Where do you start with Emil Ferris?

Do you start with her new book, her first, being lost at sea? Or the West Nile virus? The years of cleaning other people's homes? The largely immobile childhood in Uptown? The dreams she had then, of being bitten — of wanting to be bitten — by a monster? Or how "My Favorite Thing is Monsters," her new graphic novel — lost at sea last October, finally released this month — already has the aura of a contemporary classic, with an imprimatur of cartoonist royalty (Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel) singing its praises? Her own story is vast, so tangled and heartbreaking that before you pepper her with questions, you just want to sit next to her for a quiet moment and watch her draw.

An act that itself is unlikely.

Ferris boards the Purple Line "L" in Evanston, not far from her home, and glances around the train car and picks a seat that offers options, the widest, most expansive view of the largest variety of subjects. She places her cane against a railing. She drops her tote bag on the seat beside her and unfolds a sketchbook with her right hand and, in her left, grips a thicket of pens. She scans up and down the car, staring at her half-dozen fellow riders for a long second or two while simultaneously not quite gawking. She looks for interesting faces, for characters to insert into her work (after a tweak or two, for privacy).

Emil Ferris Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune

Graphic artist and author Emil Ferris of Evanston rides the "L" train red line Monday Feb. 20, 2017 drawing faces she finds interesting. When a person gets up from their seat before she can get their features drawn in she does what she calls "monsterifying them".

Graphic artist and author Emil Ferris of Evanston rides the "L" train red line Monday Feb. 20, 2017 drawing faces she finds interesting. When a person gets up from their seat before she can get their features drawn in she does what she calls "monsterifying them".

(Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

She has been doing this since high school, riding the train and sketching passengers. She's in her mid-50s now. She wears a long, elegant coat. She whispers: "I've been doing it so long the big problem now is everyone is looking down, reading their phones."

She pulls out an old sketchbook and flips it open: indeed, inside the faces are hard and uninviting, the eyelids low, the heads wrapped in scarves, headphones and hoodies.

Across from Ferris, a student balances a textbook on a knee. She stares past Ferris, and Ferris sneaks peeks at her, glancing up and down and sketching in purple ink. After a moment, the woman leans in: "Are you drawing me?" she asks with a quizzical smile.

"You are so beautiful," Ferris says. "I just had to draw you."

The woman smiles and Ferris, in her low steady monotone, explains: "Some people don't like that I do it. One guy said 'I'm on parole from Kentucky. I'm going to need that drawing.' I gave it to him. Some, they run off before I get to finish — I give them horns."

Emil Ferris Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune

Graphic artist and author Emil Ferris of Evanston rides the "L" train red line Monday Feb. 20, 2017 drawing faces she finds interesting.

Graphic artist and author Emil Ferris of Evanston rides the "L" train red line Monday Feb. 20, 2017 drawing faces she finds interesting.

(Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

The woman laughs and turns away, flattered but not surprised.

Ferris turns back to her paper. She can't move her neck well so she seems to pivot her body back in the direction of the book across her lap. This is because she was bitten by a monster once. On her 40th birthday, Ferris was bitten by a mosquito and contracted West Nile virus. "At first I had sweats and chills, but then I was brought to the hospital — but I don't remember that last part. I had been out for weeks. Later the doctors told me I was paralyzed from the waist down. And that I had contracted meningitis and encephalitis. And that I lost my speech. And I had some brain damage. But the worst part was that my right hand was like this club — I had lost the use of my drawing hand."

She moved back in with her mother and set about recovering. With help from her then-6-year-old daughter, she tried to draw. She duct-taped a pen to her right hand. She practiced a lot. Progress was slow. On the train, 15 years later, her drawing movements are small and delicate — light, fast flicks. She works efficiently, outlining then shading, making tight, short slanted lines of dense, crosshatched rows. It resembles gardening.

It's also distinctive.

Though Ferris had never published a comic, she had been cartooning informally on her own, casually working on illustrated stories for decades. She said that when she started drawing after the bite, she "basically accepted the limitations. I didn't feel like despair would help. I knew I would tire quick. But that forced me to be more intentional and efficient with what I was drawing. And so I started to find that I drew better." She developed a cartooning style so intricate and memorable (and reminiscent of austere 19th-century book illustrations, paired with a sweaty R. Crumb ick), Ferris decided she would enroll in art school, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was in her 40s. As an undergraduate she studied painting and animation; later, she entered SAIC's creative writing MFA program. She spent her freshman year in a wheelchair, and she graduated on canes.

