Contemporary Comics: "My Favorite Thing is Monsters" by Emil Ferris

I genuinely don't know where to start with how to discuss this book. It was completely not what I had been expecting, and the story (albeit very hard to follow) kept me chasing the ending long into the night.

My gears are turning. Let me try to explain what my brain is full of.

The illustrations and format of the comic. Absolutely confounding and incredible. After I had finished reading (and scoured the internet for more information about the series and the author) I learned that Ferris had a lot her ability to draw at one point, and she worked tirelessly to create this work. While it's deeply impressive, I genuinely couldn't believe that she had gone through so much and made many incredible illustrations. I love the characters and the way the comic is always formatted in a notebook, and I felt a nostalgic whiplash of being the student who ruined notebooks with drawings instead of notes. It made me deeply miss the youthful freedom to make art on anything you had available, whether it was walls or paper or ceiling tiles.

The way she illustrated and the format of the whole novel felt like looking into the Sistine chapel that also happened to be my middle school. The incredible feeling of wonder and amazement coupled with the youthful and realistic view of the darker side of like was deeply bittersweet, and its hard to describe just how much the drawings alone brought me to places in my life where I had been doing the same thing in notebooks.

There is also so much to cover in terms of the story that was wildly intriguing to me. Everything in the story, though jumbled and quilted together, kept me waiting on the edge of my seat to try and understand the world from the view of Karen as she struggles to cope with her situation, and I found her struggles profoundly relatable to some of my own experiences as a child. Still, so much pesters me about all of the topics left unaddressed. Who is Victor? What happened to Anya? Does Karen ever confess her affections to her crush?

This book, like "Blankets", cut me down to my core, and although I do feel wounded by this story and profoundly empathetic for all that has happened to Karen, this book also made me reevaluate some of the ways I view my life or my past from familiar but different angle. I won't forget this book for a very long time, and I'm deeply gratefully I was given the opportunity to read it.