More than a comic strip, “Me, what I like is monsters” by the American Emil Ferris is a “monster” book, in the author’s own opinion, and a miraculous one after a series of accidents.
This extravagant work has 832 pages divided into two volumes. The second was released in French on Friday, published by Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, five months after the original English edition.
It is the comic diary of a young girl from Chicago in the 1960s, Karen, a horror fan and gifted at drawing, who recounts her life and the murder of another resident of her building, Anka, a survivor of the Shoah.
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“He’s a monster of his own kind,” concedes the author, interviewed by AFP at her home in Milwaukee (northern United States) from Paris. “This book is written as if you could hurt someone with it.”
Emil Ferris, 62, is a survivor. At age 40, the West Nile virus caused him to lose the use of his hand. But she fought to start drawing again, with a very original technique: entirely with a ballpoint pen.
It took a good deal of courage, as the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius taught.
Too indefinable
“The number one teaching of Marcus Aurelius, which is that the obstacle is the path, was really the sentence overall that best described the whole of what brought this book into existence” , says the designer. “I told the original editor it would be about 200 pages and I felt like I could do it in a year.”
Emil Ferris then worked 16 hours a day, in great destitution, financially helped by a parking lot employee friend, and with a small advance from this publisher… who refused volume 1. Too indefinable, too extravagant.
Another publisher, Fantagraphics, took the risk. He ran into trouble: printed in China, the copies were seized in Panama when the carrier went bankrupt.
“The book aroused a lot of interest because it was actually stolen, we thought, by pirates,” remembers Emil Ferris.
It appeared in 2017, was praised by critics, then translated into French in 2018, selling, with 160,000 copies, even better than in the United States.
Cover of the second volume of “Me, what I like is monsters”, by the American author Emil Ferris, published in French by Monsieur Toussaint Louverture. (Screenshot / Monsieur Toussaint Louverture)
“Better in French”
Emil Ferris had made good progress on volume 2 when she launched into a very long and difficult procedure against her publisher, considering herself poorly paid. Once an agreement was reached, a first printer in China abandoned the game and a second took over.
Fans were desperate to read this sequel. It only arrived in May 2024, in original version. But everything was not perfect, the author thought.
“When we started receiving PDFs [versions électroniques du livre, NDLR] for the translation, each time the work was different,” says the French publisher Dominique Bordes. “Emil started working on it again, she redid drawings, texts. It ranges from small sentences to full pages, including details on the cover. She wanted to follow through on her desires.”
“I think it’s actually a better version than the English one,” says the author, a Francophile. “Don’t tell everyone in the United States but it’s better in French.”
Editions Monsieur Toussaint Louverture are betting big. The first printing is 60,000 copies, a modest print run compared to an Asterix or a Lucky Luke, but risky for such a voluminous and expensive book.
“Very big economic bet. I’m more stressed than for volume 1. With a new title, no one is really expecting us. There, the booksellers bought stock for three months: not 20 copies, no, 150 to have until mid-January,” confides Dominique Bordes.