"Truth is, School of the Art Institute can be a hard place for anyone who is not young, white, enthusiastic and fresh out of high school," said Anne Elizabeth Moore, one of Ferris' instructors and mentors at SAIC. Ferris, who started work on "My Favorite Thing" at the school, was obviously talented, Moore said, but "it was clear she didn't necessarily realize what she was doing (with the book). She was self-mythologizing and myth building and the dedication it takes to doing that in a narrative — it's a lot of work."

Ferris' family — father, mother, brother, all artists — had been split for years about her love for comics; indeed, she says there were instructors at SAIC who discouraged her from a career path as a fledgling (middle-aged) cartoonist. Nevertheless, her thesis provided the first handful of pages of "My Favorite Thing is Monsters," and soon after graduation, the book sold to publishers. In October, just before its release by Fantagraphics, the full 10,000-copy print run was seized in the Panama Canal. The ship's owners had gone bankrupt, the Panamanian government took the ship's contents and the book fell into a legal morass, missing its debut.

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Ferris shrugged it off.

Everything considered, it wasn't the worst thing that happened to her.

"The Red Line is the best thing for drawing," Ferris says, maneuvering her cane across the platform and into the train car at Howard Street. "There are all kinds of faces from across the city riding the Red Line." It's late morning, the car's relatively empty. An old man sits kitty-corner from her. Ferris starts right in and sketches his winter hat, which at first looks like the rubber cap of a baby bottle until shading brings it back to a winter hat.

Several stops later, a large women wearing large eyeglass frames and a large pink fur hat, a Russian papakha, sits beside the man. "There is opportunity on the Red Line that just doesn't quit," Ferris says. She draws the hat, its fur leaping outward in brief pink lines, then eyeglasses, then nose. Then, in the car's quiet rumble, the woman speaks.

"Am I in your way?" she asks, not unkindly.

"No, but can I?" Ferris replies, holding up her sketchbook.

"Oh," the woman says, understanding. "Yes!" She sits back, smiles and looks proud.

Ferris whispers: "Being seen is important for people. Doesn't happen enough for anyone. We're not here long in this world. Some people, they hate this — I'll just give them the drawing. Some though, they tell me they used to draw, too. I'll offer them a pen and paper and say 'OK, draw.' And they're so surprised. Then they draw! It's like they're children again. It's like they're flattered someone noticed they might have some talent."

'My Favorite Thing Is Monsters' Fantagraphics

"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters," by Emil Ferris.

"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters," by Emil Ferris.

(Fantagraphics)

Karen, the 10-year old heroine at the center of "My Favorite Thing is Monsters," doesn't feel especially understood, either. She imagines herself as a small werewolf, a freak in a noirish late 1960s Chicago. She lives in one of those old stone apartment walk-ups on the North Side that, beneath a cloudless, stormy sky, can resemble a Dracula's castle of fears. Some of which are real: Karen's best friend is a sliver of a child, neglected by absent parents. Karen's focus for most of the book is the murder of a sad, mysterious neighbor, a Holocaust survivor. But Karen's obsession — like Ferris' own obsession — is classic monsters, and so "My Favorite Thing" resembles a student's ruled-notebook, studded with drawings of vintage horror magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, so intensely packed with layers upon layers of gothic imagery (Uptown facades, Graceland Cemetery), it's hard to say if Karen or Ferris is the pathological one.

Picture 400 pages of apparent compulsion.

"My Favorite Thing" took six years and 16 hours a day of work to complete, but looks as if it took longer. And part two is coming in October. "It's totally incredible, instantly absorbing," said Hillary Chute, the well-regarded comics critic and professor of English at Northeastern University (and a former Harvard University and University of Chicago professor). "I love its range of references, both as story structure — the diary and the detective thriller — and on its pages — all that deep attention to fine art and the horror magazine. I'm totally blown away."

