My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

This book has 'a must read' written all over it. Fantastic debut by Emil Ferris. Inventive, beautiful and sincere, the work presented as a diary entries of a 10-year-old Chicago girl Karen Reyes who lives in the world of monsters but that is only part of the story.

Simply superb . The layers to this book are fabulous.

This book is very pretentious. First of all, if we see the author's interview with the Gaurdian etc news paper, we see that she is so (fakely) concerned with how women as gender treated badly and particularly how women's beauty is their constraint. But the book treats the women in exactly the same objectified way, and how dare this author writes her own prejudiced and stupid understanding of women body as the observation of 10 year old child observation in her diary? for example big breasted ladies are frequently treated as promiscuous and noisy in authors character's opinion( who are also most villainous than their sentence serving husbands). And then we are presented with some stupid eyelid battling beast-beauty type 'karen-missy' love story where Karen is treated wrongly by Missy for Karen's poor background yet this is to be believed as pure love story even as this Karen observes very slyly how she has very cold companion Sandy and her friendliness just because of her hunger and shoelace string on her blouse. This sandy character is treated throughout without dignity as if all poor people are after charity and food wihtout shame? and Karen expects warm hug from Sandy even as she is the one who doesn't return the hug ? who is giving cold hug here? the book is full of such nonsense. Sold at very high price, this book, making it look like as if the illustrations are scanned from real hand drawn note book sketches. But all the illustrations in this book are just some edited graphics, nothing much and very filthy. This is the kind of book that gets written by people who have too much time and money, media attention in their hands and some how learned faking to the contemporary social causes that they dont really subscribe for or have any concern for and just use it to further their corporate gains. Some how though, the authors real cheap mentality gets revealed crystal clear. Really, resources in the hands of people such as this author gets wasted and actually very dangerous to society. I wanted to buy a beautiful comics book to my future child to read and I bought this stupid book full of manipulative prejudice slyly inserted in it throughout.

Weird, beautiful and wonderful!

Just finished reading Emil Ferris's amazing graphic novel and I can say, as a grizzled comics fan with wide-ranging tastes, that I've honestly never seen anything quite like it. Spectacular illustrations cover almost every inch of this huge volume, all printed on lined three-hole paper emulating the illustrated diary of the ten-year-old protagonist, a tough and beleaguered tomboy on the rough streets of 1960's Chicago. Well-written and deeply immersive, this piece drew me into the world of Karen, a monster-obsessed kid struggling with sexuality, race, poverty, and the violence of her surroundings. It is as dark a work as I've read in comics yet has a jaunty sort of zest for life in it that constantly pulls the narrative along and saves the reader from being overwhelmed by some of the disturbing elements within. It's especially astonishing as the first work from a writer/artist, working in seclusion for over six years. It reminds me, in all the best ways, of the confessional work of Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, of the strange life-stories of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes and Jeffrey Brown. It also reminds me of my own childhood, of how different a child can view the world, though my own early years were far less fearful. Ferris's illustrations also show an abiding love not just for horror movies (and particularly for our mutual Universal monster favorite, the Wolf Man) but for the great horror magazines of the 1960's from CREEPY and FAMOUS MONSTERS though the gory WEIRD and TERROR TALES varieties. Perhaps also some of the Spanish/Mexican horror mags, too, I'd guess. This is a great book. I can see it speaking to those that struggled with gender issues, but its scope is well beyond that, a love poem to lonely, different kids everywhere. I eagerly await the second part of the story, which will be published in early 2018. Go to Amazon and browse through a few pages, if you wish. It is not a story for children (and, honestly, I swore aloud when I hit the pages that will keep it out of most school libraries) but it speaks to the damaged child in each of us, I think.

Non ci sono parole per descrivere la bellezza di questo libro. Ogni pagina è meritevole di attenzione sin nei minimi dettagli. Imperdibile.

Artwork in this is unbelievably good

J'ai très rarement rencontré de livres aussi fort, et pourtant, j'en consomme en quantité industrielle. Chaque page m'agrippe et ce livre ne me lâche plus. Je suis entrée tout droit dans l'histoire, le personnage de Karen est atypique et ultra-attachant, chaque silhouette a un background, c'est riche de détails, le dessin est incroyable... Tout est tellement vrai dans ce livre, et en même temps fantasmagorique. Savoir qu'il y a un tome 2 est un plaisir rassurant. Et j'attends avec impatience la sortie de la version française chez Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, pour l'offrir et le conseiller à mes proches et amis francophones. I have very rarely encountered books this powerful, and yet I use consume them in huge quantities. Each page has a grip on me and never let go. I walked straight into the story, Karen's character is atypical and so endearing, each drawn extra you spot has an actual background, the book is amazingly rich in details, the art is incredible... Everything feels so true in this book, and yet phantasmagorical. Knowing that a second volume is coming reassures. And I look forward to the French version, soon to be released by Mr. Toussaint Louverture, so I'll be able to showcase this wonder to my french-speaking friends and family.