Born to Draw, Born to Be Other: Emil Ferris Brings Her Monsters to Ixelles

From 13 June to 25 July, Galerie Martel in Ixelles hosts Born to Draw: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, the first major presentation of Emil Ferris’ original drawings in Brussels. The exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the intimate, vertigo‑inducing world of the American cartoonist behind the cult graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters. For queer readers and allies, her monsters, misfits and marginal figures feel less like fantasy and more like chosen family on paper.

A graphic novel that changed the game

Revealed to the world with Moi, ce que j’aime, c’est les monstres (My Favorite Thing is Monsters), Emil Ferris has created one of the most recognisable bodies of work in contemporary comics. Her pages – drawn in ballpoint pen on lined paper – weave together technical mastery and deeply personal storytelling, where history, memory, pop culture, painting, nightmares and wonder collide.

The Brussels show focuses mainly on drawings from Book Two, recently published, where the narrative dives even deeper into the dark zones of family memory and collective history. Around Karen Reyes – the monster‑girl, child detective and central character – the exhibition alternates portraits, interior pages and Ferris’ iconic fake horror magazine covers. Together, they sketch a universe where pulp aesthetics become tools to speak about violence, resilience and survival.

Monsters, margins and queer kinship

In Ferris’ work, monsters are never just creatures of fear. They are the ones pushed to the edge, the outsiders, the mirrors of the world’s hypocrisies. They are also the companions of solitude, and often the ones who reveal the most deeply human truths.

For queer audiences, that language hits close to home. The figure of Karen Reyes – a young girl who sees herself as a monster and uses that lens to read the world – resonates with anyone who has grown up feeling “too much” or “too different”. Ferris’ monsters are not there to be defeated; they are there to be understood, to be sat with, to be loved. In that sense, her pages feel like a visual version of what many queer communities do: turning stigma into mythology, fear into storytelling, and shame into power.

Born to draw, born to begin again

The title of the exhibition, Born to Draw, comes from the tattoo on the body of Deeze – a central figure in the story, inspired by Ferris’ own father, an artist himself. In the book, it is a narrative detail; in the exhibition, it becomes a kind of intimate manifesto. After a serious illness that radically changed her life, Ferris found in drawing not only a language but a form of rebirth.

Drawing became a vital necessity: a way to cross through memory, fear and monsters, instead of avoiding them. It is hard not to see a parallel with queer and trans experiences of survival: using art, fiction and self‑invention as tools to live with trauma, not in spite of it. In Brussels, seeing those original pages – with their density of lines, their annotated margins, their physical presence – underlines how much labour, tenderness and rage are compressed into each panel.

Brussels as a stop on a wider journey

Born to Draw: My Favorite Thing is Monsters is also a prelude to Ferris’ major monographic exhibition, Emil Ferris Between Selves, at the Cartoonmuseum in Basel, running from 4 July to 15 November. The Brussels show offers a more intimate, focused selection, giving local audiences the chance to encounter her work up close before (or instead of) a bigger museum context.

For a city like Brussels, with its own strong comics heritage and living queer scene, this feels like an important bridge: a way to connect bande dessinée, graphic novels and queer storytelling not just as separate categories, but as overlapping practices of resistance and imagination.

Practical info

• Exhibition: Born to Draw: My Favorite Thing is Monsters – Emil Ferris
• Dates: 13 June – 25 July 2026
• Opening from 18:00
• Venue: Galerie Martel, Chaussée d’Ixelles 337, 1050 Brussels
• Focus: original drawings from My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two, portraits, pages and fake horror magazine covers

A visit that feels less like a museum stop and more like stepping into someone’s diary – one where the monsters look back, and maybe look a bit like us.

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