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Blankets’ statement

Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel is the epic story of his younger self losing his religion

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Aug 15, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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Asked how he would draw the Cameo Cafe at Northeast 82nd and Sandy if he were putting it in one of his graphic novels, Craig Thompson doesn’t hesitate. “I’d get the chairs with the heart-shaped back in there, and I’d move a few senior citizens over to the counter,” he says over breakfast in the flowery eatery near his house. “And it’d be nice to get the griddle in, of course, and some of the knickknack tchotchkes, but there might not be space.”

Thompson’s ability to edit on the fly is part of what makes his autobiographical graphic novel, “Blankets,” so stunningly effective. The 592 pages race by because the story is as fluid and as focused as his ink work.

“Blankets” is the story of a boy and his brother growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household in rural Marathon, Wis. Lonely, terrified of damnation and bullied at school, we first see them clinging together under meager blankets in the freezing winter.

In another flashback, they lie panting in the humid summer, the sweet but annoying little brother Phil constantly flipping his pillow in search of coolness.

“I have a sister that I edited out,” Thompson says matter-of-factly. He cut down the tangential stories so he could stick to his theme. “It’s a book about what it’s like to sleep next to someone for the first time.”

At Christian ski camp, which is surprisingly full of jocks and bullies, plus a few potheads, Craig meets a fellow outcast, Raina, and falls into an intense, chaste relationship with her. They write to each other. Craig, who draws obsessively, sends her a drawing of the two of them in a tree, reminiscent of William Blake and his wife playing Adam and Eve.

He visits her home in Michigan, meets her slightly more worldly family (adopted disabled kids, divorce looming) and discovers a passion that dwarfs anything he has found in religion. “Another story I edited out was when I ended my Christian faith.” His dad dragged him to a Promise Keepers meeting at a football stadium in Minneapolis and encouraged him to join the other men going down onto the field to be saved.

“Once I got there, I said this prayer, ‘OK, God, I’m going to leave behind Christianity, this is obviously not where you want me.’ It was this epiphany, ‘You’ve outgrown it, you don’t need that crutch.’ ”

His dad was none the wiser.

“My aim isn’t to mock Christianity; that’s too easy,” Thompson says. “I’ve read the Bible through three times; I read it an hour a day all through high school. I was home-schooled for a year, the Christian Liberty Academy. All the tests were by mail, history was church history, in science we had Christian astronomy. The main textbook was the Bible.”

He says all this slightly amazed that it ever happened. Biblical passages are incorporated into the panels without irony. Some pages look like the hellfire comics of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“We didn’t have books in our house. My dad has read three books in the time I’ve known him: a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.”