Blankets by Craig Thompson

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Blankets is a charming, innocent, long format graphic novel. My friend Molyx gave this one to me for my birthday. With the exception of Moore’s The Watchman, this is the first graphic novel I’ve read that had designs on being considered serious fiction.

Blankets tells us the story of a young man from the American Midwest. He and his brother grow up in a highly religious household, obsessed by “the torments of Christ.” At church camp he falls in love with a young woman. They correspond, have a two week visit during her family’s implosion. Everyone grows up.

Thompson beautifully captures the magic and tenderness and heartache of first love, adolescent grappling with religion, set against the snow-becoming-summer thaw of a Midwest spring. The writing and the artwork are both lovely. I quite enjoyed the novel, which certainly elevates the form.

The Watchmen by Alan Moore


First “graphic novel” I’d ever read, and it took some coaxing by The Professor and LT, I’ll admit. But, this was a cool work of fiction; far more than I’d expected, even if there were people in tights who dress up and chase criminals.

I’ll not go into any plot or character details here, since I think the movie is about to break on the shores of North America like a marketing tsunami. The subject matter is very dark, the character portraits complex, the plot labyrinthine. The artwork is, as a rule, mediocre at best, but the “camera work” and scene composition is often interesting. There’s a particularly cool chapter told with attention towards the relativity of time such that it stutter-jumps around over a fifty year span every panel or two.

Overall, it was a neat bit of super-hero mayhem and murder to devour over the course of a few sunny hours in Florida in the days just leading up to Christmas.