Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing is Monsters: An Architectural Documentation in CollageClick to enlarge all images I have reviewed several messily drawn comics for their embodied mark-making, all of which I firmly stand by, but Emil Ferris creates in My Favorite Thing is Monsters a gorgeous example of meticulousness in embodied drawing. Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, MFTIM carefully recreates scenes and environments as though documenting photographs, saving moments in time in its own notebook archive. Unlike those titles, Ferris’ monster of a book (no pun intended) is fiction…or, at least, halfway fictional. In an interview for the Chicago Humanities Festival, Ferris references Lynda Barry’s term for the mixed form of fiction and autobiography that comix often take: "autobifictionalography." Such a term feels incredibly fitting for Ferris’ book which combines her childhood in Chicago and monster infatuation with a murder mystery exploring the past and present of a Holocaust survivor. On the live-ness of her characters, Ferris says:
The term also fits MFTIM because Ferris follows a similar creed as Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! in that events, people, patterns, places, and objects can all become “demons” (in Barry’s book) or “monsters” (in Ferris’) that haunt a person’s mindscape. Similar to One! Hundred! Demons!, Ferris’ book represents a slowly collected, slowly ruminated worldview which combines adult wisdom with childlike imagination, ultimately affording more observational credit to children than most dare. The book could not exist without having grown up in Chicago, living experiences adjacent to those depicted, and carefully referencing real world locations, but it also could not have existed without Ferris’ wildly imaginative fabrications. On the topic of imaginative fabrications, the careful way that Ferris sculpts forms with intense cross-hatching throughout the book legitimizes protagonist Karen’s visions by modeling them into the three-dimensional world. The book’s setting, the city of Chicago, becomes a character in the narrative because of Ferris’ attentive recreation of its architecture and Uptown streets. Ferris embodies her hometown in these drawings as much as Alison Bechdel embodies her childhood house by carefully re-drawing every room, piece of furniture, and rug pattern to a T; the built, three-dimensional environment is fundamental to the work. Therefore, in order to lend some credibility to Karen’s imagination and embody her reality – the very same monster-obsessed childhood Ferris also experienced – the artist renders her protagonist’s monstrous appearance and all the rest of her imaginary visions in the same style as her more realistic portraits. That Karen sees herself as a monster throughout the story in contrast to every other character retaining human form captures her feeling of Otherness in a physical, embodied way. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Ferris describes feeling like a “creature to be poked and prodded by doctors and children” as a child, having suffered from severe scoliosis from a young age. We can see this Othered feeling embodied in the precision and depth afforded to the monster drawings, but also in the weight that Ferris places on the moment that we finally see what Karen actually looks like. In the section titled “The Outsiders,” Karen’s old friend Missy invites her to a birthday party with the hopes of rekindling their relationship. In their childhood, the two bonded over their shared love of monsters, but Missy’s mom slowly discouraged their friendship and pushed her daughter into hyperfemininity. Regretting this schism, Missy pulls Karen down a stairwell where they share an embrace away from her mother, and in that moment, amidst a realistically rendered, three-dimensional space, Ferris draws the two as beast and vampire. Two pages later, as Karen and her brother, Deeze, watch smoke billow up from the city’s West Side (after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination), Deeze comments that “sometimes a thing happens that’s so bad that it feels like things should be made to look on the outside, the way they feel on the inside.” This comment, I contend, serves as a thesis for Ferris’ visual system. Architecture, facial expressions, and other sights which burn themselves so vividly into her brain are drawn hyper-realistically in comparison to her cartoonized imaginations. Those too, however, are bestowed a visual realism by way of cross-hatched modeling, which means that Ferris recognizes both the escapism in Karen’s imagination (which keeps her safe from a more depressing reality) as well as the legitimacy in Karen’s emotions. Karen seeing herself as a monster allows her to give herself more power in her Othered position; that is her reality, and it should not be denied. Deeze even comments that Karen probably sees the smoke as a monster itself, acknowledging her worldly perspective. It is only when Deeze forces