my favorite thing is monsters vol 1 by emil ferris

The first volume was published by Fantagraphics on February 14, 2017. The process of creating the book was difficult, with Ferris working long hours, living frugally, and encountering publishing setbacks, such as a cancelation by one publisher and the temporary seizure of the first volume's printing at the Panama Canal. The work draws on Ferris's childhood growing up in Chicago, and her love of monsters and horror media. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for writing and began the graphic novel to help her recover in 2010, taking six years to create 700 pages.

Ferris started working on the graphic novel after contracting West Nile virus and becoming paralyzed at age forty. It portrays a young girl named Karen Reyes investigating the death of her neighbor in 1960s Chicago. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the debut graphic novel by American writer Emil Ferris. Transgression in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters becomes a way of rethinking tradition-of comics, of novels, and of graphic novels-in the broader terms of cultural history.The cover of the first volume of the graphic novel, featuring Karen's neighbor Anka In filtering its story through a young protagonist who is marginalized on all counts (age, class, race, sex, sexual orientation), Ferris's “big, ambitious (graphic) novel” is also a layered response against the criticisms of childishness levied against comics.

Her reproductions of comics covers and art works negotiate diverse visual vocabularies and their resulting aesthetic and historical scope. The book's heroine and purported author of the book touches readers and moves them through the monstrous form she imagines for herself.

This article examines how Ferris's book is unaffected by negative reactions to this transgressiveness, championing transgression and ignored voices as the mode of expression best suited to the big, ambitious novel of our times. In his discussion of the “big, ambitious novel,” James Wood dismisses both male and female authors but singles out Zadie Smith's White Teeth for most of his critique of what he terms “hysterical realism.” For Wood, recent long novels display too much imagination but not enough substance and depth of character the new novel has become “a picture of life.” With its deliberate foregrounding of inhumanness and spectacularity, Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters commits many of Wood's list of transgressions against the traditional novel.

My favorite thing is monsters vol 1 by emil ferris