Thompson and his brother, Phil, earned money for comic books by working in the fields weeding, picking rocks and berry-picking for ginseng farmers. The international market for Wisconsin ginseng was expanding then, and more and more farmers were growing it. Thompson’s newest project, " Ginseng Roots," is in some ways a return to that time. Image from Craig Thompson's "Blankets." Image courtesy of Craig Thompson There was, he said, a "sort of playful abandon of drawing at that age." "That’s when comics and drawing was the most pure for me," Thompson told WPR's " BETA." "It’s when we were that age, 10 years old, 7 years old, and just drawing on the same piece of paper." But it’s also, as in that panel, about his love for comics. It’s about Thompson’s strained and sometimes painful relationship to his family’s evangelical Christianity, and about the isolation of being an artistic kid from a working-class background in the 1980s and '90s.
" Blankets" is a coming-of-age novel, and it tells an unvarnished story of Thompson's time growing up in Marathon City, Wisconsin. "Those were the only wakeful moments of my childhood that I can recall feeling life was sacred or worthwhile." "An entire day would be consumed by drawing, interspersed with fits of running around outside expending our energy," one panel reads. In his autobiographical graphic novel "Blankets," Craig Thompson writes about the hours he spent as a child drawing with his brother.
0 kommentar(er)
