Do you know who is Emil Ferris? Do you know her book, My Favorite Thing is Monsters? Have you read the reviews?

"Her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form."    The New Yorker

"This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them."     Terry Gross, NPR: Fresh Air

"One of the most profound, ambitious and accomplished creative works to appear in any medium this decade. ... Rarely have words and pictures worked together so seamlessly in service of such a complex narrative."     Forbes

"No one has ever made a comic like Emil Ferris’s assured, superhumanly ambitious two-part debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. It threatens not merely to exceed established standards of excellence, but to set new ones."     The Guardian

"Each page of the book is a small masterpiece: detailed, passionate, leaking genius. Ferris’s artwork bullies and commands the reader’s attention, each page bringing her to the brink of exhaustion because the struggle between art and words is so great, and the whole is so sensorially overwhelming."     The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time."     Art Spiegelman
 

What a world of characters Ferris brings to life! Anka, the soulful Chicago murder victim whose past we visit in a Weimar brothel and a Nazi death camp. Deeze Reyes, the irresistible tattooed gigolo, probably a murderer, but definitely the best big brother a girl could want. His little sister, Karen, a budding lesbian who is Ferris’s alter-ego, who sees herself as a werewolf in a shylock’s fedora and trench coat. Their mother, dying of cancer, who speaks with bunnies. Franklin, the Black transvestite who resembles Frankenstein but sees himself reflected in Cranach’s painting of Magdalena of Saxony. To name a few. 

"I think of them as on a path towards redemption, and that's what I want all my characters to be."

Ferris's ability to endow life to scratches on paper is uncanny. It amazes us. But what really moves us is her tenderness. She loves her characters with a lover’s love, a mother’s love. She allows us to see the best in them. On the way to the camps, crammed into a cattle car of desperate captives, Anka is consoled by a Jew. “The man reached through the bars and scooped snow. One by one the people came forward. As I watched this, I realized the man was on the Third Path. Despite the fact that he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t accept disorder, the man wasn’t creating fear or suffering in anyone…. I remember how the brims of our hats knocked together, until I took mine off.”