Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late-sixties Chicago, Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster-magazine iconography. Karen tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge. Rendered in a kaleidoscopically and breathtakingly virtuosic visual style that combines panel sequences and montage, Ferris’s draftsmanship echoes the drawing of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Robert Crumb. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a revelatory work of striking originality that has been lauded as the debut graphic novel of the year.

Paris Review managing editor Nicole Rudick joins Ferris onstage for a conversation about her debut, as part of the Comics Art Brooklyn festival.

Details and directions, as well as additional programming, here.

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