Reading Emil Ferris’ graphic novel masterwork, you might believe the author/illustrator views the world with a cynical eye. This is understandable. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One (2017), about a girl who longs to be bitten by a werewolf and transformed into an immortal, touches on poverty, sexual assault, turbulent political times, murder, and the Holocaust. Menace gleams from every page of the exquisite crosshatched artwork. Twisted faces loom. Threats lurk. And that’s just from the real-life monsters.

But Ferris, who has faced more than her share of darkness, finds hope in the struggle.

“Marcus Aurelius said, The obstacle is the way,” she says on the phone from her home in Evanston, Illinois. “That means to me that no matter how difficult things are, the payoff for staying in it is great.”

That is true for Ferris, 61, as well as her protagonist Karen Reyes, a mixed-race queer kid growing up poor in 1960s Chicago, who becomes obsessed with investigating the death of her neighbor Anka, a Holocaust survivor. In My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two, published in late May by Fantagraphics, Karen continues unraveling Anka’s life and her desperate attempt to save children in a concentration camp; copes with her mother’s death; and frets about her older brother Deeze, who is involved in nefarious plots she’d rather not consider.

The road to Book Two has been rocky. A now-settled lawsuit between Ferris and Fantagraphics delayed the sequel’s publication (a prequel, Records of the Damned, will be eventually published by Pantheon). Even writing the books was difficult: Ferris, who had been cleaning houses for a living, contracted West Nile virus at 40—bitten by a mosquito with monstrous results—leaving her paralyzed and demoralized with a 6-year-old daughter.

Then, in the hospital, she had a vision that indicated her path would shift.

“It was really weird,” she says. “I don’t really know how my feet were oriented, but the doctors were piercing them with needles, and I wasn’t moving.…I had the vision that my feet suddenly pointed in the opposite direction.”

Her path did swerve. She learned to walk again, though she still uses a cane. She enrolled in and graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And now, Monsters is complete, a testament to determination, a unique vision, and—dare we say it?—an almost supernatural storytelling power.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You worked on My Favorite Thing Is Monsters for more than a decade. Is it strange to still be talking about it after all this time?

The only thing that’s really weird is that I wanted to put so much more into the second book than I was able to because of the time constraints. Four hundred pages go by faster than you think.

Did you ever think you wouldn’t finish it?

I was hopeless many times in the process of doing this. It was the kindness of other people that saved me. I was blessed. We don’t do everything on our own.

I did not think there was going to be an audience for the book. There was no certainty of its value. People helped with advice or whatever else they could. I had one friend who came to visit me, and he started reading it and said, “You have to finish this. You just have to.” He was working as a parking garage attendant, and he started sending me $20 every few days so I could eat. We had two Whole Foods in the neighborhood, and I would go back and forth for free samples. So I got through it.

Why was it so important to you to tell this story?

I felt like I had to take this interesting time that I lived through and create a way of talking about it; it felt to me like we were entering a period of tyranny, and I wanted to challenge that. I wanted to say: Here are other periods of tyranny other people have endured. They made choices that are very difficult. I guess I wanted to talk about that. I wanted my readers to recognize the time they were in and to recognize their power. That felt really important. I thought if we didn’t forget, if we remembered the horror and the brutality that can be exacted upon human beings, we might not repeat that. Right now we’re seeing genocide in Gaza, and so I was wrong about that. I’m very sad all the time.

In a way, the student protests today are reminiscent of parts of Monsters.

I love our students today. An awful lot of people have woken up to the reality that we all have human rights. Bombing people in tents who have been displaced and forcing the world to watch, it’s abominable.…I wrote the book because I knew so many survivors growing up, and kids of survivors, too. We saw the damage a genocide does generation after generation.

Do you have a negative view of humanity?

I think we are wonderful. What I regularly see in my city are people who stop their cars if they see someone fall down. People will move to the other side of the street to help someone in need. I think that’s humanity.

At one point in Monsters, Karen says that she makes sense out of life’s dark side by writing and drawing. Are you the same? Is being an artist and writer a way to combat that darkness?

Yes, but I think being a parent or a cook or an interior decorator or having a plant store or grocery store or pet shop or a bookstore does, too. Almost anything if you do it and are truly invested. It was terribly boring to clean people’s houses. When I had the best time was when I made a bed and straightened a pillow and thought: I really hope you have wonderful dreams. Energetically offering a blessing on all the things the family would touch. I think everything we do matters, even those things we think are mediocre and mundane.

Monsters also feels like a love letter to the Art Institute of Chicago, where your parents met. Can you lose yourself in a painting like Karen does?

Yes! I was allowed to be at the Louvre and spend time there and see these residency paintings I’d never seen before. Sometimes if I’m upset by something, I will witness what I need to bear witness to and do what I can, and then I will remember those paintings. I try to take myself back into those paintings, hear the sound of wheels on cobblestones or smell the food on the table or look out the window in the Vermeer and see what’s beyond that room.

What do you want readers to take away from Anka’s story of survival?

Her deciding the most important thing was life and choosing it even though the compromise of that life would be extraordinary. People say it’s such a dark story, but the only way Anka could make a choice to save these children is that she believes it’s possible to heal. That to me is not dark.

So you see Monsters as a hopeful story, in the end?

Without a doubt. There’s so much hope. We can’t lose that.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.