“My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” Vol 2 (of 2) by Emil Ferris
Notes on Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Books One and Two by Nick Throkelson
Editor’s Note: In keeping with the unconventional spirit of the work being reviewed, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson presents a review within a collection of notes on the two-part epic work by Emil Ferris.
Emil Ferris draws over rules. Ha!
The following notes assume some familiarity with Emil Ferris’s comics masterpiece, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, published by Fantagraphics, now available in two volumes. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, suffice it to say that it’s a story set in the 1960s, as told and drawn by young Karen Reyes, about her coming of age in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Karen identifies and depicts herself as a monster, not (except in one instance) as the innocent and plucky girl that others see. And she tells her story in a notebook, whose binder coil and holes and rules are visible on every page.
“My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” Vol 1 (of 2) by Emil Ferris
Karen’s self-portrait. Karen draws herself not just as a monster but as a stereotype of a monster. Her jaw is spherical and her teeth are perfect cones, while the heads of other major characters like Deeze, Franklin, and especially Anka are malleable and protean — they react and adapt to circ*mstances. In that one instance where Karen appears as she is seen by others, her face becomes protean too, even as its irregular shape clearly justifies the geometric shape we usually see. The set of her mouth and jaw express hard-won courage in both versions. see.
The mob. At the end of the opening sequence in Book 1, the ugly citizens with pitchforks hunting monsters are called “M.O.B.,” which stands for “Mean, Ordinary, Boring.” What a perfect description of unfree America! Karen says, “What freaks me out is that one day they could turn me into one of them.”
Karen does not fear the mob the way the mob fears her. She writes, “Humans are afraid of death and it makes them frantic. The undead don’t have a ‘self-esteem problem.’” Does the fear of death negatively correlate with self-esteem? Actually, all the major characters in Monsters have a self-esteem problem, but what unites the (sympathetic) ones is that they acknowledge their inner monstrousness instead of pretending it’s not there.
The neighbors. Karen and her mother and older brother Deeze (Diego Zapata Reyes) live in an apartment building with a number of offbeat people. Mrs. Gronan, the gangster’s wife who lives upstairs and has the hots for Deeze, is introduced in Book 1 as an unattractive woman so fabulously decked out that she looks sexy. In Book 2 Karen observes that Mrs. Gronan is pretty as long as she doesn’t try to smile.
Anka’s eyes. Anka, a beautiful holocaust survivor married to a jazz musician, also lives upstairs until, early in Book 1, she is murdered. Eyes—intense, beautiful, and threatening—appear throughout both books, but the eyes of Anka are the saddest.
Hatch lines. The blue and red pen lines used to draw Anka’s skin could almost be her arteries and veins. These complementary colors blend and cancel each other out, so that her face looks like porcelain. In a flashback, she arrives at a Nazi concentration camp, perhaps Theresienstadt, set up to look like a humane facility in order to fool visitors. But the bakery worker is a mannequin with cracks in his “skin,” which remind us of the knife wounds on the face of Karen’s Black classmate Franklin, inflicted by a hom*ophobic gang when he was young.
Franklin’s face. Karen says, “If all the pieces fell away, I got the idea that what was inside him was a big ball of white light.” His scarred face is reminiscent of Frankenstein’s Monster, or the Willem DaFoe character in Poor Things. Franklin illustrates Karen’s idea that Frankenstein was a “skin-tight Prometheus variously coded as Black and queer” (odd language for a 1960s kid, but no matter). Franklin’s scars were inflicted to destroy, unlike the ones on Mary Shelley’s monster that are the marks of an attempt to create life.
Franklin as Françoise in Book 2 hides her scars with makeup, and turns out to be the most soulful Patsy Cline imitator anybody has ever heard.
Commercial art. At one point in Book 2 we see part of an illustration Deeze did for a science fiction novel by his friend Jeffrey Alvarez, a.k.a. The Brain. This sets up several pages concerning Deeze’s second career as a commercial artist (in his day job he’s an enforcer for a loan shark). Deeze may well have created many of the monster comics covers that Karen uses to set off sections of her story. A treat. For comics nerds like me it is enjoyable to learn that Deeze plagiarizes himself. He creates a frightening monster called The Lurch for one of his comics covers and then repurposes it as the repulsive mouth of a different monster, Mothman. This is reminiscent of real life comics legends like Wallace Wood who plagiarized themselves when pressed for time.
