Emil Ferris had a feeling she was a monster at an early age. “I was a werewolf,” she says, quite happily. “I had fangs and I was furry.”
Karen, the little werewolf girl at the heart of Ferris’s landmark graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, is clearly inspired by that self-portrait. The character is drawn as an oh-so-cute creature who is vulnerable, optimistic and hirsute. Obsessed by her neighbour’s death, she embarks on an investigation that exposes the grand horrors of political history and the street-level drama of 1968 Chicago. Both strands are filtered through Karen and Ferris’s shared fascination with monstrousness. “The book is a refutation of the idea that the monster is bad,” the 62-year-old author says.
