Years ago a friend recommended I read “Blankets,” a graphic novel by Craig Thompson. We had both had a very ‘Christian’ upbringing, complete with church camps and Sunday school and a good dose of old-fashioned guilt, and she thought this book would resonate since it deals with a lot of those issues.
I’ve always kept that title in the back of my mind, and whenever I’d end up browsing the graphic novel section of a bookstore, I’d keep an eye out for it.
I’ve never seen it, and had started to doubt it actually existed, when it’s white and blue spine jumped out at me on a shelf a few weeks back. There was just one copy and I snatched it up right away and started reading it that night.
My friend Meghan Sheffield was right when she said that this book is relevant to anyone who grew up the way she and I did. At some points I cringed in embarrassment at the honesty in those pages, other times I laughed, and I even got a little misty at one point.
The writing is powerful and honest, and is a perfect match to the rich black and white drawings that go along with it, illustrating the emotions, feelings and ideas described in the text.
“Blankets” is mostly autobiographical, and traces Thompson’s life, beginning when he is just a young boy growing up in a poor Wisconsin family with his parents and brother, right up to what seems like his present day life.
Along the way he wrestles with faith, fitting in, growing up, falling in love, then struggling as that love falls apart.
I found his experiences at church camp the most relevant to my own experience. The way Thompson describes and draws it, it could almost be one of the camps I went to. The camp he attends is even called 'Sno Camp’ – exactly the same name as one I went to.
He expects camp to be a haven of escape from his hometown school, where his faith has made him an outcast and the mockery of the ‘popular’ kids. But when he arrives, he quickly discovers he doesn’t fit in there either, and feels surrounded by cliques, hypocrites and fakes.
“Something about being rejected at church camp felt so much more awful than being rejected at school,” he writes, suggesting that it felt like God himself was disappointed that he couldn’t fit in.
But as he grows up and starts to figure out who he is, he learns to spot the other outsiders and band together with them. One of those is Raina, a girl from Michigan who is also trying to figure out her faith and her place in the world.
They fall in love and most of the second half of the book describes their relationship, from smitten bliss, to disappointment and depression – basically all the things you feel when you fall in love as a teenager.
There are two especially poignant moments in the book, in my opinion.
The first is a scene where, overcome by the spirit of guilt and old-fashioned Bible-thumping that he has received at church, Craig decides his love of drawing is a sin or an idol in his life.
Acting on it, he fills a bag with all the artwork he has ever done, and burns it in a barrel behind his parents home.
The second, and this is where I got pretty torn up, is when things hit rock bottom in his relationship, and he severs all ties. Once again, he sets out to burn everything related to that part of his life, including a patchwork quilt Raina spent weeks making for him. It’s a terrible moment and I regretted it for him – but at the same time I respected his passion and the courage to do something so final.
Thompson is an expert at matching pictures with words -- or using pictures to illustrate the feeling that one experiences after reading those words. He’s patient and takes his time when he needs to – sometimes using a nearly blank page to illustrate a feeling of emptiness or loneliness, other times cramming images into a panel to show excitement or exuberance or an overwhelming feeling of joy on the part of the characters.
He does what a good graphic novelist should – uses the combination of pictures and words to creat something bigger than the sum of its parts. I like that.
There were many parts of Thompson’s Christian experience that I didn’t go through in my own personal life and couldn’t fully relate to. But they all hit home either through friends’ experiences, time I spent working as a youth leader, or just as a cautionary tale about the power of organized religion and it’s potential negative effect on sincere faith.
A brave and honest memoir, Blankets is recommended reading for anyone who has struggled to fit in, gone to church camp, fallen in love or questioned their faith. Wait, I think that’s pretty much all of us…
Here's an interesting sidebar from Exclaim! magazine about the fallout from Thompson's decision to be so honest and open in the book.
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