My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Can Karen solve Anka’s murder? Why did Karen’s brother Deeze shoot their brother Victor? Did Anka strike a deal with the devil by saving children from the Nazis by prostituting them? Did Karen’s brother Deeze commit fratricide in Vietnam? Taking place in tumultuous and violent Chicago in the summer of 1968, young Karen attends the Yippie-organized Festival of Life in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate her neighbor’s recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka’s heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity and tells her good friend Sam Silverberg, that the best birthday present she could receive is to “feel like there is someone in the history of the world who has been like me.” The cast of characters introduced in volume 1 of Emil Ferris’s critically acclaimed masterwork My Favorite Thing is Monsters experience revelations and epiphanies that both resolve and deepen the mysteries earlier visited upon them. Visually, the story is told in Ferris’s trademarked style of a breathtakingly seamless combination of panel sequences and cartoon montages.