Another treat. We see many covers of a horror comic called Ghastly, and they feature a cartoony master of ceremonies in the upper-left-hand corner. This character could have been drawn by Harvey Kurtzman. Similarly, in real life, the emcee character that appeared on covers of the great 1970s-80s Eerie comics series was drawn by Jack Davis, Kurtzman’s frequent collaborator. Image quotation. The re-drawing and re-purposing of art occurs constantly in Monsters, sometimes based on comics imagery but just as often based on the “high art” that Karen encounters at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in Deeze’s art books.
Not every quotation from a famous artwork is acknowledged as such. A parochial school art teacher, remembered fondly by Karen in Book 2, is first seen as a witch on the cover of Dread (another magazine with a comical M.C. in the corner). In Karen’s memory she is a sweet-looking lady, but on the Dread cover she looks just like the grotesque profiles of Jesus’s tormenters in Hieronymus Bosch’s Carrying of the Cross. Grotesques. Ferris’s (i.e., Karen’s) Chicago is full of racists, hom*ophobes, sad*sts, the ravaged and empty. One group portrait of the surly M.O.B. looks like an homage to George Grosz’s 1920s Berlin etchings. A contradictory image, of everyday Uptown people on the street, has a caption telling us that most of them are migrants and all of them are riders on the “Royal Shaft Express,” as Deeze calls it. These faces are ravaged but not empty.
Slouching towards androgyny. After recreating a painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx in which the Sphinx is a pretty woman, Karen imagines Oedipus saying, “I’m scared of the part of me that is you.” The Sphinx replies, “That part is bigger than you think.” It turns out that women know, and men need to know, that we are all part male and part female. Karen and Deeze illustrate this by mirroring each other.
Hey hey we’re the. Karen says of one of the first girls she crushes on: “Missy’s bedroom used to be monster-themed but now it’s covered in Monkees posters and these big horrible flowers” — Monkees and stylized 1960s flowers being emblems of sexual and sentimental self-presentation, as opposed to monsters that function as emblems of unrestrained nature and difference. As Peter Tork’s brother I defensively object to the idea that the Monkees were fakes, but that’s another story.
Fire. Karen, usually stoical and observant, becomes an aggressive monster flame-thrower when she learns that Deeze has been hiding their mother’s terminal illness from her. Karen expects to be betrayed by the M.O.B., but not by those she loves.
Paintings. Karen and Deeze bond over their shared (or negotiated) responses to the treasures of the Art Institute of Chicago. The magical romantic projection of themselves into the academic story-paintings is consistent with the theme of adolescent rites of passage.
Ambroise Fredeau’s painting The Blessed Gillaume DeToulouse Tormented by Demons (1657) certainly fits. In Karen’s reading, the painting says that good monsters frighten us because they can’t control how they look, and bad monsters frighten us because they demand control.
The minor character Salvatore is a bad monster observing us from the top floor of a skyscraper, and he is simultaneously German, Italian, and Japanese, i.e., the Axis powers.
The Greens. Anka has a “Viewmistress” covering the bullet hole in her chest. Karen steps through the hole and finds more paintings. As a near-contemporary of Karen, I identify them as the academic paintings we were taught to disparage in the days of triumphant modernism. (The paintings’ dates are 1790, 1865, 1875, 1886, and 1906, bringing us right up to the surrealist revolt.)
This sequence culminates in a two-page spread, “Green Island,” a fever dream of solace where a branch overhanging a rapids turns into a skeleton’s hand groping a breast or buttock. For me, Green Island evokes the “Green Door” of H.G. Wells and Jim Lowe (Wells wrote a story in 1906 of an elusive green door leading to happiness, and Lowe had a hit record in 1956 where he couldn’t get through the Green Door leading to a rocking party.)
