Emil Ferris won the lottery seven years ago. She knows this. She didn’t win the Illinois Lotto.
She won the artist’s lottery, which costs far more than $2 to play, and no matter if you are a pianist or playwright, it’s the crueler, more arbitrary game. Even in a field of long shots, she was unlikely. She was already in her 50s, scraping by as an Evanston illustrator and sometime product designer (for McDonald’s Happy Meals, among other things).
Worse, Ferris had made a graphic novel so dense and sprawling, its manuscript pushed north of 600 pages long. Its initial publisher decided that it was just too..
. much. But Fantagraphics, the venerable Seattle comics publisher of everything from “Peanuts” to Chris Ware, grabbed it.
They would release it as companion books, the second coming six months after the first. The book, “My Favorite Thing is Monsters,” with its sweaty caricatures and latticed, ballpoint collages, tucked inside a package made to resemble the school notebook of an alienated girl in Uptown who wants to be a werewolf and befriends a Holocaust survivor, was such a baroque, accomplished swing for the creative fences, it resembled a life’s work. I remember a Fantagraphics staffer telling me that the publisher had wondered if this out-of-nowhere Chicagoan even existed.
Or was this “Emil Ferris” the pseudonym for a known genius? No, no — Emil Ferris lives, breathes, writes, draws. Seven years after “My Favorite Thing is Monsters” became a ra.