And yet, the book is not a memoir, Ferris says, not entirely. Unlike Karen, she recalls a childhood full of heady inspiration — silent films with her father at the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum), dives into illustrated Dickens and trips to the Art Institute of Chicago (seen in the book's elaborate renderings of AIC masterworks), alongside Zap Comix, Mad magazine, EC horror comics.

She acquired an appreciation for high and low: "Silent films weren't so different from my comics — the basic choice both offer an artist is what do you show and what do you tell."

"But," she adds, "don't think I was one of the regular kids."

Her mother, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, was a well-regarded surrealist painter; her father, Mike Ferris, was an established toy designer (his work included the first Mickey Mouse phone and Simon, the electronic musical-memorization toy). Emil — whose name alone cast her apart from classmates at Gale Elementary in Rogers Park — had severe scoliosis. She came to think of herself as a creature to be poked at and prodded by doctors and children. "Kids get very excited by spine curvature. But I also remember standing mostly nude in front of a group of doctors who pointed at my body and said, like, 'See, now this is interesting.' It kind of made me develop a sympathy for monsters."

Crystal Powell, her best friend since the fourth grade, remembers it a bit differently. She says when Ferris' family moved to Rogers Park, there was real love for Ferris in their neighborhood, and a protectiveness toward her among their classmates. "But I see why Em would feel the way she did. When I met her she was in a cast from her neck to her hip. And she stayed in that cast for four years, until eighth grade. On the other hand, Rogers Park was a multicultural experience. You had a lot of kids then trying hard just to fit into America itself. Em was only visually different."

Still, Ferris felt alienated. Sometimes she imagined herself as a werewolf, sometimes as a hunchback. She wanted to be bitten by a vampire and complete the transformation.

Not that she had to look far for real-world horrors: She recalls aging Holocaust survivors throughout the Far North Side. She remembers that Uptown saw its share of murder and dead bodies in the street after crimes. She heard whispers about serial killers in Rogers Park. Once, she came across an accident, which haunted her for years: "It was after school, before any ambulance and police arrived. A boy had fallen out a window, and he just ... splintered. I remember thinking, he looks like a body inside another body."

She said she felt scarred by Chicago, and by 16, she dropped out of high school. At times, she lived in parks. She began running with sketchy characters. She got a GED and became a waitress. She cleaned houses. She liked it. She said she didn't "see a way" to do what she wanted to do: She wanted to act, and make art. And she studied acting for a while at theaters around Chicago. But by 40, she had a daughter and was supporting herself with freelance art work, sometimes sculpting toys for corporations (including Happy Meal trinkets for McDonald's), sometimes drawing illustrations for magazines. "I was alone with my daughter but I didn't want to put her in day care and I was working days and nights. In that situation, if 11 magazines come to you and say they pay $250 for (an illustration), you take all the jobs. So, between work and child, I got ill. I fell asleep once while washing dishes. I hallucinated prolifically — like, squirrels knitting whole sweaters! It was like my dreams inserted themselves in my waking life."

She says, as awkward as it sounds, the West Nile focused her.

"In a way, I'm grateful for it," she says. Unable to move much, she found herself as she was as a child: She had a lot of time to draw and read and develop. She would eventually get what she described as a big advance for the book and live on it. "The drawback was, I was operating in isolation. No editing. Nobody to reflect my work back on. And for years like that. I had no idea if this book was atrocious or brilliant but if it was atrocious, I decided, it would be finished and atrocious. There's a madness in that."

Ferris has good days and bad days.

The days she needs two canes are bad days. The New Yorker saying her first graphic novel has placed her "among the greatest practitioners of the form" — good day. She is chatty with strangers and disarms them with a lot of questions. She is warm, ethereal and watchful. She doesn't seem overly confident, and she doesn't seem alienated. She works in cafes around Evanston and on CTA trains. She moves slowly and deliberately.

Once arriving in the Loop, she changes trains and heads back to Evanston. She picks a seat across from a woman with red eyeglass frames and gnarled tufts of graying hair. And yet, Ferris is actually glancing at another passenger whose hair, bunched above her head with a band, looks not unlike a mustard yellow bouquet of cauliflower. The train lurches and sways. Ferris settles her cane, drops into her seat and pulls out her sketchbook.

"Opportunities," she says to herself. "Opportunities."

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

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