Beautiful Monsters: The Art of Emil Ferris

In the highly anticipated My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two, the densely layered artwork of Emil Ferris transports us to Chicago in 1968, a year of violence and protest. In its seedy Uptown neighborhood, 10-year-old werewolf aficionado Karen Reyes continues her private investigation into the murder of her beautiful neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor. Still absorbing the shock of the recent death of her mother, Karen slowly becomes aware that she is queer and that her beloved brother Deeze has been hiding dark secrets from her.

Ferris tells this story in the form of Karen’s notebook, drawn with dynamic cross-hatching in ball-point pen on notebook paper, the only materials Karen can afford: “The lines on a notebook — they might look like bars, but they’re ladders,” Ferris says, “You can defy them by drawing right over them. Nothing confines you in that notebook. And I knew that I had to use a ballpoint pen — the only choice you have, but then you make everything you can with it. That’s really what the book is: It’s that this person, my little Karen, she makes the very best out of whatever she’s got.”

Ferris holds an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her parents first met as students. Her debut graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book One, garnered multiple awards, including two Ingnaz awards, three Eisner Awards, The Lambda Literary Award, The Lynd Ward Prize, and the prestigious Fauve d’Or at the Festival d'Angoulême.

Curated by Kim Munson, editor of the Eisner nominated anthology Comic Art in Museums, curator of Women in Comics and Collen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman. Her latest books, Conversations with Denis Kitchen and Conversations with Trina Robbins are forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in 2025.

Tribute to Emil’s Father

“He fought for me when nobody else did,” Ferris said. “He always told me you’ll be really good at what you do because you care about it so much. Those words from someone I respected enormously were tremendously important to me.”

Her father, one of her greatest sources of inspiration, was a gifted designer who created beloved toys like the Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots, Simon, the Masterpiece board game, and the iconic Mickey Mouse phone. He taught her, for example, the importance of the repetition of shape — a trick she tried to deploy in her pages: “The eye gets trained for the shape, and even if the eye doesn’t perceive that they’re seeing it again, there’s a sense of reassurance.”

“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

Love, Sacrifice, and Monsters

Drawing from varied sources such as the Penitente art of New Mexico, Hammer horror films, The Twilight Zone, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Dickens, and Dr. Who, monsters really are Emil’s favorite thing, although she makes a distinction between two types: “good monsters―those that can't help being different―and rotten monsters (not sure they even deserve to be called the sacred “m” word, truly) those people whose behavior is designed around objectives of control and subjugation. I don't really think they deserve the title of monster. In my mind that's an honorable title. It represents struggle and wisdom bought at a high, painful price.” The struggle can be seen in the faces of her characters in these portraits of Karen, her brother Deeze, Blemmy (a toy that talks in her dreams), Mrs. Gronan, the wife of a local mobster, Shelly, Karen’s new BFF and potential love interest, and Stan Silverberg, husband of the late Anka Silverberg.

In the rest of this gallery, Ferris’s skilled illustration and storytelling are highlighted in sequences that show us both types of monsters in action, with an undercurrent of love, violence, and sacrifice. The Biblical heroine Judith explains to Karen how she rescued her village from slaughter by decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes after a long night of sex and wine. Karen listens to a tape recording of her deceased neighbor, Anka, explaining how she escaped extermination in the camps of the Nazis by becoming a child prostitute and how she later risked her life by entering a concentration camp shower to rescue six other young girls from certain death. In Chicago, Deeze tells Karen about his physically abusive father and the accidental shooting of his brother Victor while they gaze out over the railing of the Michigan Avenue Bridge. Karen also witnesses the violent beating of anti-Vietnam War protesters during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

“The Bite” was part of Emil’s Eisner winning Our Favorite Thing Is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters published by Fantagraphics for Free Comic Book Day 2019.

Scary, Scary Night (with free-standing Vincent) and portrait gallery

Downstairs gallery: Visions, Nightmares, and Clowns

Monsters and horror are the theme of this gallery. We have a nightmare sequence featuring the mascots of the Chicago Art Institute – the Harris Lions, a vision of the wolf spirit Karen sees after she sustains a head injury, and Mrs. Gronan’s collection of clown themed objects.

“Karen’s copies” of monster magazine covers are one of the delights of Ferris’s books. When asked if her versions of these horror covers were her idealized memories of 60’s magazine covers, she replied: “Frankly, there’s a bit of Men’s Adventure, a dash of The Addams Family, and a healthy dollop of The Twilight Zone in them. So, yes, I guess they are a bit more risky than a lot of horror covers were back then, but there were some pretty great ones then, too.”

She lists her influences as the “Bride of Frankenstein, lots of things by Val Lewton, almost every Hammer film, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria, and of course, The Wolfman. On television, I loved The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, The Outer Limits and, yes, Doctor Who. Art Spiegelman. Fine artists like Delvaux and Van Gogh. I really liked Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Dickens, ghost stories, Edgar Allan Poe, the Lang books of fairy tales (which could often be really disturbing and sometimes outright frightening).”

The Toy Army of Salvation

When Ferris was a child, her parents didn’t have money for expensive toys. The neighborhood Salvation Army store had a large bin of cooking utensils, doll parts, and other odd bits for 10 cents apiece. She would buy these parts and construct her own toys, which she still enjoys doing. For this exhibit, she created a story about the toys and Karen interacting with them.