The Thompson that frets and plays in Blankets-we’ll call him Craig- is highly introspective and acts often in the heat of his youthful emotional turmoil, rather than from a simple, sensible motivation. Thompson’s illustrated avatar acts, at all times, with striking realism and the chaos of his thoughts is entirely believable-if not exactly illustrative of the average meditative development. Kinda want to punch this lady right in the breadbox. And while flashbacks and tangents proliferate, the overarching chiastic structure verifies the reader’s intuition that Thompson knows well where he is headed and is going to take you there whether you like it or not. Semi-autobiographically chronicling (via chrono-thematic structuring) his early life-from his establishment in faith and his discovery of love to his abandonment of that love and his subsequent abandonment of faith-Thompson plays honestly at all times with his story elements, thereby lending his tale an uncanny credibility. The sweetly disturbing sentimental journey that was seeded years earlier in Thompson’s Goodbye Chunky Rice finds pregnant fruit in his nearly-600-page opus, Blankets. It’s for this reason (among others) that Thompson’s second book remains one of my favourites, even years after having first encountered it. There may be moments in Miyazaki that approach the wonder of the sanctuaries that Thompson builds in Blankets. As spiritual as an atheistic holy experience can actually be at any rate. Whether he intends to lead the reader into a religious experience or not, his work really is very spiritual. He offers his readers these holy moments, these frozen, fluid, organic treasures. His sense of the sacred and his ability to convey it in ink is breathtaking. And as great as all those things are, there is one idea that stands out in his work that I’ve yet to see another creator tackle (let alone master) as Thompson has done. He writes true experiences, even when they’re fictional. He treats personal topics with a sense of both whimsy and honesty. His art is gorgeous and his brushline expressive. (His third, Habibi, will be released this Fall.) There are any number of reasons that Thompson’s work should be lauded. Apart from Blankets, he has only released one other major work of fiction. Craig Thompson, for all the lack of works in his bibliography, is one of the best creators working in comics today.
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