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Raina. That name haunts Blankets, Portland graphic novelist Craig Thompson’s 2003 memoir about his romance with a girl he meant at a Christian youth camp. Raina is not just the name of the girl in the book—it is a whisper of hope and yearning that echoes far beyond Blankets’ 582 pages.
It might sound hyperbolic to say that Blankets changed everything, but it did. The graphic novel, told in exquisitely etched black-and-white images, transformed Thompson from a promising author-artist with one major work to his name (1999′s Goodbye, Chunky Rice) into a superstar of the graphic novel world with two Eisner and three Harvey Awards.
Still, it’s reductive to define Blankets by its accolades. Fans don’t love it because Time magazine named it the best comic book of the year. They love it because of Thompson’s tender and impassioned evocation of first love—and how it dovetails with his harrowing chronicle of being raised in a fundamentalist Christian family.
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.
WW: As a younger reader, I saw Blankets as a love story. With more years behind me, I see it as a story about how one of the greatest acts of love can be letting go—of a person, a relationship, of a time in your life.
Craig Thompson: It’s been strange for me to reread Blankets. I was forced to do it for the anniversary edition. It’s a timestamp, who I was at that moment [I wrote it]. I was also looking at it through the lens of my new project, Ginseng Roots, which is also about my rural upbringing in a small Wisconsin town. When Blankets came out, I didn’t even acknowledge the town I grew up in. I kind of was mysterious about it in my bio. And now I think I’m actually confronting it head on—like, this is where I grew up, and I want to own it.
Around the time Habibi came out, you said something like, “Oh, I just got so sick of drawing young Craig.” It’s interesting that you’ve come back around to some of the same thematic elements.
Yeah, except I’m less cute than I was as a kid or a high schooler. I had to draw the bald version of myself for this new project. Everything I work on, I get completely sick of it. Graphic novels take so long to construct and draw. I always resisted the idea of doing Blankets 2, which a lot of publishers wanted.
I always wondered if people asked for Blankets 2 partly because of the ending. It’s beautiful, but devastating. There’s a whole generation of people who got involved in your emotional life.
Some people think it’s a completely depressing ending, some people think it’s a beautiful, hopeful ending. I think of it as hopeful. And that’s what I sort of envy about the author who wrote that book. I think there’s a youthful, energetic enthusiasm—there’s a positivity in that book that maybe I don’t have in my more current work, which has become a little more cynical.
There’s a line in Blankets where Raina says something to you like, “You’re going to drown yourself in cheesiness.” But I never saw Blankets as cheesy. I saw it as committed to unabashed romanticism.
That is both what I cringe at and envy in rereading my own work. There is a naïve quality, and it was very sincere.
It’s not just the people in Blankets—I think of the landscape in all your work as a character. How did you learn to draw snow so it feels like this alive entity that’s coming from the characters’ souls?
I’ve drawn all my books, essentially, in Portland, so I wasn’t experiencing a lot of snow at the time I drew Blankets. I was nostalgic for it, longing for it—and trying to tap the essence of that memory of how snow emotionally felt to me. I always think of nature and landscape as a character.
I started Blankets in 1999, finished it in 2003. I started it only two years after I moved to Portland, in 1997. During the whole course of the book, I went back home once for Christmas, and that kind of got written into the book. With all of my books, I do rough drafts from beginning to end before I start drawing the final pages. But with Blankets, I never knew what the last chapter would be. I couldn’t figure that out, and it had to happen in real time while I was working on the book. It centered around both going back home for my brother’s wedding and for Christmas—the one and only Christmas that I’ve gone back home in 30 years of living away. I try to avoid Christmas.
When you started Blankets in the ‘90s, what was the initial inspiration? Was it the romance? Was it wanting to write about your family?
It was definitely the romance. Writing about family was very reluctant, writing about religion was reluctant. I wasn’t comfortable about that; I wasn’t comfortable with the autobiographical elements either. But I did want to do a pretty simple story about a coming-of-age romance, which was not a common thing in comics at that time, in the ‘90s. Teen romance was not a genre in comics.
In Blankets, young Craig draws a picture of a naked woman and is told that it makes God sad. But you draw the human body in a very respectful, reverent way.
I grew up in this strict religious household where media was censored, but somehow violent media was not discouraged. So I grew up with all the Arnold films—Commando, Predator, all that stuff—that was all allowed to be consumed in the house, but anything that had a hint of sexuality was immediately shut down. For instance, Tom Hanks’ Big, I never saw that as a kid, because it’s implied that he had sex.
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.
I went to art school for one semester—that’s all I could afford—and I really appreciated and thrived in figure-drawing classes. I remember bringing those drawings home to my parents and they looked through them in quiet disgust. I was really proud of the work and I was like, “What do you think?” and they were like, “What can we say, Craig? It’s just a bunch of naked drawings.” You could tell they were disappointed.
I’ve always had more of a European take on this stuff in media. I think there should be more sexuality in media and less violence. I actually used to have a rule for myself that I never wanted to have guns in my comics until Ginseng Roots, in which I end up writing a bit about the CIA’s secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War, which required me to draw a lot of guns—but definitely not glorified or glamorized.
You end Blankets with the words “no matter how temporarily.” It’s so hard to get to that point of acceptance—to accept that you had an experience that’s gone, but still treasure it. How did you get there as a storyteller and as a person?
It’s not gotten easier with age. It was very intuitive, writing that book. That’s what I miss about the younger version of myself—I think I was a more intuitive writer, and less self-conscious. That was the era where I just didn’t have an audience, so I never even thought of people reading the book. That was a very pure place to create from, and I think everything since has been a little bit hampered by worrying about critical and public perception.
You talked about growing more cynical, but you still find ways to channel that youthful idealism, like seeing the universe through a little girl’s eyes in Space Dumplins.
Space Dumplins is my most overlooked book. I don’t think anyone read that book. I don’t think my existing readers really knew it existed, or they weren’t interested in a full-color, kid-friendly book from me. It wasn’t the genre they wanted to see me work in. I maybe should have made it a trilogy. But instead, I have this book that seems to be invisible.
The failure of that book really took a lot of wind out of my sails that I’m still trying to generate again. Space Dumplins and Blankets each took four years, but now with Habibi and Ginseng Roots, these are seven-year projects—almost a decade goes by. And when something doesn’t land, it really is hard to get back on my feet afterwards.
Do people who have experienced family struggles or heartbreak similar to what you chronicle in Blankets come to you looking for clarity?
For me, that’s what justifies doing autobio. Because there’s this fear that if I do an autobio, it’s kind of narcissistic. My dad said to me, “What makes you think you’re special? What makes you think your childhood was that hard?” And I told him, “No, I don’t actually think my childhood was any more difficult than anybody’s. That’s not the point of telling these stories.”
I think that’s why I circled back to doing autobio again—that intimacy is important to me and moving to me. So yeah, I’ve heard all kinds of stories on tour. People cry, people want hugs. There was a couple who proposed to each other in front of me with a copy of Blankets that was carved out to have a ring in it.
When I focus on my almost-cringe-y personal stories, it just allows the readers to access their own. And I hear those stories all the time, and I’m touched by that. It makes it worth it.
SEE IT: Craig Thompson appears in conversation with Aaron Scott at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Wednesday, Aug. 23.