Seven years after its immense critical and public success, What I like is monstersthe graphic saga ofEmil Ferris published in France by Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, is making its comeback with a second volume which appears this November 8 in bookstores. The American author, who this year signed the poster for the Utopiales festival of which she was also to be the guest of honor before being forced at the last moment to cancel her visit for personal reasons, has become over the years an icon of science fiction comics.
Recognized for her unique ballpoint pen drawing technique, with this new 416-page volume she delivers a story continuing from her first opus. Published in 2017, it was crowned with the Fauve d’or in Angoulême in 2019. The one thatArt Spiegelmanauthor of Mausconsiders it “ one of the greatest comic artists of our time » here offers a narration more oriented towards introspection, but which does not give up anything in intensity.
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Story of the investigation into the death of Anka Silverberg which continues, What I like is monsters 2 immerses the reader in medias res in the Chicago of the late 1960s. The survivor of the death camps, murdered by a bullet to the heart, was at the center of the intrigue in the first part. A mystery that continues to haunt Karen Reyes, heroine of the saga, a young werewolf detective in full puberty. In this new volume, the story tightens around the young monster and her family. By highlighting her doubts and questions, both identity and sexual, Karen's quest for meaning, characteristic of adolescence, comes up against the harshness of a world that still escapes her.
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This second book remains faithful to the first and we almost forget the seven years that separate them. If the story seems unchanged, the characters have grown up a lot. Karen is on the verge of entering the adult world. Always driven by her curiosity and a certain form of touching naivety, the heroine wants to understand the world around her and appropriate the monsters that illustrate her pulp magazines whose covers punctuate the story (cheap horror or occult stories). Emil Ferris continues his quest for new characters, always on the frontier of reality. Alien, ghostly druid, wacky and colorful creatures, come to life before the eyes of a Karen brimming with imagination.
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The bonds between Karen and her brother Deeze intensify, offering the reader some breathing space during fraternal visits to the Chicago museum. These scenes, already present in volume 1, distill moments of peace into the author's organized chaos. Of Picasso has Jan Sanders Van Hemessonpassing through Edward Hopperthese excursions, both physical and spiritual, nourish the philosophical reflections on life, death, family, which populate the mind of young Karen.
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The journey continues in the late 1960s. Chicago lives to the rhythm of social, political and cultural upheavals, becoming a character in its own right. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War, struggles for civil rights and the birth of the hippie counterculture permeate the pages of this second volume. The specter of the Second World War is still very present, fueled by Anka's testimony about her time in the death camps (sensitive souls refrain).
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Reading Emil Ferris is like entering a dark, disturbing tunnel, at the junction between dream and nightmare. The reader, however, cannot help but follow her. The pages, blackened with pen by the author's unique style, wonderfully transcribe the darkness of a polluted Chicago in full turmoil, the cluttered souls and the knots in the brain of the budding inspector. Sometimes disturbing, the comic finds a balance with many traits of humor and the purity of Karen's outlook, always in search of redemption, love and truth.
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Like the first volume, Karen is driven by humanist, feminist and anti-racist values dear to the author. Emil Ferris cultivates his love for monsters. Prostitutes, blacks, Native Americans, homosexuals, trans people… the author continues to highlight the marginalized, the outcasts of the time. And continues to twist graphic and narrative conventions to offer a work that is at once provocative, poetic and deeply human.
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This second volume fits perfectly into the continuity of the first, while adding new layers to the complexity of the characters and the richness of the graphic universe of Emil Ferris. Karen, an extraordinary heroine, remains faithful to her quest: to understand the monsters that surround her, but also those that live within her.
