A short life of the author
Emil Ferris (born 1962 in Chicago) is an American cartoonist and illustrator whose debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) is one of the most singular achievements in the history of the form — a sprawling, visually hallucinatory, emotionally devastating work drawn entirely in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, presenting itself as the journal of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl growing up in the Uptown neighbourhood of Chicago in the late 1960s. The book won the Fauve d’Or at the Angoulême International Comics Festival (the most prestigious prize in international comics) and three Eisner Awards, and was immediately recognised as a masterpiece whose ambition, technique, and emotional range placed it alongside Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home in the graphic novel canon.
Life and Career
Ferris grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the daughter of a father who worked as a taxidermist and a mother she has described as a “monster fan” who nurtured her love of horror films, pulp magazines, and the macabre. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked for years as a freelance illustrator and toy designer, creating monster figurines — a career that fed directly into the visual vocabulary of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.
In 2001, at age thirty-nine, Ferris contracted West Nile virus from a mosquito bite. The illness left her partially paralysed, initially unable to hold a pen. She taught herself to draw again by taping a pen to her hand and slowly, painstakingly rebuilding her motor control. The recovery took years, and the experience of losing and regaining her ability to draw — the medium through which she understood the world — became part of the deep structure of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which is itself a book about how art and monsters and imagination can be tools for survival.
She enrolled in the MFA programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in her forties, and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters grew out of her thesis work. The book took over fifteen years to complete. It was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2017 and was an immediate critical sensation.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 2 appeared in 2024 after years of delays, continuing Karen’s story and the interleaved narrative of Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor whose story Karen is investigating.
Major Works and Themes
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it is a murder mystery: Karen Reyes, a self-identified monster kid who imagines herself as a werewolf, investigates the apparent suicide of her upstairs neighbour, Anka Silverberg. But the investigation opens into a labyrinth of interconnected stories — Anka’s experiences in Nazi Germany, Karen’s own family secrets, the social and racial tensions of 1960s Chicago, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Karen’s dawning awareness of her own queerness — all rendered in the visual idiom of a child’s obsessive, genre-saturated imagination.
The ballpoint pen technique is not a limitation but a formal argument: the lined paper, the marginal doodles, the smudges and cross-hatching create a world that is simultaneously childlike and virtuosic. Ferris’s command of composition, perspective, and visual reference is extraordinary — pages reference Dürer, Goya, Klimt, Bosch, and horror movie posters with equal facility, filtered through Karen’s ten-year-old sensibility. The “monster” motif is both literal (Karen loves monster magazines, horror films, and creature features) and metaphorical (the real monsters are fascism, racism, poverty, abuse, and the violence that adults visit on children and on each other).
The book is also a profound meditation on art-making itself — on the idea that drawing is a way of seeing, that the notebook is a space where the world can be reorganised and made bearable, that monsters (the ones we choose, the ones we create) are a language for experiences that resist conventional narration.
Critical Reception
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters was received as an instant masterpiece. It won the Fauve d’Or at Angoulême (2018), the Eisner Awards for Best Graphic Album, Best Writer/Artist, and Best Coloring (2018), the Ignatz Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications. Critics praised its formal ambition, its emotional depth, and Ferris’s ballpoint pen technique as a genuine innovation in the medium.
Key Works
- My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017)
- My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 2 (2024)
Collecting Ferris
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017, Fantagraphics Books) is one of the most important graphic novels of the 2010s and a strong collectible. The first edition, first printing is identified by the Fantagraphics imprint and first printing statement. Fine copies bring $40–$80; signed copies command $100–$250. Ferris signs at comics festivals (particularly at Angoulême and the major US conventions) and at bookshop events, but she is not a prolific signer — her health limits extensive touring — making signed copies genuinely desirable.
Original artwork from the book — the ballpoint pen pages on lined notebook paper — is extraordinary, and individual pages have sold for significant sums in the illustration art market. Given the fifteen-year gestation of the work, each page represents an enormous investment of creative labour, which is reflected in market prices.
Volume 2 (2024, Fantagraphics) first editions are more readily available at $20–$40. The pair together constitutes the complete work and is the natural collecting unit.