Telling the Truth through Fiction: A Conversation with Emil Ferris about "My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two"

Elisa Shoenberger

June 3

Like the next movie installment of Godzilla or Dracula, Emil Ferris's magnum opus graphic novel is here. Taking place right after award-winning My Favorite Thing is Monsters ends, My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes as she makes sense of her world in 1960s Chicago. As in the first book, this successive story successfully blends multiple genres such as dark family secrets, coming of age, crime, and character study through Ferris's unique, detailed, and colorful ballpoint line drawings.

Told through Karen's own notebook of her drawings, Book Two opens with Karen learning more about the dark secrets in her own family in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. She and her brother Diego "Deez" Zapata are trying to figure out life after their mother passed from cancer. She continues to draw herself as a monster in a trench coat as she tries to figure out the world around her, whether it's better understanding the mystery of the Green Man symbols all over Chicago buildings or solving the murder (and life) of her troubled upstairs neighbor Anka. Along the way, Karen learns more about the people around her from her brother's acquaintance, Jeremy "The Brain" Alvarez, as well as her kindred spirit and love interest, Shelly, who loves monsters like she does.

I spoke with the magnificent Emil Ferris about her art and writing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Elisa Shoenberger

Why is this story important?

Emil Ferris

The very nature of fiction is to create empathy. I'm not saying sympathy necessarily, because I have characters with whom you might not have sympathy, but you would have empathy. You would understand where they came from and understand the choices that they made.

I had a moment with my child's friends at a party on her birthday. I was just asking them questions about World War II and the Holocaust. They were twelve years old, but they had no idea about these things. It really concerned me. Some people were saying the amount of information being given to kids was lessening. We've seen things like a school district deciding that Maus shouldn't be available in the school library.

It said to me that we're deciding to forget something we shouldn't forget. We care about what happens to other human beings. Fiction is the way that we retain that muscle. And if we don't do that exercise with fiction, then that muscle becomes flaccid and eventually atrophies. What do we become afterwards?

Elisa Shoenberger

Obviously, your book talks about monsters. At one point, Karen contemplates the good and bad monsters of the world. I think of the quotation: "Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster."

Emil Ferris

In the negative sense, monstrosity is often invisible. In other words, we've seen the full dimension of John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer's monstrosity. Would you have seen that if you had met them walking down the street? The answer is no, you probably wouldn't.

We've decided that what looks to be monstrous to us is monstrous. This person looks Arab or Jewish or Black or Hispanic or white. We've decided this person is monstrous. Every single one of us is a monster to someone else, right?

At the core of all of our troubles in the world, we don't really seem to understand that we are one spirit, divided by two walls of skin, our skin and the skin of the other. We contain within us the spirit that is collective.

We've allowed materialist science to dictate to us what the truth is, but the vast majority of us know that we're connected and that that's powerful. If we were in full possession of that reality, then we would have to address each other very differently than we do. We would have to love each other. I believe, unfortunately, the only way humanity will survive is because the vast majority of us will decide to love each other.

Elisa Shoenberger

Well said. In both volumes, there are drawings of masterpieces at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as images of monsters. What made you decide to juxtapose this imagery?

Emil Ferris

I don't think there's a difference between what people consider to be fine art and some of the fantastic illustrations that I've seen. It's a story we're told that doesn't really embrace the truth of story painting. The fact is that most of what's in the Uffizi Galleries right now is essentially illustration. It is one painter being commissioned to paint Judith or St. George [and other figures that were] very popular through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for a religious figure who was essentially the editor or the publisher of the time. This [work] was going to be published in the cathedral.

We've always had the system where people have hired other people to represent images that they wanted. Goya's work stands really supreme to me in so many ways, but also the work of Bernie Wrightson [who was known for his horror and movie art.]

Elisa Shoenberger

Do you think it's because every new art form is always maligned? I'm thinking of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent about the dangers of comic books to children.

Emil Ferris

When you read what he wrote, he really is making the case that this combination of the visual and the textual is very, very powerful. He might be wrong about his conclusions regarding it, but he's absolutely right that the combination is powerful because it harnesses the power of both hemispheres of the brain. It's essentially a magic spell, very much like what the Egyptians were doing, and people [in the past] have done.

We see it in the Lascaux Caves. My deepest sense is that there was a storyteller who held fire near these images so they would move. So many of these cave paintings were in positions where if you wanted to see this image where you would have to risk something and in doing so, you would heighten your excitement. You would be told a story and the story would be alive in front of you. This would be tremendously powerful. All hemispheres of the brain and your adrenaline would be activated. That's the fear he had about this medium.

There are people who don't want us to experience humanizing things, because they have decided that our future is artificial intelligence and we are to be subservient to it. We need to be aware of the fact that our humanity is not valued by many people in positions of power.

If we recognize that, then we can better read the things that they do and don't want us to have. When there is something we were not supposed to have, it's something that is incredibly dismissed.

Why do we dismiss and denigrate this thing that is so powerful? It has the power to speak in a greater, more impactful, more incisive, more indelible way than any of the propagandist messaging that is meant to teach us to believe in the division between us.

Elisa Shoenberger

That reminds me of how science fiction and horror (and monsters) were often able to express things that were taboo in the past and often under the radar.

Emil Ferris

There's the saying, often incorrectly attributed to Margaret Atwood, that says "science fiction tells truths that no one else can tell." I remember so many early episodes of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica that were definitely preparing us for the reality of artificial intelligence and its potentially deleterious effects on our humanity. We're being channeled towards a future that, if we're not aware of what is being planned for us, will leave us rather shocked and extremely dismayed. Science fiction has this capacity to tell us stories that we need to know.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein can be read in the context of what's happening now with artificial intelligence. It is the new monster. We will have to recognize there are tremendously important decisions to be made. If we allow the worst people to make those decisions, the future will not be good.

Elisa Shoenberger

What else do you want me to know? Any final words?

Emil Ferris

I want to say to artists, whom I believe to be my tribe—I consider writers, poets, chefs, parents, everyone who creates worlds to be artists—I do not want you to give up. I do not want you to give up. No matter what you're going through. I do not want you to give up.