Emil Ferris' My Favourite Thing is Monsters is stunning. There's no two ways around it.
Set in the tumultuous backdrop of 1968 Chicago, Ferris work is meticulous in its command of history and breathtaking in its delivery. It's a tense read too, focussing on 10 year-old Karen Reyes as she works to solve the murder of her older German neighbour, a former citizen of the Weimar Republic and a Holocaust survivor too. Not only that, but Ferris makes an effort of bringing the past back to the present, granting the first and second volumes of the text a salience other books sorely lack.
There really isn't a comic like it out there, and while there's plenty for students of the sixties to take away from the read, cinephiles and purveyors of pulp horror will undoubtedly enjoy it too.
It's totally absorbing, and while there have been plenty of murder mysteries in the medium this year, none hold a candle to Ferris' work, which roots itself squarely in an almost timeless zeitgeist - one that reiterates that the nightmares of the past, no matter how much we may like to believe otherwise, aren't over yet.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
