Emil Ferris conjures up 1960s uptown in the sequel to “My Favorite Things Is Monsters”

You don’t have to go far to find the ghosts in Chicago, says comic book writer Emil Ferris.

Among the luxury high-rises, upscale supermarket chains and other monetized monstrosities of gentrification, ghosts still abound with stories from the city’s seedier, dirtier past, according to the South Side-born, North Side-raised artist.

“I love the history of my city, even its dark history,” Ferris told the Sun-Times. “If you stop and read the plaques, you learn so much. You’re right in the middle of it. Every neighborhood has secrets, history and heroes.”

In her new book, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two, Ferris’ heroes are back to explore the mysterious depths of 1960s Uptown, a sequel to her critically acclaimed 2017 debut, in which she toured Broadway and the creepy denizens of its dirtiest back streets with flashy pens.

Courtesy of Fantagraphics and Emil Ferris

The highly anticipated sequel to Ferris’ noir saga was released by Fantagraphics in late May and sends teenage protagonist Karen Reyes – a horror fanatic like the author – even deeper into the rabbit hole of solving the murder of her upstairs neighbor, Holocaust survivor Anka Silverberg.

Self-proclaimed detective Karen struggles with the loss of her mother, the pressures of the Vietnam War era on her brother Diego “Deez” Zapata, and the blossoming of her own sexuality – all in a neighborhood that, unfortunately, has as many good-hearted monsters as it does fanatics, schoolyard robbers, and trigger-happy gangsters.

“Growing up in Uptown in the late ’60s, you had to have pretty good survival skills if you survived,” Ferris said, recalling a series of cruel tragedies experienced by the children she grew up with. “I read about them being shot or kidnapped and murdered. Things like that happened. It was Uptown, ’60s, terrible things happened to kids.”

Ferris, a former toy designer and longtime illustrator, gives these children a voice in hundreds of Karen’s spiral notebook-style pages that detail a journey full of Chicago iconography, from the Aragon Ballroom to the lions of the Art Institute, in a mesmerizing rainbow of Bic pens.

“This is the thing I had to use for Karen because we were poor kids. We got this notebook at the beginning of the school year and that was it. We could talk in it,” Ferris said.

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“The lines in a notebook – they may look like beams, but they’re ladders. You can defy them by drawing right over them. There’s nothing limiting you in this notebook. And I knew I had to use a ballpoint pen – the only choice you have, but then you do everything you can with it. That’s really what this book is about: It’s about this person, my little Karen, making the most of what she has.”

Ferris said, “We’re robbing children of their right to speak and their right to wisdom, and that’s part of what I wanted to address in the book. I wanted people to think about how they treat themselves and how they are raised to treat themselves and their children.”

For a teenager who grew up in a complex near Buena Avenue and Broadway, however, this was not a scary affair.

“I had friends from the Caribbean, and I got to eat their food and hear their language. When you’re in a city as diverse as Chicago, it’s just remarkable and wonderful to have a microcosm of that diversity in one building,” Ferris said. “There were communists, there were black communists, there were white hillbillies, for lack of a better word, mountain people. There were all these different groups and they came with different experiences. And they talked and I listened.”

Karen sees herself as a werewolf, befriends a hungry ghost, and consults with demons in paintings of Art Institute masterpieces. But the most terrifying creatures in Ferris’ new novel are confined to the human form: cultish street preachers, grinning Nazi vigilantes, and bloodthirsty Chicago cops.

When Karen stumbles upon the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention protests and the police brutality that followed, she sees up close the CPD’s skull-bashing when Ferris, as a six-year-old, saw bloodied protesters returning on the L after the chaos downtown.

“I was the weird kid begging to stay up until 10 o’clock and watch the news,” Ferris said. “You could actually sit down and watch what was actually happening: the My Lai massacre. You could see the brutality of the Democratic National Convention. You could see the police. You could hear them interviewing and saying things that just weren’t American. That’s something Karen struggles with, and I think that’s something everyone has to grapple with.”

Courtesy of Fantagraphics and Emil Ferris

Like her heroes, Ferris finds her inspiration in the Art Institute and the countless other “cool, dark places in the city that still have beautiful architecture and where you can kind of smell the 1930s.”

“But you really can’t walk down the street without finding inspiration,” she said.

“Everywhere you look, there’s something tragic and wonderful and exciting and victorious. There’s just so much wonderful history in this city. And that’s because, as much as people are plagued by the presence of this evil, they so often transcend it. Maybe it’s because we have water nearby. They say demons can’t really operate well near water, but ghosts can – ghosts love water. It really feeds their energy. And that’s important. We need our ghosts. My God, we need our ghosts, don’t we?”