My Favorite Thing Is Monsters - Softcover

Ferris, Emil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606999591 ISBN 13: 9781606999592

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Review:

“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

“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

“A thrilling and surprisingly profound novel ... The book is a fine balance of stunning artwork and terrific writing.”
- Chicago Tribune

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

About this edition

• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1606999591
• ISBN 13: 9781606999592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416