The seven-year wait since Emil Ferris published her debut graphic novel has felt far longer than that, but MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS, BOOK 2 (Fantagraphics, 412 pp., $44.99) is finally here, and now the first book is no longer in a class by itself. There is apparently nothing Ferris can’t render: A cartoony girl-werewolf — her protagonist, Karen Reyes, drawn as she sees herself — seems to flow from her multicolored ballpoint pens as easily as Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s musclebound Judith, standing contrapposto next to the head of Holophernes on one memorable page, wields her sword.
And that’s part of the point. Ferris is drawing a murder mystery and a story about Chicago in the 1960s and a coming-of-age tale, but she’s also interested in all the ways that high art is in conversation with low art. Her gangsters, drag queens and hippie philosophers might be aliens or vampires from a sleazy magazine on one page, but they could just as easily populate a Picasso or a Goya drawing on the next. There’s a page of Medusa as the Mona Lisa that feels like the book’s cri de coeur: Why shouldn’t beauty and monstrosity peacefully coexist within the same subject?
This is not merely an artistic problem. Karen’s beloved brother, Deeze, is devoted and protective, but he’s also brutally violent. And as Karen tentatively gets more comfortable being gay, she learns that one of her neighbors, Anka, a Holocaust survivor, has been murdered — a fact made all the more tragic because of the terrible things she did to survive.
Ferris doesn’t tie up all these plot threads; she revels in the contradictions rather than resolving them. A prequel, “Records of the Damned,” is reportedly already in the works, and somehow my anticipation for the next volume is already exactly the right kind of pleasant agony.
Last year when the artist Martin Simmonds was at New York Comic Con, he let curious passers-by flip through a beautiful portfolio of pages he had for sale. The most striking would become leaves for UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: DRACULA (Image/Skybound, 120 pp., $24.99), drawn, painted and collaged by Simmonds and written by his frequent collaborator James Tynion IV. Those pages, with lace glued to them and gutters drawn with what looked like correction tape, are featured in this condensed “Dracula” story, a lush volume that plays up Mina Harker’s attraction to the Transylvanian count.
Simmonds and Tynion have produced less an adaptation of the 1931 Universal Studios film, as the cover suggests, than a tone poem on its themes, which is all to the good. The script is spare and the images are generous and baroque; often, they sweep across pages and beyond borders, and Dracula himself gains a dreamlike quality. Little wonder that their Mina is so thoroughly seduced.
Despite a charming visual style that looks like a 1990s Cartoon Network offering and a cover that promises “six twisted tales of adorable horror,” Jay Stephens’s DWELLINGS (Oni Press, 272 pp., $34.99) is both a single, rewardingly complicated narrative and decidedly not for kids. The story concerns a little Canadian town called Elwich, populated by an encyclopedic variety of scary-story protagonists: There’s the family on the lam from the mob, the woman whose puppet talks to her, and a demonic possession.
The characters are simple and their demises are satisfyingly horrible, a bit like especially gory episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” but that is only the plot. The icing is as much fun as the cake here: Each issue begins with an “advertisement” hawking cheap toys and magic tricks to kids, but the descriptive text is both funny (Existentialism, item No. 3306, is only $1.98) and very worrying. It’s the sort of thing you can enjoy once, and then resolve not to read again because it was too disturbing and then immediately pick back up.
The boom in reprinting classic newspaper comics somehow missed Ernie Bushmiller’s astounding “Nancy,” a strip that manages to reduce much of what makes comics work to its barest essence. (And yes, monsters dwell here as well.) It does this by making you laugh, and the editor Denis Kitchen has filled NANCY & SLUGGO’S GUIDE TO LIFE (New York Review Comics, 148 pp., $24.95) with many of Bushmiller’s best gags.
Bushmiller drew the strip for 44 years, and, unlike with Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” or Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley,” there was no deep psychology or narrative engine, so “Nancy” occasionally repeated itself. Here, Kitchen doles out little bits of Bushmiller’s unchanging but inarguable genius with scientific precision. He’s separated the book into three themes: Money, Food and Sleep, with the last being the strangest and most fun. (It is also probably the least funny, but who cares?)
It’s a showcase for Bushmiller’s prodigious drawing skills, which he played down his whole career. One terrific strip has Nancy being swatted by a giant mosquito; another has ghouls, ghosts and devils chasing her through her dreams and inspiring her to open a haunted house. All of them, through that peculiar Bushmiller magic, take longer to describe than they do to read and enjoy.
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