Because its biographical structure echoes the sensibilities of Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel. Because it’s unabashedly a comic as a comic.
Because, for example, she’s formatted it as an illustrated diary that’s been entirely recorded in the sort of spiral-bound, lined, three-hole punched composition book kids used back then. Why do I think so? Let me count the ways.Ī section from a six-page, post-book release, autobiographical strip by Emil Ferris that first ran in Chicago magazine.įor starters, it’s because Emil Ferris has produced a work that’s boldly experimental and innovative in both its execution and delivery. It’s also important to note that Favorite Thing … is a masterful display of graphic literature. So it was no surprise that it soon went into a second printing.
And now she’s just sold the movie rights to Sony.Īnd as for reader popularity, I personally witnessed stacks and stacks of Favorite Thing … disappear from the Fantagraphics booth at a brisk pace throughout all four days of last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, bought by both comics connoisseurs and casual browsers alike. He New Yorker’s Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes have placed Ferris “among the greatest practitioners of the form.” NPR’s Terry Gross has noted that “she’s produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don’t want to turn them.” Art Spiegelman has proclaimed that “Emil Ferris is one of the most important comics artists of our time.” And her newfound recognition is all the more impressive when you consider that, at 56, she’s a first-timer to longform visual narrative-and that at this time last year, when the book was first published, she was practically unknown. And publications from The New York Times to The Guardian and from Forbes to Mother Jones have joined the chorus of praise.
As it is, Emil Ferris’s breakthrough, groundbreaking graphic novel-set in a hardscrabble late-1960s Chicago and in the rich interior life of a ten-year-old girl-seems to have appeared on practically every comics-centric books-of-the-year list. If there was a designer “best of the best ofs” list for comics, My Favorite Thing is Monsters would easily be 2017’s winner.
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