[Plura-list] Emil Ferris's long-awaited "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two"
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Sat Jun 1 11:20:14 EDT 2024
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/
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Next weekend (June 7–9), I'm in Amherst, New York to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity:
https://media-ecology.org/convention
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Today's links
* Emil Ferris's long-awaited "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two": A tour-de-force that was worth the wait.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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🍡 Emil Ferris's long-awaited "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two"
Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by *My Favorite Thing Is Monsters*, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was *amazing*:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/
The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right - dominant - hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken *days* of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.
The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.
*My Favorite Thing Is Monsters* told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord - a gangster and his girlfriend - the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.
Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.
But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen - who loved and worshiped Annika - is determined to get to the bottom of it.
Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her - and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.
Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life - including Karen herself - are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.
These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute *catnip* for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.
But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.
Seven years ago, Book One of *My Favorite Thing Is Monsters* absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).
But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into *years*. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/
The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of *Monsters*. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the *very* long-awaited *Book Two*:
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two
*Book Two* picks up from *Book One*'s cliffhanger and then *rockets* forward. Everything brilliant about *One* is even better in *Two* - the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.
Everything about *Two* is *more*. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in *One* takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.
I've been staring at the spine of *My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One* on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous *thing*, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.
After seven years, it would have been hard for *Book Two* to live up to all that anticipation, but god*dammit* if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.
There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of *Monsters* this year - and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.
In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to *Monsters* and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:
https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769
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🍡 Hey look at this
* Introducing the new Framework Laptop 13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-new-framework-laptop-13-with-intel-core-ultra-series-1-processors
* Right to repair is now the law in Colorado https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24166894/colorado-right-to-repair-law-electronics-devices-parts-pairing
* Phanpy: A minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client https://phanpy.social/ (h/t Nelson Minar)
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🍡 This day in history
#20yrsago Adrian Mole: the text-adventure game https://web.archive.org/web/20040603000808/www.c64unlimited.net/games/s/Secret Diary of Adrian Mole/Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.htm
#15yrsago Canadian cinema fined $10,000 for privacy invasion over bag-search https://web.archive.org/web/20090529094117/https://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090525/cinema_lawsuit_090525/20090525
#15yrsago Profile of the lock-hacker who bumped the “unbumpable” Medeco lock https://web.archive.org/web/20090525195144/http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster
#15yrsago Devilish Devenish-Phibbs bench-plaques around London https://web.archive.org/web/20090529001109/https://www.timeout.com/london/big-smoke/blog/7810/london-s_benches_and_the_strange_case_of_croy_devenish-phibbs.html
#10yrsago Women who’d never seen their vulvas given a mirror and a modesty screen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC4dVe8pIGY
#10yrsago Engineering our way out of mass surveillance https://web.archive.org/web/20140603175909/smarimccarthy.is/blog/2014/05/28/engineering-our-way-out-of-fascism/
#10yrsago Harvard Bluebook: more threats to those who would cite the law https://web.archive.org/web/20140601042919/http://tinyletter.com/5ua/letters/a-cite-to-behold-5-useful-articles-vol-1-issue-10
#10yrsago Majority of Americans think Snowden was right to leak https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint-security/a-year-later-most-americans-think-snowden-did-the-right-thing
#10yrsago The English Method: UK taught modern torture to Brazil’s dictators https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27625540
#10yrsago What’s the story with the Makerbot patent? https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/30/whats-the-story-with-the-makerbot-patent/
#10yrsago NSA can’t find any emails from Snowden, then it can (convenient, no?) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/29/nsa-email-snowden-surveillance-internal-whistleblowing
#5yrsago How Mexican labor unions tried to rescue Freud from the Nazis https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/mexico-attempt-save-freud-nazis/
#5yrsago Wealth is correlated with greed, dishonesty and cheating — are these effects or a causes? https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/opinion-why-do-rich-people-lie-cheat-and-steal-more-than-those-on-low-incomes-4647197-May2019/
#5yrsago New Amazon patent application reveals “solution” to missed Alexa instructions: always on recording https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on
#5yrsago How the “prosperity gospel” convinces poor people to give everything to grifty millionaire preachers https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47675301
#5yrsago After viral Youtube denunciations, Germany’s establishment parties falter — so the ruling party’s leader faxed her colleagues demanding action https://www.techdirt.com/2019/05/30/german-political-leader-questions-youtubers-right-to-tell-fans-not-to-vote-her-party-urgently-summons-her-advisers-response-fax/
#5yrsago Public outcry has killed an attempt turn clickthrough terms of service into legally binding obligations (for now) https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2019/05/22/ali-annual-meeting-ends-with-uncertain-future-for-restatement-of-the-law-consumer-contracts/
#5yrsago Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz calls neoliberalism “a failed ideology” and sketches out a “progressive capitalism” to replace it https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/30/after-neoliberalism
#5yrsago Google’s API changes mean only paid enterprise users of Chrome will be able to access full adblock https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/
#5yrsago Chase credit cards quietly reintroduce the binding arbitration clauses they were forced to eliminate a decade ago https://www.fastcompany.com/90357331/chase-adds-forced-arbitration-clause-to-slate-credit-cards
#5yrsago Ted Cruz backs AOC’s call for a lifetime ban on lobbying by former Congressjerks https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/aoc-calls-for-ban-on-revolving-door-as-study-shows-2-3-of-recently-departed-lawmakers-now-lobbyists.html
#5yrsago To reduce plastic packaging, ship products in solid form https://www.treehugger.com/incredibly-simple-solution-plastic-packaging-waste-4857081
#5yrsago For the first time since the 70s, New York State is set to enshrine sweeping tenants’ protections https://web.archive.org/web/20190531131740/https://www.thenation.com/article/universal-rent-regulation-new-york/
#1yrago To save the news, ban surveillance ads https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation
#1yrago Ian McDonald's "Hopeland": A novel so eerily good it almost made me angry https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace
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🍡 Upcoming appearances
* Media Ecology Association keynote, Jun 6-9 (Amherst, NY)
https://media-ecology.org/convention
* Locus Awards keynote (Oakland), Jun 20
https://locusmag.com/2024-locus-awards-weekend/
* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
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🍡 Recent appearances
* All Tech is Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKThzsYGjEQ
* RISD Debates in AI keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs
* Author's Alliance 10th Anniversary (at 1:55:00)
https://archive.org/details/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-presentation
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🍡 Latest books
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
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🍡 Upcoming books
* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
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🍡 Colophon
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Friday's progress: 817 words (4140 words total).
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast:
Wanna Make Big Tech Monopolies Even Worse? Kill Section 230 https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/26/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230/
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