A graphic novel so immersive it feels almost four dimensional... A fantastical, densely cross-hatched world of Nazis and mobsters and neighborhood eccentrics, seen through the curious eyes of a 10-year-old girl.

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