‘Drawing is the way I understand things,” says Karen Reyes, as she sits and sketches on Chicago’s L-train, her fanged mouth tight with concentration. It’s 1968 and Karen, a 10-year-old girl who thinks she’s a werewolf, has a lot to digest.
The 2017 first volume of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters saw her turn detective after her beloved neighbour, Anka Silverberg, was found with a bullet in her chest under neatly tucked bedcovers, her doors bolted from the inside. This debut – at once a child’s diary, a murder mystery and a showcase for the fantastic beasts of Karen’s fertile imagination – is one of the best graphic novels of the 21st century so far.
As with its predecessor (which you should definitely read first), Book Two is an adult work that’s packaged like one of the notebooks Karen carries everywhere with her, its lined pages filled with glorious Biro-drawn sketches. Perhaps fittingly, given both books’ love of B-movie monsters, their gestations have been packed with incident. Book One was written by Ferris – an illustrator and toy designer – while she recovered from paralysis caused by West Nile virus, and had its entire print run seized at the Panama Canal after its shipper went bust. A follow-up was expected to be published months later, but took seven years, during which a prequel and a film were both mooted and Ferris and her publisher Fantagraphics went to court over the rights to the sequel.
Book Two has finally emerged, and opens directly after Book One’s conclusion. Karen’s mother has died from cancer, leaving her and her older brother Deeze to negotiate life alone. And Karen has made a shocking discovery: that Deeze had a twin, Victor, who was shot and killed when she was a baby. She digs into the circumstances of Victor’s death, and continues her investigations into Anka’s, uncovering second world war trauma and police corruption. Unsurprisingly, she finds more questions than answers. Who can she trust? What is Deeze’s relationship to local gangster Mr Gronan? And what is in the basement that broods beneath her apartment, its doors padlocked?
With her mother gone, Karen gets to have cola for breakfast and watch creature features at night. She dreams of plunging stakes into vampires and sees druids walk the streets. She’s in Grant Park when the police crush the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, and she visits the Chicago Art Institute, where she plunges into paintings by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Pablo Picasso and Felice Ficherelli to speak to biblical widows and eavesdrop on minotaurs. The plot takes in guns, speakeasies and the Nazi gas chambers.
None of this is rushed: instead Book Two takes time to explore a sprawling city and larger-than-life cast. We watch as Karen navigates late childhood and meets toothy fellow monster obsessive Shelley, who steals quarters from vending machines with a shoelace and flirts shyly with Karen. Jeffrey “The Brain” Alvarez is a friend of Deeze’s who has a rabbit named Raygun and a collection of conspiracy theories. Karen’s schoolfriend Francoise, once known as Franklin, tells of cruelty in Jamaica and sings like Patsy Cline. And as Karen edges closer to the truth and further into danger, Deeze – charming, funny, caring, but full of secrets and capable of sudden violence – is rarely far away.
The result is a gothic romance that’s also a detective noir; a graphic novel that’s part illuminated manuscript, part carefully composed scrapbook. We tour back alleys, bridges, diners, fleapit cinemas and crumbling brownstones, see mothmen and manticores on the covers of horror comics, meet shopkeepers, schoolchildren and thugs. Everything is rendered with the same observant fascination. This is a book as interested in everyday apartment interiors as it is in the enchanted forests and vengeful mummies that lurk in Karen’s imagination. The moments where My Favorite Thing Is Monsters pauses to show the lines on a commuter’s face, explain the nuances of white nail polish or explore Edward Hopper’s use of the perfect ratio, are among its most precious.
Karen stands at the book’s heart, pen in hand, dwarfed by the hard, strange world that surrounds her, but undaunted. Above all, Ferris’s work is an account of this young artist as she comes to terms with herself and the world. It is curious, over-the-top and easily distracted because it is the tale of a child who is all these things. It’s a great tribute to love and friendship, and a journey into underworlds literal and metaphorical, full of horrors that are hard to put into words but that can – with lush, exaggerated obliqueness – be drawn. A great graphic novel has a worthy sequel.
• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two is published by Fantagraphics, £44.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