Karen to confront her “real self” in a mirror pages later, however, that she first admits to being a lesbian, though when she says so, she returns to her monster form. Karen’s duality in representation helps visualize the mental experience of one’s outward appearance standing in conflict with their inner feelings, both equally “true” despite their contradiction. Pages from "The Outsiders" Though Karen explicitly wants her whole family to receive “the bite” of a monster so that they can all live forever in spite of her mother’s sudden illness, Ferris secondarily tries to cement her permanent place in history by invoking a plethora of art historical references from which she and Karen both take influence. Throughout the story, Karen, either with her brother Deeze or various street friends, visits the Art Institute of Chicago and talks about many paintings as though she knows their subjects intimately. When not in the museum, Karen often refers to her sensory experiences as reminding her of a specific painting, the majority coming from the Institute or her brother’s art books. As an artist herself, Karen situates herself in the art historical canon by recognizing, mentally cataloguing, and employing her favorite works of art in her drawing and everyday speech. I have found that many cartoonists contemplate their work’s relationship to classical artists (usually painters, printmakers, and writers) in order to deepen the resonance of their drawings beyond iconic representation. The other layer to Ferris’ beautifully realistic pen drawings, aside from their relationship to notebook paper which I will touch on later, is the way that realism claims an extra sense of credibility that cartoons are not often afforded. The term “seeing is believing” derives from a need for proof – photographs, testimonies, scientific studies, and personal experience provide individuals the mental security that the truth they believe is sound. Ferris provides the “proof” for her fictional story by grounding it in a half-cartoonish, half-realistic style which at once confuses and legitimizes the historical accuracy of her “autobifictionalography.” Ferris draws sights as they appear to Karen – heads often the largest and most detailed/realistic part of the human form, sculpted stonework the most intricate of architecture, intensified emotion the most colorful on each page. That Anka always appears blue in Ferris’ drawings represents not her physical reality, but her emotional reality as perceived by Karen. Often, the most visceral and descriptive pages are those that exaggerate proportions and color to, as Deeze puts it, make people, places, and events “look on the outside, the way they feel on the inside.” Examples include giant close-ups of Karen’s mother, Deeze, and Anka; other exaggerated drawings involve tiny details that stick out in Karen’s mind, such as the color red appearing through the novel on a bloody rose petal, the Nazi swastika, and rose-tinted skin. Color brings many things to life – artwork Karen admires, the people of color in Karen’s multiracial upbringing, the violence in both physical acts and prejudices – but it is the very act of choosing which of these small details to layer together (via Karen’s perceptive point of view) that gives each page such humanity. Excerpts of color singled out in Karen's embodied perspective In a strange way, My Favorite Thing is Monsters remind me of an assemblage sculpture in two dimensions; the pages exist as collages, yes, but they have an added history and sense of depth that also has a sculptural element. Perhaps the physical book’s evocation of the notebook page, allowing blue lines and binder holes to enter, weave through, and participate in the pen illustrations, contributes to this sculptural feeling. Rather than using traditional panel structures, Ferris’ illustrations splay across each page intuitively. As the reader flips through the book, one feels as though they really are reading the investigative sketchbook-diary of a ten-year-old, and it has a similarly pieced-together storyline that does not always read linearly. Part of this has to do with Karen’s investigation into her upstairs neighbor Anka’s death by listening to recorded tapes of her Holocaust testimony. This frame story resembles Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a dual
