Emil Ferris

Emil Ferris – Life, Career, and Artistic Legacy

Discover Emil Ferris — the American graphic novelist, artist, and storyteller behind My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Explore her biography, creative journey, themes, awards, and insights into her work.

Introduction

Emil Ferris (born 1962) is an American writer, cartoonist, and designer whose spellbinding graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters marked a breakthrough in the world of comics. With a distinctive aesthetic, deeply personal themes, and the resilience to overcome severe illness, Ferris has forged a unique voice in contemporary graphic literature. In this article, we’ll trace her life, creative struggles and triumphs, stylistic approach, and enduring legacy.

Early Life and Family

Ferris was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1962, the daughter of Eleanor Spiess-Ferris (a painter) and Mike Ferris (a designer) — both artists who had met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Her familial environment was rich with art: visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and exposure to visual and design thinking from her parents shaped her sensibility early on.

From a young age, Ferris experienced physical challenges: she had scoliosis, and parts of her childhood were spent with limited mobility, leading her to turn inward and toward drawing.

Youth, Education & Turning Points

Ferris’s childhood included involvement in a small theatrical troupe called the Marble Cake Kids near Graceland Cemetery, where she discovered her early fascination with monsters, ghosts, and the uncanny.

Her formal art education was delayed by life’s difficulties, but eventually she enrolled at SAIC, earning a BFA (2008) and later an MFA in Creative Writing (2010).

A pivotal turning point occurred in 2001, when Ferris contracted West Nile virus from a mosquito bite. paralyzed from the waist down and rendered her right hand impaired.

Yet it was during her recovery that Ferris began work on My Favorite Thing Is Monsters — first as a form of rehabilitation and later as a creative lifeline.

Ferris often recounts that she worked long, grueling hours, drawing page after page, living austerely, and enduring repeated rejections.

Career & Major Work

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

Ferris’s breakout work is the graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, published in 2017 (Volume One) and followed by Volume Two in May 2024. diary of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, a child who artfully sees herself as a werewolf, living in 1960s Chicago, and uses her love of monster lore to make sense of social tensions, identity, and a suspicious death of her neighbor, Anka Silverberg.

Ferris drew the work in ballpoint pen on lined notebook pages, layering crosshatching, dense imagery, and freeform structure (often forsaking rigid comic panels) to allow visual richness and emotional layering.

Creating the novel took several years of intense labor. The first volume consists of about 400 pages.

Despite such obstacles, Monsters received widespread acclaim, being hailed as a modern masterpiece and compared to work by Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Chris Ware.

Other Projects & Contributions

Before her success with Monsters, Ferris worked as a freelance illustrator and toy designer — including assignments for McDonald’s and Takara Tomy.

She has also contributed to anthologies, including Comics for Ukraine: Sunflower Seeds (benefit anthology) in 2022, collaborating with other creators for humanitarian purposes.

Under her name, a prequel titled Records of the Damned has been announced by publishers.

Ferris has also exhibited her original art in galleries, participated in comics and art festivals, and had her work featured internationally.

Themes, Style & Influences

Themes & Motifs

• Monsters as metaphor — The monsters in Ferris’s work often represent otherness, internal struggles, identity, trauma, and social marginalization.

• Memory & trauma — The past, secrets, abuse, and the fragility of life play key roles in Monsters.

• Identity, queerness & visibility — The book engages with themes of gender, sexuality, outsider identity. Ferris has discussed her own journey (having earlier identified as lesbian, later bisexual) and how these inform her work.

• Art as healing — Ferris uses drawing not only as expression but as a form of survival and rehabilitation.

• History, Holocaust & social injustice — In Monsters, the neighbor Anka’s backstory involves Holocaust survival; Ferris weaves real historical horrors with fiction to emphasize injustice and memory.

Visual & Narrative Style

• Dense, richly detailed pages filled with layered images, marginalia, and symbolic motifs.

• Minimal panel boundaries, often letting scenes bleed freely across page space.

• Use of ballpoint pen and notebook paper texture — the graphic novel emulates a diary.

• Homages to fine art (e.g. the Art Institute, museum references) and horror/fantasy comics/cinema (Hammer films, EC Comics, etc.).

• A collage sensibility: mixing text, imagery, visual echoes, footnotes, and visual whispers.

Influences

Ferris cites influences such as Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, cartoonists Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and horror/genre comics and film posters. Dickens, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, and Gothic/ghost stories. The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery) also left a lasting mark.

Awards & Recognition

Emil Ferris has won numerous awards for My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and her artistic work:

• Ignatz Awards (2017): Outstanding Graphic Novel, Outstanding Artist

• Eisner Awards: Best Writer/Artist, Best Graphic Album — New (2018)

• Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Graphic Novel

• Lynd Ward Prize (best graphic novel)

• Fauve d’or at the Angoulême Festival (France)

• Grand prix de la critique ACBD (France)

• Multiple awards internationally, in translation, and honors in comics and fine art circuits.

• In 2025, she won the Whiting Award in Fiction.

• In 2024, she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Famous Quotes & Insights

While Ferris is less quoted than some, her interviews and writings include reflections that illuminate her creative philosophy:

“I say these words to myself every day: ‘Just keep going.’”

On her recovery:
“My daughter taped a pen in my hand … and got me drawing again.”

On monsters:
“I had this vision of this little wolf girl … enfolding in the arms of this tall handsome cut-apart Frankenstein character.”

On creative challenges:
“Writing and drawing a story really requires enormous concentration … the distractions were bleeding into my sacred imaginative space.”

These statements reflect her resilience, the centrality of the imaginative, and how her personal wounds and obsessions inform her art.

Lessons from Emil Ferris

1. Art can be rehabilitation — Ferris transformed physical crisis into a mode of recovery, where drawing became both therapy and purpose.

2. Persist through rejection — She endured dozens of rejections before finding a publisher.

3. Let constraints inspire — Her use of ballpoint pen, notebook pages, and limited gesture became strengths, not limitations.

4. Merge the personal and the universal — Her stories tap into deep human fears, identity, and memory through the lens of monsters.

5. Be bold in form — She rejected conventional comic structure to allow freer, denser visual storytelling.

6. Let vulnerability be strength — Her openness about trauma, illness, and mortality gives her work emotional power.

Conclusion

Emil Ferris is not merely a graphic novelist but a visionary who turned adversity into art. From a family steeped in art, to the harrowing near-loss of mobility, to the bravery of drawing page after page in the grip of uncertainty, her journey is a testament to the radical act of making.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters stands as a landmark work — a multilayered meditation on life, identity, monsters, history, and healing. The fact that Ferris continues to evolve, exhibit, and contribute to the comics community shows that her voice will resonate for many years to come.