Monstrous Affections: affect, trauma, and the (im)pulse of living in Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Abstract

In this thesis, I am interested in amalgamations of writing and drawing that are affecting, that gather into impressions, atmospheres, attunements, encounters and worldly rhythms. I explore emotion, affect, temporalities and connections between bodies in Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Sara Ahmed writes that emotion,1 that which moves us to feel, also forms attachments, paradoxically moving us whilst also attaching us to others; “What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place [...] attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others.”2 We are moved by what makes us feel, as affect takes place between moving bodies, involving a way of being in and “apprehending the world,”3 whilst drawing us to pay attention, to linger. Comics move us in the manner that Ahmed describes, literally moving us in time, but also accumulating, impressing on us, to form attachments, to re-orientate our “way of apprehending the world.”4 In this thesis I become swept up and carried away with the affective intensity of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, how it creates complex, shimmering worlds abundant with impressions, interactions, pasts, pain, pleasure, joy, hope, attachments, multiplicity. My Favorite Thing is Monsters, is a graphic narrative, constructed as the spiralbound diary of ten-year old girl Karen Reyes, growing up in 1960s Uptown Chicago. Karen draws herself as a werewolf-detective, following the death of her upstairs neighbour, and uses the diary to “collect clues” that become a mode of understanding and living in the world. Monsters is, itself, a monster: a hybrid of genres and forms stitched together: diary, detective story, noir, horror, coming-of-age story, family drama, Holocaust testimony, historical epic. I have drawn from theories of comics, temporalities, thinking around drawings and writing, along with ways of understanding and imagining temporality, trauma, intimacy, bodies and affect, in relation to My Favorite Thing is Monsters. I attempt to ‘stitch’ these together into what I hope will be productive, but soft associations, in the mode of an implicated detective who gathers clues, interprets, fails, grieves, and is repositioned.