My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris review

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris review 

My favorite thing is monsters by Emil Ferris. Emile Ferris. I really need to do a better job of looking up these author names before i do my book reviews. 

I apologize. So if it wasn't obvious, this is a comic book or graphic novel and this is one of the books that is on the av club best of 2020 list. 

It is a book that i know a lot of people really, really love, but i have to say like i was slightly disappointed by this one. 

But maybe my expectations were just too high or i just didn't know exactly what this book was going into it. 

So this is kind of like a horror mystery-ish graphic novel. This book is set in 1960s chicago and you are following this 10 year old girl named karen who is basically the protagonist of the story. 

And she lives in this like apartment building in the city and her brother and her mother all live in this apartment. They're probably like middle class, lower middle class people here in Chicago. 

And the story begins with one of karen's neighbors dying. It is thought to be a suicide but some people think that it might not have been a suicide. 

And so karen basically decides that she wants to figure out what exactly happened to her neighbor. 

That's sort of like the basis storyline but there's also like a lot more happening here in this story. Karen is someone who really loves sort of like horror movies and sort of like that b-list horror sort of idea. 

She thinks of herself as being like part werewolf and so like the way that she's written she's basically like drawn kind of like a werewolf girl or like a were girl. 

If you like look at the back cover here, like that is the character she has created for herself. 

And so while the story is partially about like her looking into this mystery, it's also just like a coming-of-age story and a basically like stream-of-consciousness story from the perspective of this 10-year-old girl. 

You learn about her mom and her brother and some of the people that she goes to school with. 

She's like picked down at school until you learn a little bit about that. You learn about just like her loneliness, her neighbors, like all of these different ideas are covered in this book, as well as like stories about her neighbor who died. 

And i don't want to say more than that but it gets like really dark and graphic. So i will leave like the synopsis basically at that because, again, there's a lot that happens in this book but i don't want to tell too much of the plot, or to talk too much about plot details because i think that's not necessarily the point of this comic. 

Which i think is part of the reason why i didn't get along with it quite as much as i thought i was going to. But like before i get into that, i think like anyone who picks up this graphic novel is going to recognize the fact that like the art in here is un-freaking-believable. Like the entire book basically looks like this. 

Like flip to any page and you're going to see like these impeccably drawn, extremely detailed illustrations that are just like wild. And a lot of this is inspired by like the movies and art that emil ferris is obviously a fan of. 

She also like references like specific paintings and things like that. The older brother in this book is someone who is basically an artist himself. 

He takes karen to like the art institute and shows her all these like classic paintings and artists and stuff like that. And so emil ferris like recreates those paintings in this book and it is unbelievable. 

So like, on that basis alone, this is a comic book to be heralded as one of the best comics of all time just because like the level of skill. 

But like it's not just that she's like copying it, but she's like doing it justice and also like doing it in her own style and also doing it in a style that fits the tone of this book, which is just amazing. 

Amazing, amazing, amazing. There's also the fact that like she captures chicago in my opinion really, really well, which is obviously like a personal sort of pro. But i feel like she captures all these like very specific parts of Chicago. 

And it's not like she's doing it like super deliberately. Like obviously she is because they live in a very specific neighborhood in chicago, and so she references like these buildings that are like basically iconic, like the green mile club and like uptown theater and riviera and all this stuff, which are like places that still exist today. 

And so seeing those things and like you know seeing someone at an el stop and stuff like that, like seeing all those specific places in this book which are places that i know about is always like super, super cool. 

So i feel like those are the two things that compelled me to keep going with this book. But what made it really hard for me is, again, just stuff that is really hard for just me personally as a reader. 

I don't do super well with stream-of-consciousness stuff in general and so i didn't realize how stream-of-consciousness-y this comic book was going to be. 

This is like a massive book, like this is really heavy for me to hold up and i might put it down soon. But this is a comic book that like really meanders because it is the stream of consciousness. 

And so this is a story that your experience with it will vary depending on just your own tolerance for stuff like that. It takes a whole lot of turns in terms of like what it chooses to focus on and the characters it chooses to talk about and all of these different things. 

And a lot of times i was reading these stories and just being like, okay, but what's the point i guess? Or like we would lose track of like another storyline that we were following and i wanted to like get back to that. 

There's like a significant portion of this book that is just like backstory on the person who died, which again is just like an extremely, extremely compelling story and is you know probably based on people's real experiences. 

But like it feels so disconnected from the other stories that you are reading. Like how karen is bullied at school and her different friends it's the few people that she has that she like actually talks to and stuff like that. Like those two ideas in this book feel so completely separate. 

There's also like a completely separate sort of like family storyline going on as well. 

So like keeping track of all of that and all of the different characters and all of their different backstories and all of that is not super easy and i think is not something that personally i'm used to when it comes to comics. 

Obviously i'm not a huge comic reader so like that's not something i deal with all the time. 

But i think i'm just not used to a story like this told in comic form. When i was reading this, honestly what it felt like to me was like reading the comic book version of a really long running tv show. 

Because it feels like 24 episodes of a show put into comic book form. And again your mileage may vary with that but i think just like with my own personal experiences with comic books, i'm used to either trades, single-issue sort of ideas or things that are similar in length to trades. 

And so the stories are much more compact, much more streamlined and that's not really what's happening here. 

So i don't think that this is a bad comic by any means. I think anyone who would call this a bad comic is probably missing the point of it. But it's just one of those comics where it's just like, oh, this is just a not for me comic. 

And the other thing about this is that like this is technically a book one. And so there's supposed to be a sequel that has been delayed, uh, a lot because-- i'm sure because like the amount of work that is required of a single person to create something this like dense and immaculately detailed is probably a lot more than most people realize. 

But again, the fact that this is a book one means that like the ending isn't super wrapped up, which you know is fine but i think is something that i personally found a little bit disappointing. 

So yeah, in the end, i understand completely why people absolutely adore this comic book and it definitely is like one of those books that will be heralded as one of the best of all time. 

But it's just a comic that's not for me which is fine but always just a little bit disappointing. So those are my quick thoughts on my favorite thing is monsters.

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