A Cool Breeze. The sky in Alpine Scene by Gustave Doré, as depicted by Karen, is full of fuzzy stars “like the tangled strands of pearls in Mama’s jumbled jewelry box.” The actual painting is set in daytime and is only dark because of the towering evergreens in what looks like the Black Forest. The original, like Karen’s version, has a tiny male figure as its focal point, but it also has a second figure, perhaps a sweetheart, that Karen leaves out. The famously gloomy artist Doré sees companionship and a cool breeze in the shade, where Karen sees solitude and mortal dread.
Victor. At the end of Book 1, Karen turns and sees Deeze but it’s not Deeze, it’s Victor, the twin brother that Deeze killed (by accident?) when they were children. Victor, who will become an important character in Book 2, seems to float among the fuzzy stars and the eyes of Anka, not to
mention the holes in the notebook pages. Sexuality of the monster trope. In the Dracula story, woman’s irrationality/hysteria is the flaw that lets evil insinuate itself into polite society. In Monsters, society is never polite and Karen’s awakening gayness is the armor that makes society bearable, at the same time that it is her authentic self.
Chicago. I love all the drawings of Chicago and wish there were more. In one full-page drawing of Karen and Deeze on the bridge over the Chicago River, near the end of Book 2, the golden evening light from the West butts up against the pale blue light coming off of Lake Michigan to the East. Not naturalistic but it certainly puts you there. But no act of virtuosity exists for its own sake in Monsters, except in the sense that Karen might like to show off her drawing chops sometimes. That poignant picture of the Chicago River at twilight feels like it’s there to foreshadow the imminent ending of Deeze and Karen’s rich Chicago life.
The invisible man. In Book 2 the lost or missing father of Karen and Deeze materializes as a vicious tramp and a surrogate for the biblical Holofernes, the supposedly invincible warrior beheaded by Judith so that her community could survive. Many different paintings of Judith killing Holofernes are reproduced, mirroring Karen’s obsession with, and ambivalence about, violence and female power.
Later. The notebook/journal format of Monsters allows major story points to be implied or passed over, not stated or concluded plainly. It’s as if Karen says to herself, “I will never know what happened when I took Deeze’s gun and went looking for my father, but never mind, let me move on to the stuff I’m actually trying to understand.”
In Book 2 we frequently hear some form of “I’ll tell you more about this later,” which doesn’t happen.
Another example. The episode in Book 2 featuring “the preacher guy” and his female followers seems too brief after such a tantalizing setup, but I appreciate the idea that these sinister characters are going to do what they do, for better or for worse, and we don’t need to know what that is. Unanswered questions feel more true to life than the typical wrapping-it-up ending to a murder mystery.
Except for this. In Book 2 we learn that Deeze is a killer, and we already know Anka is a murder victim. Also in Book 2, Deeze denies that he killed Anka. Well, actually, he denies that he meant to kill her. But even after two fat comic books, we don’t know how or why she was shot, do we?
We do hear, or seem to hear, a jealous Deeze say to Anka, “I’ve always been a big distraction for you, haven’t I? And then you throw me a look and I come running. I should put a goddam bullet through your heart!”
On the other hand. We learn late in Book 2 that the police wanted to frame Chubb, the ventriloquist in the building, for Anka’s murder. This doesn’t make sense if Deeze was the killer, does it? The cops all have it in for Deeze because Deeze’s father, Frank, was once a cop and he wants his former fellow police to make Deeze suffer for the death of Victor.
And on the other other hand, just because somebody wants to frame you doesn’t mean you’re innocent. Could it have been the lovesick ventriloquist, impersonating Deeze, that threatened to shoot Anka, and did so? I suppose we’ll never know.
The sixties. The main thing we know from Book 2 is that Karen and Deeze leave Chicago, which seems all but impossible except they’re being hunted by the police and, anyway, leaving home is what young people did in the 1960s.
From one angle, Monsters is a perfect sixties story, “the sixties without apology.” We monsters of that era needn’t apologize for being freaks, for rebelling, for facing sexuality head-on. Ferris doesn’t say this but it occurs to me that we have spent all the decades since then wondering whether we may have been turned “into one of them.”
