After a seven-year gap, Emil Ferris returns with the eagerly anticipated conclusion of the story of Karen Reyes, a monster-obsessed, 10-year-old girl. The new book picks up right where the first one ended, with Karen coming to terms with the recent death of her mother while also continuing her amateur investigation of the murder of a neighbor in her apartment building. While Ferris provides a brief recap on the front endpaper and callbacks throughout the book, readers are advised to revisit the first book before diving into the new arrival.
Buy My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two by Emil FerrisFerris deepens Karen’s character with the revelation of her budding feelings for another girl, as well as her conflicted emotions about her brutish brother and her newly identified deadbeat dad. Karen’s adventures take us into some heavy territory for a child, including another extended chapter in her murdered neighbor’s taped Holocaust memories, her brother’s criminal exploits as a thug for hire, and her derelict father’s seedy orbit around her neighborhood. Although Karen sees and draws herself as a werewolf and revels in her love for all things monster, the true monsters are the all-too-human men in her family, fallible fools unworthy of her love but blessed with it nonetheless.
While Ferris keeps plenty of plot plates spinning, she’s in no rush to land them, leisurely moving between Karen’s shifting attention to the many forces buffeting her life. Karen is adrift on a tumultuous sea: missing her mother and neighbor, learning about the identity of her father and another brother for the first time, and coming to terms with her queer attraction that would have been condemned by her conservative mother. Stories drift in and out of focus as Karen moves through her days, set against the backdrop of late 1960s New York City squalor where her escapism into monster fantasies acts as her coping mechanism.
Ferris continues the highly unique art style of the first book, presenting the tale as Karen’s journal entries, right down to the lined notebook paper and seemingly commonplace ballpoint pens and colored pencils used for the entirety of the work. However, her stunning mastery of the application of those everyday tools results in frequently mind-blowing works of art far surpassing the capabilities of any child. Insanely intricate crosshatching adds weight and shading to her panels to such a degree that the results look closer to museum pieces than childish doodles. She intersperses Karen’s pseudo-pulp-magazine covers throughout the book without comment, presenting campy monster splash pages every few pages to demonstrate Karen’s ongoing monster obsession. She also switches up the quality level at times, rendering some pages as basic as wispy black sketches, which supports the illusion that Karen is the artist while also giving Ferris an occasional break from her monumental undertaking.
It’s hard to believe that this is only Ferris’s second published work, or more properly the conclusion of her first published work. She is the rarest of unicorns, arriving as a master of the comics form right from the onset and rightfully earning all of the associated industry recognition, a status that will continue with this release. While the epic saga of Karen Reyes has seemingly drawn to a close after 800+ combined pages, the comics world will be watching for our next favorite thing from Emil Ferris.
