Drawing Monsters with Emil Ferris and Lynda Barry: An Exploration of the Drawing Process as Part of Graphic Medicine

Abstract

This essay explores the role of drawing as a mode of processing intersectional violence, a strategy that I argue links Emil Ferris’s comic, My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2018) to Lynda Barry’s pedagogical graphic narratives What It Is (2008) and Making Comics (2019). I argue that My Favorite Thing is Monsters embodies an enhanced version of graphic medicine that shifts the scale of analysis from the individual to the collective, revealing the health impact of intersectional oppressions. In its titular preoccupation with monsters, especially the Medusa, and its materialization of the protagonist’s sketch book, I further argue that Ferris’s work of fiction recalls Barry’s exercise of drawing monsters. Continuing its exploration of the healing process of drawing, and drawing monsters, the essay concludes with an experiment in ethnographic criticism, reflecting on my own experience of drawing my way through the global pandemic of Covid-19 during the first six months of 2020.

Keywords: Emil Ferris, Lynda Barry, Graphic Medicine, Intersectionality, anti-Semitism, racism, gendered violence, Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous, Medusa, scale, health, drawing, ethnographic criticism.