Blankets

Product Information

This book is a masterpiece of form, symbol, and structure. Tokens bend and writhe and carry narrative significance throughout. Thompson's art here is fluid and is of that less-polished variety found also in Goodbye Chunky Rice and serves well to establish the variety of moods described in his several vignettes.

It was a really weird double standard. It’s reflected in that scene [in Blankets] too, where it’s OK that I’m drawing war on one side of the paper, but the fact that I drew a naked lady on the other side…I was always getting in trouble for that kind of stuff as a kid. Craig Thompson’s graphic memoir “Blankets” traces moments from his childhood through high school. The book begins by exploring Craig’s relationship with his younger brother and then follows different threads of his early life: being raised by extremely religious parents, going to Bible camp and not really fitting in, and falling in love with a girl named Raina. Though Craig and Raina start dating at camp, they live far apart and eventually break up. Much of Craig’s focus is his experience with religion and love, and the conflicts between faith, personal morality, sexuality, desire and responsibility. But for me, these are all secondary to a theme of processing memory. How do we understand our memories? How can we move on from the past? How do those memories shape who we are? How do we shape ourselves based on the memories we have, especially traumatic ones? I feel saying whether I loved these illustrations will be redundant because it’s safe to say I love all illustrations. A quilt made of memories, bad and good, side by side sketches about growing up in a small town in Wisconsin; about sharing a room with a younger brother; about surviving school days with merciless bullying; about finding solace in religion; about a boy who meets a girl; about disfunctional families and people with disabilities; about being an artist and about the power of imagination, about the purity of first love reflected in the purity of snow; about losing your religion and losing your inocence ... about beauty and sadness and time turning the pure white snow into a sea of dirty slush; and about the precious few things you can salvage, like a quilt of many shapes and colours This graphic novel won two Eisner Awards, three Harvey Awards, and two Ignatz Awards in 2004 and a Prix de la critique for the French edition a year later. A strict Christian evangelical family raises two sons in rural Wisconsin; we watch the boys grow up, from sleeping together in the same room/same bed they move to their own rooms, go to summer camp, get harassed at school, romance a girl.a b c Mechanic, Michael. "Craig Thompson—The Devil Made Me Draw It". Mother Jones. September/October 2011 Craig begins by describing his relationship with his brother during their childhood in Wisconsin. They have devoutly religious parents. Thompson also depicts a male babysitter sexually abusing both Craig and his younger brother, Phil. Craig suffers harassment from bullies at school and at church. I first read about Blankets in an article on the history of graphic novels, where it was mentioned as one of the signature examples of the form - along famous works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus (Interestingly, Spiegelman liked the book, and sent the author a congratulatory letter after publication). Blankets was offered as an example of a serious and important work, which helped define the term and give it meaning and significance - by telling a mature and largely autobiographical story it helped distance the graphic novel from a stereotype of a comic book for children. I've never read anything by Craig Thomson before, so when the opportunity presented itself I chose to take it and dove right in. This fall, a 20th anniversary edition of Blankets will be published with a new afterword, and in celebration of the release, Thompson will appear in conversation with NPR’s Aaron Scott tonight at Powell’s City of Books. Before the event, he spoke to WW about what Blankets means to him two decades after its publication—and why he envies the younger version of himself that wrote it. This blanket does not always protect us, for there are moments when the past is too present to be warded away. Memories haunt Craig, an experience represented masterfully by the reproduction of the same images in new contexts throughout the book. Thompson captures not only his character’s memories but the process of remembering: how present events trigger the past in ways sometimes unexpected.

Craig.Snow. Brothers. Church camp. Patchwork. Under the pool table. Cubby holes. Identity. Faith. The future. First loves. Doubt (“It’s reassuring”). I thought the book was very thoughtful and handled a lot of things tastefully and beautifully when it would have been very easy to make the book hateful or angry or vengeful. I really want to give certain authors this book to show them the meaning behind the phrase “show not tell”.As someone who loves Jesus and reads his Bible daily, Craig has developed a fear of sexuality, finely tuned by his parents, his teachers, and his church. For many, many years he is the perfect Christian boy - one who never ever masturbates because it's a sin and feels extreme guilt and shame for drawing one single picture of a naked woman. He really and truly feels like he is "making Jesus sad" when he thinks lustful thoughts. It's not all about love here. This memoir also gives you a great feel for Wisconsin in winter (cold), sibling rivalry (lots of urine), a sexually abusive babysitter (disgusting) and religious fundamentalist parents (thank God I didn't have them).