Local artist and author Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a knotty, richly drawn graphic novel that blends memoir, pulp horror, detective fiction, and historical drama. It’s set on mock notebook pages—like Syllabus, a recent comic from former longtime Reader contributor Lynda Barry. Ferris uses panels and word balloons in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, but an equal amount of space is given to illustrations of a type more often seen in children’s storybooks. The aesthetic approach pays off for a narrative that balances heaviness and playfulness.
Ferris’s portraits emphasize distorted features and sunken cheeks, and renderings of the city’s architecture are similarly illustrated. Ornate rooflines and sophisticated terra-cotta surfaces are exhaustively detailed in Ferris’s penned depictions of Uptown Station, the Uptown Broadway Building facade, and the Riviera Theatre. Karen’s written remembrance of Silverberg curls around these spellbinding settings.
By Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
