Emil Ferris (Chicago, 1962) landed like a UFO in 2017 in the global graphic novel world. She made her debut at the age of 55 after being semi-paralyzed for a while at 40, and she did so with an avalanche of awards for an unclassifiable work, created with colored pens: What I like best are the monsters (Finestres/ Reservoir books) , the graphic diary in which the girl Karen Reyes reflects on her life in the turbulent Chicago of the sixties. A girl from a broken family fascinated by horror films and pulp comics and who in her diary portrays those around her with the face of a monster. She is a wolf girl dressed as a detective: she wants to solve the mysterious death of her neighbor Anka, a survivor of the Holocaust.
A graphic novel of which Ferris is now publishing the second volume, which mixes the slums of Chicago with Vietnam and hippies, Nazi Germany and Karen’s sexual awakening by the girls, the world of art and dreams. And that of monsters, which Ferris soon got into by watching the movie The Werewolf.
“Its protagonist was taken by surprise by what it was. I identified with him and I remember crying. I was five years old and I was impressed. His people receive a gift that they never recognize: the gift of this supernatural being that transforms into a forest dweller. His knowledge of the world beyond humans is greater than anyone else’s. He knows things we no longer know. But the only answer is to try to kill him. What if the people satisfied their blood lust, but not with humans? What if when there was a full moon they chained him? And if they then said to him: ‘Please, explain to us, what is it like to be you?'”, he questions.
“Perhaps he would tell a story that the town needs or has skills that the town requires. What if we didn’t kill the monsters? What if we understood them and, then, we understood ourselves?”. And she evokes the eternal seduction that the monsters have exerted on her: “They were all wonderful and offered different things. I wondered about their conscience, their experience, their stories. Even the ones that weren’t so sexy. I wanted to grow up and be a monster, that’s all I wanted.”
And he explains that even though he debuted late, he’s always drawn, only now he believed he had something to tell with Karen’s story: the danger of tyranny in the world. “We had Assange’s revelations, and that was on the rise,” he points out. A restlessness that led her to remember when in the Chicago of her childhood she saw strange numbers on the arm of a beautiful woman and asked the librarian about it. “He showed me some books. And the Karen that I was saw the cruelty. It changed me forever. I grew up in a neighborhood with many Holocaust survivors. And I realized that traumas don’t go away, ghosts stay and monsters are not the werewolf or Frankenstein or Dracula. They are those other evil monsters who, if there is gold underground and people walking on it, see it as an obstacle. People who don’t want us to know how remarkable we are, and their greatest desire is to keep us believing that monsters are outside of us and that we are not powerful. And the monsters are not out. We are the monsters and we are powerful, beings with an incredible and glorious ability to create. And partly our greatest power is the stories”, he concludes.
