Seven years after the release of the first part of What I like is monsterswhich shook the hypercompetitive graphic novel industry, American artist Emil Ferris returns to us with a second volume, a sequel that is just as unique and astounding. In interview at Dutyshe recounts her meteoric rise despite serious health problems and numerous obstacles.
In 2017 an unidentified literary object appears which delights critics and fans of original proposals. Even if the album What I like is monsters was signed by an unknown person in the battalion – and is a piece of more than 400 pages – the copies had sold like hot cakes.
Distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies all over the world, the work was then crowned with a string of prestigious distinctions in the United States and elsewhere, including three Eisner prizes and the Fauve d’or for best album in Angoulême Festival 2019. Emil Ferris will even be qualified by Art Spiegelman, the author of the masterpiece Mausof “the greatest comic book artist of our time”.
“Even now, I find it hard to believe it,” admits the designer, on the phone from her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she recently moved. “I created this work in complete isolation. At the time, there weren’t many people who believed in what I was doing. I could count them on the fingers of one hand. »
It must be said that no one had yet leafed through a work of such breadth, a sort of extraordinary drawn diary whose narrator is Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old girl in working-class Chicago, a gloomy and teeming city of the late 1960s, populated by ghosts, criminals and thugs.
The heroine of the comic strip, the barely veiled double of the designer, sees herself as a werewolf, a multifaceted character, a fan of B-series horror films, vampires and the living dead. She becomes a detective in order to solve the mysterious murder of her neighbor Anka Silverberg, a survivor of the death camps.
“My main goal with this story is for people to be able to identify with someone who is different from them, so that they can get away from themselves a little bit. Throughout her investigation, Karen discovers that monsters, good or bad, are creatures like any other, ambivalent, haunted and tortured. »
The fact remains that the first volume, an abundant and ultra-referenced fantastic bestiary, with the corridors of the Art Institute of Chicago as a backdrop, was initially rejected by 48 publishers, Ferris recalls, explaining that his agent sent him regularly received rejection letters from publishing houses, who found the work unclassifiable and too bizarre.
“In some of them, there were beautiful things written,” underlines the 62-year-old author. Several editors explained that they liked this or that, but that in the end, they couldn’t understand the whole thing. Fantastic? Horror? They didn’t know what to do with this book. »
This comic book magician had to wait a long time before a publisher finally agreed to publish her album.
This day came late, at a time when the author’s life, then in her fifties, was at its lowest point. Penniless and in great material deprivation, she survived thanks to the financial help of a friend. “I was hungry and had just been evicted from my home in Chicago. Then you will understand that everything that happened to me afterwards was only unexpected. I was very far from foreseeing the enthusiasm that would arise from the first album. I didn’t even know if people were going to like the book. »
A lesson in resilience
Ferris’s life hasn’t been easy. She has been hit several times by bad blows of fate. Severe scoliosis from birth disrupted his childhood in Chicago. At age 40, she was struck down by a rare and severe form of the West Nile virus, which paralyzed her limbs. However, she did not give up, despite the doctors’ pessimistic predictions. She struggled with all her might to be able to draw, until she stuck a pencil in her hand with adhesive tape!
“I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life without being able to draw. I was determined to get through the immense pain. I imposed iron discipline on myself by working more than 16 hours a day. I worked very hard, tirelessly. It allowed me to improvise a new creative technique, entirely with a ballpoint pen. »
Buoyed by the triumph of the first volume, she takes up the monstrous adventure in the pages of the imposing second part which closes the diptych. This time we find Karen in full puberty. The budding detective continues to accumulate clues about the death of her neighbor, but must also deal with the death of her mother and the transformation of her own body. Although the album continues to combine the horror story and the baroque world of fine arts, the heroine, who is poor, mixed race and queer, evolves in a more violent and politicized social environment than in the previous opus. .
“Yes, there is a greater part of gravity,” she confides. “The second volume is the end of a cycle. It deals more with demands against people who don’t believe in humanity. As such, the book is about fear, a natural and omnipresent feeling in human beings. But fear is our worst enemy, it stifles imagination. »
The personal ordeals that the designer went through in some way allowed her to overcome her own anxieties. “Without all this, What I like is monsters would not exist,” argues the sixty-year-old.
Seven years passed between the first volume and the second part, a period of necessary work, Ferris points out, in part because of his choice to draw with a four-color ballpoint pen, each page requiring the tracing of countless numbers hatched marks, a process which has since become his trademark.
“This allowed me to create a work that I consider suitable and in perfect coherence with the style. I also wanted to be in agreement with the characters, particularly that of Karen. I try to be true to what she wants. She guides me and I listen to her,” says the artist, who at the same time announces the preparation of an ante-episode already entitled Records of the Damned (Archives of the Damned) and a new series.
