Review: Blankets (2003)
For my last comic of the month (I didn’t manage to review 30 but I’m telling myself that’s okay), I revisited a book I first read almost ten years ago.
Blankets is about ecstatic longing and the point where ecstasy becomes pain. It centers on Craig Thompson’s own upbringing in a conservative evangelical household in rural Wisconsin and explores the way strict religious principles shape the nature of his intimate relationships — with his brother, his parents, and his first teenage love, Raina.
None of these relationships are simple, and young Craig’s romance is especially complicated. It’s deeply interwoven with feelings of shame over his own sexual longing, but also a discomfort with the possibility that he could possibly be an object of desire. He idolizes and idealizes Raina; perhaps too much. But aren’t we all at risk of doing that in any relationship? It’s just as possible to fall in love with the idea of someone as it is to fall for the person themself, and that’s one of the tensions that Thompson captures so well.
Blankets was also the first comic that really widened my perception of what the medium could do: It doesn’t just tell a powerful story about adolescence, love, and religious trauma; it folds back upon itself to explore the very act of storytelling, the magic of putting ink on paper, and the way images can become imbued with transcendent significance.
Sometimes I feel like a comics evangelist on this platform, so let me consciously step into that role for a moment: If you don’t read many comics, or want to read more in the new year, I really really REALLY suggest picking up Blankets. (Really.)
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