Emil Ferris

Emil Ferris grew up in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood during the roiling social upheaval of the 1960s, absorbing the monster movies, pulp horror magazines, and outsider culture that would later define her artistic voice. Her parents — surrealist painter Eleanor Spiess-Ferris and toy designer Mike Ferris, who created the classic Mickey Mouse rotary phone — met as students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and art was never a question in Ferris’s life. Born with scoliosis, she spent much of her childhood in body casts, drawing obsessively in notebooks and forging bonds with the misfits and survivors who populated her neighborhood. “I was also severely hunchbacked, which is why I loved monsters,” she told Chicago Magazine.

After a career as a freelance illustrator and toy sculptor — designing McDonald’s Happy Meal figurines and dolls for Tokyo’s Takara Tomy — Ferris’s life was upended in 2001 when a mosquito bite gave her West Nile virus. She was paralyzed from the waist down and lost the use of her right hand. Her six-year-old daughter Ruby duct-taped a pen to her hand and said, “Do it anyway.” That moment of ferocious love became the catalyst for everything that followed. Ferris enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earned her BFA and MFA, and began writing the story she’d carried for decades: a girl who longs to become a monster so she can save the people she loves.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters — published by Fantagraphics in 2017 after 48 publisher rejections — is told through the spiral-bound diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, a bisexual, monster-obsessed girl in 1960s Chicago who investigates the murder of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor. Drawn entirely in ballpoint pen crosshatching on lined notebook paper, the book’s visual language is unlike anything in comics: paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago become characters, pulp monster magazine covers introduce chapters, and the line between the real and the fantastic dissolves. Art Spiegelman called Ferris “one of the most important comics artists of our time.” The book won the 2018 Eisner Awards for Best Graphic Album — New, Best Writer/Artist, and Best Coloring, plus the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, the Lynd Ward Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and France’s Fauve d’Or at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Book Two arrived in May 2024 to a comics world that had been waiting seven years. At 412 pages, it picks up in the violent Chicago summer of 1968 — the Festival of Life, the police riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — as Karen wrestles with her mother’s death, her brother Deeze’s secrets, and the truth about Anka Silverberg’s heroic past in Nazi Germany. The complete two-volume story sold over 100,000 copies and was optioned by Sony Pictures (Sam Mendes was in early talks to direct). In 2024, Ferris was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and her forthcoming projects include a Monsters prequel, Records of the Damned, and the illustrated noir A. Rosenbloom and the Marionette Murders, both for Pantheon Books.

Perfect for fans of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis — comics that use the medium’s full expressive range to grapple with history, identity, and the monsters we carry inside.

Explore Emil Ferris’s comics: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, FCBD 2019: Our Favorite Thing Is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.