"My Favorite Thing is Monsters" Visual Language

In the graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, we get to see through the eyes of the main character, Karen Reyes. Karen is a young girl in 1960s Chicago who is obsessed with monsters. The story tells about Karen getting through life as well as her intrigue in solving the mystery of the death of her neighbor Anka. 

To help us understand Karen’s mind and how she thinks, Ferris has devised a visual language for us to learn and adopt. Some of the ways that Ferris implements her visual language is through “haptic” or tactile sensations in Karen’s notebook, the campy world of 1950s horror films, and painting and visual art. 

“Haptic” relates to the sense of touch or to perceive that something has been touched. Within her notebook, there are plenty of moments where it seems that there has been human touch. Firstly, this is achieved heavily through the fact that it’s a hand-drawn graphic novel within a notebook. Hatched pen and ink drawings within a spiralbound shows that this really was created through a human hand. The image below is a good example as well of the “haptic” sensations. 

Karen has clipped in a well-rendered drawing of Anka. An overlay of this separate piece of paper really gives the sense that this is someone’s notebook or diary. Along with this, we can see that Karen’s mind and hand wandered to draw three bullets flying around the page. There are also little doodled in speech bubbles of her and Anka’s conversation. 

 

In the novel, there are lots of moments of campy 1950s horror movies too. From dramatic lighting to the tropey themes that make up the plot. All of it seems to be absorbed and spat out within Karen’s notebook. 

Karen assigns monsters to some of the people within her pages. She has labelled herself as a werewolf, for example. Giving cheese-y horror movie monsters to people is just one example. The use of these monsters is an interesting part of the visual language that Ferris implements in her story. Her use of monsters is Karen’s way of showing things she knows are considered “odd” or “other,” but she doesn’t fully understand why or how. 

Besides the characterization of the people, she also makes the chapter titles like horror movie posters. Like in the image below. We have a classic horror movie/comic poster image. Two hippie vampire babes on the beach with spider palm trees; how much more campy horror could you ask for and get?  

Finally, the last component to Ferris’s visual language is that of painting and visual art. Ferris’s use of art within the story is very interesting. I think my favorite use of it is when Karen goes to the art museum with Frank and Sandy. 

In this section, the three of them are going through the Art Institute. Karen sees Frank embody many of these art pieces as he gives detailed speeches about the fashion and status of each painting’s figure. Karen’s visionary view of Franklin in these fanciful costumes as he describes in detail of each woman’s outfit tells about how into fashion Franklin is. She even says that “Franklin understands clothes in the same deep way that I understand monsters.” This explains the detail in which she gives respect to Franklin's love of women's fashion as it befalls the same category of her projecting through monsters the things in which she doesn't understand.