My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two

by Emil Ferris

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Everyone loved Book One of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, and now Emil Ferris is back with Book Two. This continues right where the first book left off — a murder mystery, a family drama, a monster tale, a queer coming-of-age story and so much more.

The most anticipated graphic novel of 2024, concluding the story of young Karen Reyes, the most inspiring “monster” in contemporary fiction.

Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two is the eagerly awaited conclusion to one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of the past decade. Presented as the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her beloved and enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold.

In Book Two, dark mysteries past and present continue to abound in the tumultuous and violent Chicago summer of 1968. Young Karen attends a protest in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate Anka’s recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka's heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity, the death of her mother, and the secrets she suspects her brother Deez of hiding. Ferris’s exhilarating cast of characters experience revelations and epiphanies that both resolve and deepen the mysteries visited upon them earlier. Visually, the story is told in Ferris's inimitable style that breathtakingly and seamlessly combines panel-to-panel storytelling and cartoon montages filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster mag iconography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683969273
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	05/28/2024
Pages:	412
Sales rank:	13,076
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 10.50(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Emil Ferris grew up in Chicago during the turbulent 1960s, where she still lives, and is consequently a devotee of all things monstrous and horrific. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/26/2024

The much-anticipated conclusion to Ferris’s dazzling debut proves a triumph. In it, readers are invited deeper into the mind of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old girl in 1960s Chicago who sees the world through a kaleidoscope of fine art, classic movie and pulp fiction monsters, and mystery. Karen now lives with her older brother, Deeze, a brilliant but troubled artist in danger of being shipped off to Vietnam. As she continues to investigate the death of her neighbor, Holocaust survivor Anka, she becomes enamored with Shelley, another monster-loving girl. Together they form a secret society called the Eternal Guild of the Benevolent Undead. The free-flowing plot develops organically as Ferris lavishes attention on Karen’s obsessions: visits to art museums where she pictures herself climbing into the paintings, conversations about philosophy and paranoia with a Greek chorus of street people, and expeditions into the depths of her spooky old apartment building to unearth family secrets. “All my family does is hide stuff from me,” Karen gripes, even as she discovers that the adults in her life have reasons to bury the truth. Ferris coaxes images of uncanny depth and vitality from ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, and the dialogue carries similarly offbeat beauty: “Mama used to say Dante’s voice was like butter melting off a honey factory.” Elevating gritty urban realism to the heights of her protagonist’s flights of fancy, Ferris brings forth a gloriously subversive world of the imagination. Agent: Holly Bemiss, Susan Rabiner Literary. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"A graphic novel so immersive it feels almost four dimensional... A fantastical, densely cross-hatched world of Nazis and mobsters and neighborhood eccentrics, seen through the curious eyes of a 10-year-old girl."

Entertainment Weekly

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

Art Spiegelman (Maus)

"Ferris' work fuses the style and atmosphere of noir godfather Raymond Chandler with the passionate moral intensity found beating beneath a good episode of Tales from the Crypt."

Paste Magazine

"The novel tackles race, gender, and what it means to be 'monstrous' in big and small ways. It could not be more relevant to today’s climate."

Mother Jones

"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

"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

"A thrilling and surprisingly profound novel ... The book is a fine balance of stunning artwork and terrific writing."

Chicago Tribune

★ 04/01/2024

Ferris's 2017 debut, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, was an international sensation, acclaimed for her virtuosic illustration, seemingly effortless mastery of plot and tone, and nuanced evocation of her protagonist, Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old girl experiencing an uncommonly tumultuous coming of age in 1960s Chicago. This second volume finds Karen navigating a variety of personal and private upheavals—she's mourning her mother's death, increasingly contemplating her own sexual identity, and obsessively pursuing an investigation into the murder of her upstairs neighbor, a holocaust survivor named Anka Silverberg. Karen's relationship with her older brother Deeze takes center stage in an extended sequence during which the pair tour landmarks and cultural centers around the city discussing favorite painters, various approaches to creating meaningful works of art, human sexuality, and much more. Later, Karen discovers a cassette tape detailing Anka Silverberg's heroic deeds in Nazi Germany, as well as evidence which finally compels her to confront Deeze about the nature of the relationship between he and Anka, and whether or not he played a role in her demise. VERDICT Fans are likely to find this gorgeously illustrated, uniquely immersive conclusion to Karen's story well worth the wait.

Library Journal

★ 2024-03-23
Ferris delivers the second part of her debut graphic novel of queer coming-of-age werewolf art noir.

In politically charged 1960s Chicago, teenage werewolf Karen Reyes is still haunted by the murder of her neighbor, and now by the cancerous death of her conservative mother, whose worries bleed into Karen’s dreams via a beheaded but sentient teddy bear. With Mom’s judgments gone from the land of the living, Karen sweetly pursues her first girlfriend, a fellow member of the Eternal Guild of the Benevolent Undead, who bonds with Karen while stealing coins from a pay toilet at the Art Institute of Chicago. An aspiring artist, Karen frequents the museum with her brother, Deeze, an artist and local mob enforcer who holds court as Karen draws selections from the collection, the re-creations appearing in Ferris’ style of finely hatched ballpoint pen on lined spiral notebook paper. With her world under siege by her mysterious father, the Invisible Man, and the possibility of her protector, Deeze, being drafted into the Vietnam War, Karen fixates on depictions of the biblical Judith’s seduction and beheading of a general who threatened her village. Ferris’ take on pulp and horror magazine covers punctuates the story and echoes all manner of luridness uncovered as Karen deepens her investigation into the heartbreaking life and violent death of her neighbor Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor. Karen comes to suspect Deeze of terrible things, up to and including the murder of a brother Karen remembers only in dreams. Ferris’ visual style achieves depth and contour through layering and at maximum effect reaches a rich, leathery aesthetic. Color pops throughout the mostly black-ink pages, and close-ups appear breathtakingly photographic, with smaller, less-detailed panels existing as exquisite doodles. A cliffhanger ending could promise more monsters.

Heartfelt horror and spectacular cartooning.

Kirkus Reviews