father last left off, Ferris jumps around, treating her plot like memory book pages that someone shuffled around. Perhaps Ferris means this as concession that many thematic ties in real life do not snap so cleanly in place like they do in a highly constructed narrative. Sometimes, all we can see is a collection of similar events that make meaning simply in their combination and contrast. The My Favorite Thing is Monsters cover flap blurb describes Ferris’ book as a combination of panel sequences and montage, relating it to film history and a more general similarity between the modern mediums of cinema and comix. Both film and graphic narrative use the frame as their cellular, foundational component, and both mediums developed their own meta-discourses very quickly given their modernity. Both mediums experienced a maturation stunt in the form of the Hays Code and the Comics Code, respectively, and critical concerns for both often revolve around the passage of time as dictated by their structures. To describe a comic as montage using the filmic sense of the word connotes a speeding up of time, which makes sense from a Scott-McCloud-point-of-view in which the gutter presents readers with the task of filling in the excluded blanks. Rather than making explicit the connection between two images, comics and film montage expect the consumer to assume their relation based on context clues, thematic similarities, and imagination. For a comic like My Favorite Thing is Monsters, however, scenes of montage feel more like a collection of slowly amassed clues and meditations than the condensation of one or several events into a series of snapshots. In making a comparison between montage and comic art, I realize just how many different uses the montage has and how comics could make use of the same variety of relationships they forge between shots. Let’s take one of the pioneering examples of montage, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and compare it to sequences from My Favorite Thing is Monsters. In its totality, Vertov’s film captures the energy of Soviet-era Moscow, portraying the city’s multiplicities – in what is essentially an hour-long montage – from morning to night. Though not focused on characterizing the city of Chicago in the same way, Ferris shapes her comic around its architectural ornament, social conflict, and demographic makeup. In a similar way to the opening of Vertov’s film, the city arising from its slumber, multiple sections in MFTIM introduce the neighborhood of Uptown and its denizens by way of a series of “vignette” type panels in which a background character’s essence is generalized by a drawing of them performing their ritualistic, daily action, like “the Indian lady who sings Jesus songs in front of the Wilson ‘El’ station” or “the Pigeon Man.” The following four pages feature a series of headshots of Uptown’s most bizarre residents as though flicking through a reel of street photography. Similarly, in Man with a Movie Camera, the beginning of the film gives the viewer snapshots of the residents of Moscow waking up in the morning – a young woman in bed, a homeless man on a bench, a carriage driver in their vehicle – alongside shots of the city streets, including shops, empty terraces, warehouses, and government agencies. In the MFTIM scene, Deeze takes Karen out to a friend’s birthday party, and the first page remains in black and white as they begin their way to her apartment. Describing the people of Uptown as “sort of beaten up but sometimes beautiful,” the next page explodes with color – a two-page spread completely filled by the morning commute crowd of all kinds of faces. In Vertov’s film, a similar calm before the busy crowds kick into action begins with a stillness to all the shots and a prevailing emptiness to the exterior scenes. Then, with the arrival of a train filmed in an array of hectic, Dutch-angle shots, the city fully awakens and people get about their daily business of dressing, cleaning, and going out for errands. Like MFTIM, Vertov pits shots against one another to draw comparison, such as a blinking woman, opening blinds, and aperture of a camera at 11:28-12:03. In that clip, he calls specific attention to the focusing of the human eye after they greet the morning sun and comparing it to the need to refocus a camera lens based on new lighting (i.e. the movement of the sun throughout the day). Throughout the film, he calls attention to the role of the camera and filmmaker in shooting, editing, and telling a story with the mundane sights around him; Ferris, similarly, calls attention to the artist’s hand and observational skills in formatting her book as the investigative journal of her ten year old protagonist. The only linear, overarching plot in either piece of media takes place in the unfolding of vignettes, each either sharing themes or characterizing the setting until the viewer develops a sense of the context into which they have been thrust. Pages from "Twin Terror Kinderscarton" Coming back around to the built environment as experienced in the collapsed forms of montage, collage, and the comic frame, Ferris truly embodies the experience of growing up in Chicago through her realistic drawings of actual locations in the city. Having called Chicago home for my whole life, recognizing buildings like the Art Institute, Riviera Theater, and the (now defunct) Uptown Station pulled me back into a treasure trove of memories. I think that Ferris’ lovingly accurate drawings would place anyone within that space by virtue of her skill, but they struck such a personal chord with me that I cannot help but view the comic as a love letter to the Chicagoan childhood.
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