Emil Ferris's Graphic Novel 'My Favorite Thing Is Monsters' Wins Gran Guinigi at Lucca Comics

Emil Ferris's debut graphic novel 'My Favorite Thing Is Monsters' (Italian edition: 'La mia cosa preferita sono i mostri', Bao Publishing, 2018) has won the Gran Guinigi award for best graphic novel published in Italy in 2018 at Lucca Comics. The book, set in Chicago between 1967 and 1968, follows young Karen Reyes, a Mexican-Irish girl who loves monster movies and investigates the suspicious death of her neighbor, German Jewish woman Anka Silverberg. Ferris, born in 1962 in Chicago, is the daughter of painter Eleanor Spiess-Ferris. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as an illustrator and toy designer. In 2001, she was paralyzed from the waist down due to West Nile virus, losing speech and use of her right hand. She recovered and created the graphic novel, which has won the Lambda Literary Award, Eisner Award, and two Ignatz Awards. The work is praised for its virtuosic ballpoint pen drawings, cross-hatching, and multistream narrative alternating between Karen's present in Vietnam War-era Chicago and Anka's past in Nazi Germany. It includes direct citations of artworks by Füssli, Delacroix, Grosz, Dix, Seurat, Caillebotte, Gérôme, Monet, Correggio, Cranach the Elder, Goya, Doré, and Utamaro. The book is 416 pages, costs €29, and has an ISBN of 9788832730692.