Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two exhibition review

reviewed by Laurie Anne Agnese 

Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Paris: Galerie Martel, November 7, 2024 - January 11, 2025. https://www.galeriemartel.com/emil-ferris-2024/

Like the werewolf stories that she treasures, Emil Ferris’s evolution as an artist started with a bite. “But it wasn’t the bite I thought it would be,” she explains in the Meet Emil Ferris documentary short that was playing at Galerie Martel’s show for My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. “But it did make me a monster and it made me understand being a monster.”

In 2002, Ferris was celebrating her fortieth birthday when she was bit by a mosquito and contracted West Nile Virus. Ferris woke up from a coma three weeks later to discover her transformation: she was paralyzed from the waist down and unable to use her drawing hand. It closed the chapter of her life as a single mom working to support her six-year-old daughter on various commercial art freelance jobs in Chicago.

“The bite saved my life,” Ferris says. “Because if you lose something that you take for granted, all of a sudden it becomes extremely valuable to you.” She fought back paralysis so she could raise her daughter. She committed to drawing again, this time for her own art and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. To create the two books that comprise My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Ferris spent 14 years drawing at night, while working odd jobs and struggling with various health and financial issues.

 

Video credit: Meet Emil Ferris, 2019, director Mathieu Gervaise for Monsieur Toussaint Louverture (Ferris’ French publisher)

Ferris’ voice was heard throughout Galerie Martel whose curators placed this looped chapter of the documentary to preface their exhibit of original artworks from the second volume of My Favorite Thing is Monsters. At more than 800 pages, the two books represent a remarkable and wholly unique work that was praised by Art Speigelman for advancing the language of comics. But viewing the work through the additional lens of Ferris’ struggle also contextualizes the tremendous effort that informs the hard-earned message of the book: art has the power to heal.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2, continues the story as told through the personal notebook of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old living in Chicago during the tumultuous year of 1968. This gothic romantic tale of Karen’s coming of age is layered with her understanding of herself as an artist, as a “good monster,” as a trangendered person. These transformations are uncovered through a generic detective story that drives the narrative: Karen is also on a dangerous quest to solve the murder of her neighbor, Anka, a holocaust survivor, while also discovering that her life in her uptown Chicago neighborhood is built on lies and violence.

Photo credit: Vadim Rubenstein, courtesy of Galerie Martel

The arrangement of the artworks in the gallery was notably symmetric. To the left, drawings of equal height showed the variety of visual techniques and forms borrowed from comic books and artist sketchbooks.  The selection on the right side of the gallery were portraits of the gothic characters who inhabit Karen’s imaginary and actual world. The focal point of the arrangement was Book Two’s enlarged cover placed in the center of the gallery:  a self-portrait of Karen as she sees herself as a monster. 

Emil Ferris’s original drawings of covers from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two.

Being a monster in Ferris’s world is identified with physical differences, in particular the visually grotesque. In the book, Karen’s copies of covers of monster magazines are dark and ghastly, though she takes enormous pleasure in reading, collecting and sharing them.  The cover images hover between imaginary and real-life horror as they often foreshadow scenes in the story. The covers also provide the only structure to the books which otherwise contain no chapters or page numbers. They appear as monthly installments, so the passage of time is suggested through the device of the occasional cover issue date.

But being a monster is not always observable from the exterior, but rather through actions and motivations. The original pieces offer a closer appreciation of the variety of styles employed by Ferris, such as the fluid comic panels and word balloons that are reformatted to make a page spread, to drive the action of the story and demonstrate how the characters live. 

An original artwork (left) and the published version (right), from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. The monster on display is a supposedly religious man preaching the bible, while also abusing his followers, and keeping his secrets in his own notated version of the bible, which Karen reads.

 

Original artwork which appears as a double page spread in the published book.

Karen’s copies of fine art that she finds in books or during her cherished visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with her brother recall a form borrowed from the artist sketchbook.  Karen’s interpretations of works of art are the book’s most exquisite and surprising, and they demonstrate Ferris’ demanding and labor-intensive style. Working with basic materials, ball point pens and cheap spiral bound notebooks, Ferris uses the materials that Karen could afford, building rich textures and shadows from the smallest of cross hatches.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two featuring Karen’s rendering of Le Lit, 1892, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Ferris was so committed to the idea of creating Karen’s personal notebook that she originally worked on lined notebook paper but changed her process to working in layers to ease the labor of making corrections. The portraits featured in the exhibit demonstrate her use of layering, which add to the depth and complexity of each page, and by extension, the overall work.

Karen also copies many different artworks depicting the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.  Judith is a daring and beautiful widow whose village has been invaded by the Holofernes army. She gains his trust through a sexual seduction, and then decapitates him to save her village.  Though Judith only appears in historical paintings, she’s featured on the character side of the gallery, because her story is so deeply pondered and brought to life by Karen’s imagination. In the published book, Karen reflects deeply the choice Judith made to use violence to save the people she loves and adds herself to the artwork as Judith’s loyal servant.

 

From left to right: Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1665, Felice Ficherelli, Art Institute of Chicago; Emile Ferris’ original artwork; Published version in My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2. 

In a later segment of the Meet Emil Ferris documentary, Ferris highlights the importance of collage and synthesis to her artistic process:

   “I wanted to give a lot. I wanted to give everything I could. I could only choose certain things, so there’s a collaging that happens where I put two things together because one image has one energy but when you put it aside another image and then there’s text, it creates another sort of energy.”

 These layering and collaging choices are observed in the drawings of Franklin/Francoise, a school friend of Karen’s who was severely beaten for cross dressing, and a character she reads about in her monster magazines that looks like a younger version of Sylvia Gronan, Karen’s neighbor and the wife of a local mobster. The collision of texts and other images adds context to the characters.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Franklin/Francoise (left) and Sylvia Gronan (right). Their published versions are below

Original Portraits of Stan Silverberg (Anka’s widower), Diego (Karen’s brother) and Anka as a ghost.

