Blankets by Craig Thompson
Initially, I bought Blankets for a friend whose sense of whimsy is decidedly more pronounced than mine. Before Blankets, I’d never read a graphic novel, nor did I feel any inclination to familiarize myself with the genre. However, I was intrigued enough by its premise — a memoir in graphic novel form — to start reading it myself, although I still expected it to be an easily digestible read. My problem is that I tend to care more about words than I do pictures, and that was certainly the case here.
Blankets is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age story. The reader is shown various events — from Craig / Mr. Thompson’s childhood to adulthood — that touch on the difficulty of navigating the timorous road to maturity. Craig is depicted as a caring sibling to his younger brother, Phil, and it is the relationship between these two brothers that became my favorite one in the book. Initially sharing a love of drawing and flights of fancy, Craig and Phil later on drift apart, as siblings sometimes do, and, as an adult, Craig reminisces about their lost closeness, wistfully wondering how and their paths diverged. Craig’s parents are also a source of emotional turmoil; they are a religious pair, and it is not surprising that their conservative views eventually clash with those of their mercurial, artistic son.
Craig finds solace in Raina, a girl he meets in church camp, and with whom he falls swiftly in love. But young love, as we all know, is tempestuous and not meant to last. Though Raina loves Craig, she doesn’t quite return Craig’s single-minded devotion. Eventually, their love ends and becomes what all experiences with first love become: a nostalgic, bittersweet time that, if you’re lucky, you can look back on without too much pain but with great affection.
There is much in Blankets that readers can relate to, and, despite my initial skepticism, I found it difficult not to get smitten by the story. Mr. Thompson uses straightforward dialogue and fanciful, evocative imagery to illustrate the many nuances of love and relationships; the problem is, the imagery was more effective than the dialogue, which was a bit too twee and precious. The sketches within Blankets were communicative and just breathtaking to look at, but the words don’t reach that same level. As I said before, books, to me, are more about words than they are about pictures, and because Blankets failed to combine rich illustrations with rich dialogue, the book ultimately disappoints.
