my favorite thing is monsters vol 1 by emil ferris

But then Karen’s life is touched by real, not fantastical horror: her neighbor Anka is found shot to death in her apartment. Her monster mania touches every part of her life: she sketches the sapphic countess of Dracula’s Daughter approving of her tender courtship of Missy, and likens her absent, deadbeat father to the Invisible Man, whose menacing presence can be felt even when he can’t be seen. In the book’s most charming conceit, Karen depicts herself as a adorable little werewolf girl in a flowered dress, a misunderstood monster lost in a mob (actually an abbreviation for “mean, ordinary, and boring”) of everyday people. A child in a multi-ethnic family during the last days of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, and a girl gradually realizing her deeper feelings for her best friend Missy, Karen is struggling to find her place in a world that is much, much bigger than she is. Like many outsiders, Karen is drawn to the monsters of Horror Theater and Ghastly magazine because of the way they represented the other, or people ostracized from society. The book is presented as the journal of Karen Reyes, an artistically gifted 10-year-old girl documenting her life in late 1960s Chicago. My Favorite Thing is Monsters is the kind of debut graphic novel that lands with the impact of a meteor-the same meteor that carried the slimy, flesh-eating Blob from outer space, we can assume. Eventually my aunt voiced exasperated concern over my reading habits: what could a young girl, soon to face the metamorphosis of puberty, unsure in her own skin, and already learning that to be a girl is to be different–see in monsters? When I heard a one-sentence summary for My Favorite Thing is Monsters (young, monster-obsessed girl tries to solve the mystery of her Holocaust survivor neighbor’s death), I immediately zeroed in on Emil Ferris’s graphic novel with my x-ray vision.

Even though I hadn’t seen those movies (yet), I would check out the book again and again, mesmerized by Lon Chaney’s transformation into the Phantom of the Opera and the sad saga of lycanthrope Larry Talbot.

Its dust cover lost to the ages (or ripped apart by another anonymous, sticky-fingered child), I remember it as a black hardcover book, mysterious and untitled, full of pictures and summaries of classic Universal horror films like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Werewolf of London. In elementary school, I was enchanted by a library book about monsters.

My favorite thing is monsters vol 1 by emil ferris