 

The placement of the three portraits together allowed the exhibition the opportunity to show a compassionate side of Emil Ferris. Stan Silverberg is Anka’s widower rendered in blue, as is Anka’s ghost. Karen chose blue for Anka’s inner sadness that now her widower processes.  The center portrait shows Diego, who is committed to raising Karen as best as he can while also being involved with the local mob in order to avoid the draft for the Vietnam war. He’s one the books’ many flawed heroes.  In Karen’s portrait of Diego, she is responding to the advice of her friend who advises “when somebody is in a dark place the best thing you can do for them is to always try to remember their better, most beautiful selves.”

 My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2 offers no easy answers to the many questions and ideas it weaves together, so fittingly neither does it offer much in the way of a clear or conclusive ending. But the narrative, and everything it took to make it, demonstrates what Karen realizes in Book 2 that “the greatest way to be a strong, evil defeating monster is to make art and tell stories.”

Unless stated otherwise, all photos taken by Laurie Anne Agnese

Exhibition Review: Beautiful Monsters: The Art of Emil Ferris

 reviewed by Carli Spina

Kim Munson. Beautiful Monsters: The Art of Emil Ferris. New York: Society of Illustrators’ Museum of Illustration. August 3-October 19, 2024. https://societyillustrators.org/event/beautifulmonsters/

To coincide with this year’s publication of Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters: Book Two, the Society of Illustrators’ Museum of Illustration devoted its main floor and lower level gallery spaces to an exhibition of her work curated by Kim Munson. Munson has ample experience in this arena, having edited the Eisner Award-nominated anthology Comic Art in Museums, curated the museum exhibit Women in Comics, and served as a 2022 Eisner Award judge. Clearly, Munson curated this exhibit with care to ensure that it adds to visitors’ understanding of Ferris and her work. The pieces selected illustrated many aspects of Ferris’ work in My Favorite Thing is Monsters including her character design work, her influences, and the monster magazine covers which feature in both volumes. Pieces from her short work “The Bite That Changed My Life” from Our Favorite Thing Is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which was created for Free Comic Book Day in 2019 were also prominently featured in the exhibit.

Where the exhibit exceled most was in placing Ferris’ work in context. This began as visitors entered the first room of the exhibit where the first case and interpretative text focus on Ferris’ father’s work as a toy designer. His work as a designer of iconic toys, including the Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots, the light-up game Simon, and the Mickey Mouse push button landline phone, where Mickey holds the receiver, were highlighted as an important source of inspiration for Ferris’ work and particularly her repetition of shapes. The influence of toys carried into the second room of the exhibit where an illustration of Granny Smith: Super Crime Fighter was paired with an actual doll with an apple in place of the head, and a label explaining how Ferris grew up creating her own toys from 10-cent items found in the Salvation Army bin. Understanding how these childhood experiences carried into Ferris’ work adds a deeper layer to her artwork and her text.

The exhibit also contextualized Ferris’ references to several classic paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes by bringing these pieces, and some initial drafts, together while listing the works Ferris references. Though this section of the exhibit would have benefited from including reproductions of the works referenced for comparison, it was nevertheless helpful in making explicit the connection between these classic works and Ferris’ art. In keeping with this connection to classic art, Ferris created a large-scale piece titled Scary Starry Night specifically for this exhibit. It is described on the accompanying label as a “tribute to Van Gogh’s 1889 painting The Starry Night” and the piece consists of a large, rectangular illustration that is very similar to the original painting, drawn in the style of Ferris’ artwork for this book with cross-hatching in ball-point pen. Eyes are featured in place of the stars found in the original work and a red set of eyes has been added to each of the black towers that rise in the left side of the piece in this adaptation. To the left of this work, a cutout figure of Van Gogh holding a palette and brushes was positioned as if he is in the midst of painting the larger work. This illustration continues Ferris’ practice of reworking classic art works and more modern popular illustrations in her own style and inhabited by her own characters. At the same time, it also served as an interactive element of the exhibit, given that the label specifically suggested that visitors take their picture with this piece and post it on social media. Such photo opportunities are becoming more common in museums, but this one contributed to the exhibit by serving both as a focal point for the eye upon entering the larger of the two rooms of the exhibit and as an original work specifically created for the exhibit.

While the majority of the works in the exhibit were illustrations from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, the exhibit would still have benefited from more detailed labels in places, particularly for those works that are not illustrations from one of the books. A good example of this was one of the few three-dimensional objects in the exhibit, a mask that appears to be a recreation of one found in an illustration. A recent interview with the author seems to confirm that this mask was created by Ferris’ mother when she was a child,^[1] which an adjacent comic in the exhibit described. However, a label with more details about this would have been appreciated, especially given that greater context is given for her father’s creative career and his influence on Ferris. Given that her mother was also a professional artist,^[2] this felt like a missed opportunity to offer a comparative look at her mother’s influence in her work.

This exhibit offered a chance to experience Ferris’ work, often in a new context that added to visitors’ understanding of her novels but could be appreciated by both fans of her work and those who have not yet read it.

 

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^[1] Vitali, Marc. 2024. “Eagerly Awaited Graphic Novel Embraces Chicago, Art and Monsters — Both Real and Imaginary.” WTTW. June 4. https://news.wttw.com/2024/06/04/eagerly-awaited-graphic-novel-embraces-chicago-art-and-monsters-both-real-and-imaginary

^[2] Yood, James. 1991. “Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Zaks Gallery.” Artforum International. Sept. 1: Reviews 139.