“The monsters are not those of the werewolf movie, nor those of Frankenstein, nor those of Dracula. Dracula is so sexy… Monsters are not outside of us. We are the monsters. And we are powerful,” says Emil Ferris (Chicago, 1962), that strange and dazzling UFO that landed on the global graphic novel scene in 2017 at no less than 55 years old, after having been temporarily semi-paralyzed a decade earlier by a virus. And he landed, receiving an avalanche of awards, with an unclassifiable work, with hundreds of pages created… with colored pens: the first volume of What I like most are the monsters (Reservoir books in Spanish, Finestres in Catalan), the diary graphic in which the girl Karen Reyes reflects her life in the tremendous Chicago of the sixties. The same city of gangsters and fascinating architecture that the author grew up in.
From a humble and unstructured family, Karen has found a world for herself in horror movies and pulp comics and in her diary she portrays everyone around her with the face of a monster. She herself is a werewolf girl dressed as a detective, because she wants to solve the mysterious death of her neighbor Anka, a Holocaust survivor.
A graphic novel of which Ferris is now publishing the second volume and in which the poor neighborhoods of Chicago are mixed with the Vietnam War and the hippies, Nazi Germany and Karen’s sexual awakening for girls, the world of pulp comics and that of great art, and that of dreams and ghosts. And, above all, that of monsters, which Ferris entered with an early passion for the werewolf. Or perhaps observing some strange numbers tattooed on the arm of a beautiful woman one day as a child. Ferris responds via zoom about the origins of her work, her fear of tyranny, and her peculiar pen drawing born out of necessity.
“Why did I start so late? I have always been drawing and writing. But this is the first thing I showed anyone. And I was very lucky. Much of what he did was not necessary for anyone. It was important to me. But there were things I wanted to say to others when telling Karen’s story, and I felt that it was time to say them and that it was not just an exercise of my ego. He believed it necessary to speak of the feeling that an imminent tyranny was looming over all human beings on the planet. There are Assange’s revelations that governments were operating in ways that would not meet with the approval of the people. And that was increasing and was less and less questioned,” she recalls.
But that worrying feeling, she says, led her to reflect on a difficult experience as a child. “I saw some strange numbers on the arm of a beautiful woman. I went to the librarian and asked her: Why do some people have numbers on their arms, like a tattoo? She told me, go there, she looks at those books. I did it. And I thought, ‘oh, this is what we did.’ The Karen that I was saw the cruelty and it changed me forever. Then I started talking to people. I grew up in a neighborhood with many Holocaust survivors. Many of the children I met were children of survivors. And I realized that traumas do not disappear, that ghosts stay and that the monsters are not those of the werewolf movie, nor those of Frankenstein, nor those of Dracula. It’s not them,” she says.
And he continues: ”They are those other bad monsters that when they see gold underground and people walking on the surface, they see people as an obstacle to the gold. People who don’t want us to know how remarkable we are, and whose greatest desire is to keep us believing that the monsters are outside of us and that we are not powerful. And the monsters are not outside of us. We are the monsters and we are powerful. We are beings of an incredible and glorious capacity to create. And partly our greatest power is stories. By the way, you would make a great vampire. Or would he become a werewolf? Better vampire, I think,” he is amused.
And he evokes the Chicago of his childhood, monstrous and majestic, which he reflects in his novels. “What I saw as a child was that the human will would always endure. In Chicago there were white people who came from Appalachia, from the mountain towns. They came with the hope of a better life for their children. The mining companies had stripped them of their lands. You also had Native Americans, the government wanted to remove them from their land because they discovered some value in it and they were promised jobs and good schools in the city, but nothing turned out to be true. And then there were all these amazing people from so many different countries. “People from Africa, from India.”
And all of them, he recalls, “sought to free themselves for the good of their children. There was a feeling in the air that you had to stand up. Fight for the rights of all people. And the feeling arose, despite racism, of tolerance between groups. And the feeling that each child was everyone’s child. There was a lot of poverty and incredible kindness. Of course, there were very dark people spiritually who did terrible things. But the vast majority desperately wanted the best they could for their children, even if they were hindered by the demons of poverty, sometimes alcoholism or drugs.”
And, he evokes, “I saw it, and I saw its beauty. The people of Appalachia organized and fought against the landowners. Native Americans fought for their children to have an education that would teach them who they had been for thousands of years. There were amazing things. I saw and believed in those things. And Karen sees those things. We are told all the time that we are not good, but that is not true. We are glorious. And we are monstrous.”
Ferris’s first monster came in the movie The Wolfman. And he cried. “When I saw that story and its protagonist, Larry Talbot, he was baffled. He was taken aback by what he was. I identified with him and remember crying. He was five years old and he impressed me. In that film the town receives a gift that it never recognizes: the gift of this supernatural being who transforms into a forest inhabitant. In a beast, a creature. His knowledge of the world beyond the human world is greater than anyone else’s. And the only answer is to try to kill him. There is something he knows that we no longer know. What if the people said they would satisfy his bloodlust, but not with humans? And when the moon is full, will they make sure he is chained? And then, they will ask him ‘please tell us, what is it like to be you?'” he asks.
”Maybe it would tell a story that the town needs or has skills that the town requires. I mean, what if we didn’t kill the monsters? What if we understood them? And, in doing so, what if we understand ourselves? We are the monsters. He never stopped being a human being, but rather he became something more. And when he became something else, we didn’t want him anymore. As a kid, I thought it was a huge missed opportunity. And he was so cool… Couldn’t we have loved him?” And she remembers the perpetual seduction that the monsters exerted on her: “They were all wonderful and offered different things. She asked me: What is your conscience like? What is your experience? What are their stories like? Even the ones that weren’t so sexy. He wanted to grow up and be a monster. It’s everything he wanted.”
Regarding Karen’s experiences in her adolescence in a conservative Chicago in which certain clothes or certain women, lesbians, are not recommended, she says that “I had a slightly different experience because I had very liberal parents who allowed me everything. But in the 1960s and 1970s, women weren’t really considered full people. My father had many comics whose drawings I loved, but the way women were portrayed is that they were always the subject of sexuality or violence. They never did anything. “You never really knew what they thought, unless they were stupid.” In that world she saw the impressive Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes from the Art Institute of Chicago that she reproduces in the comic. She “she is a very powerful woman. Are you going to mess with her people? She’s going to cut off your head. Brilliant. “It was surprising to me to be in a world where my mother couldn’t have a checking account and where I could go see this painting.”
To explain his unmistakable pen drawing he also goes back to his childhood. “When I was a child we had very little. For a long time my father worked as a welder, a job that did not pay very well. My mother taught part-time at a school for the mentally disabled. We were very poor. And we lived in a building for people who didn’t have much. I remember going to my mother to ask her for 69 cents for a field trip. Impossible. So she left me at school with Native American kids whose parents didn’t have the 69 cents either. And we drew while the class went on a trip. And when the course started and I received some incredible pens and a notebook, it was like someone gave me all the land in the world. It seemed incredible to me. I wanted to have that again. “I wanted that feeling of the most humble tools possible to open all the doors.”
Ferris promises more Karen soon: “Sometimes I work up to 16 hours a day. There is a new book that will tell the most personal story between Karen and Anka, their secret adventures. In many ways, the book is about the ghosts of Chicago, one of my favorite things. And there will be many other things, because Karen’s world is a big world.”
