If you’re a fan of Nancy Drew, “Veronica Mars,” and/or pulp fiction, listen up: Another amateur girl sleuth is headed for the screen, and this one faces off against monsters. Sony has won the screen rights to Emil Ferris’ critically-acclaimed graphic novel “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” after a bidding war, Deadline reports.
Released this January, the story is set in late ’60s Chicago and serves as “the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes. It is infused with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazines iconography,” Deadline writes. “Karen tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, where the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge. Present throughout are monsters, real and imagined.”
No word on who will pen the screenplay or direct the film. Amasia Entertainment’s Bradley Gallo and Michael Helfant are producing the project, and Palak Patel is overseeing for Columbia Pictures.
“I always felt like [monsters] were kind of heroic because they were facing something,” Ferris told NPR. “Becoming a monster sometimes isn’t a choice that you have. We’re all that; we’re all ‘the other’ in one way or another.” She began working on “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” after she was bitten by a mosquito that infected her with West Nile virus. “The virus left her paralyzed, but eventually she regained some use of her right hand and learned to draw again by duct-taping a quill pen to her hand. Ferris now walks with the help of a cane,” NPR details.
If you love the graphic novel and can’t wait for Karen’s story to come to the big screen, you’re in luck. “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol. 2” is scheduled to hit shelves October 10.
