My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
A ten-year-old monster-obsessed girl investigates her neighbor's murder in 1960s Chicago, rendered in breathtaking ballpoint-pen crosshatch on the lined pages of a spiral notebook.
đź“– Fantagraphics • Started 2017
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters presents itself as the spiral-bound composition notebook of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old horror aficionado who draws herself as a werewolf and longs for “the bite” that will transform her into an immortal monster. Set against the racially charged backdrop of late-1960s Chicago, Karen journals her investigation into the death of her beautiful, enigmatic upstairs neighbor Anka Silverberg — a Holocaust survivor whose story unfurls across cassette tapes and across decades, from the brothels of Weimar Berlin to the Nazi death camps.
Emil Ferris’s debut, published by Fantagraphics in 2017 and completed with Book Two in May 2024, is a formal marvel that redefines what a graphic novel can be. Every page is drawn in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, with crosshatched illustrations of staggering density. Karen — part detective, part art critic — climbs into the paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago to shake loose memories, and each chapter opens with a faux pulp-horror magazine cover. The result is part murder mystery, part historical reckoning, and part coming-of-age story about a queer, mixed-race girl navigating a world that considers her a monster.
Book One earned three Eisner Awards (Best Graphic Album — New, Best Writer/Artist, Best Coloring), the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, the Lynd Ward Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and France’s Fauve d’Or. Art Spiegelman hailed Ferris as “one of the most important comics artists of our time.” Book Two — a 412-page full-color conclusion set during the violent summer of 1968 — follows Karen through the Yippie-organized Festival of Life in Grant Park, the police stomping, her mother’s death, and the darkest secrets her brother Deeze has been hiding. Together, the two volumes form a single epic that The New York Times called an “eerie masterpiece.”
Perfect for fans of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis — graphic novels that use the medium to excavate history, trauma, and the beauty of being an outsider.
Created by Emil Ferris.
