Monday, March 15, 2010
Blankets
An interesting and extraordinarily personal graphic novel that is unlike any graphic novel I have read before. Craig Thompson’s drawing style was a fascinating graphic abstraction, in which he often did not concern himself with drawing the exact same character in every panel, in fact from panel to panel the characters changed slightly, but the characters maintained so iconic part, be it their hairstyle, cloths, what-have-you, that kept continuity between panels and, as a result, throughout the story. It’s fascinating to read an autobiographical graphic novel, it’s simply something I have never encountered before, or even considered as a possibility really. There were elements of Craig’s struggle I could identify with, mostly in his doomed romance and awkward high school years as opposed to his traumatic childhood. My childhood was not traumatic and my parents are both lovely people who didn't scare the carp out of me the way Craig’s dad scared him. Craig seemed to be going through some similar things I was through, I too was raised in a nice, Christian, Midwestern town, though I was in Kansas and the city was not too far away. Unlike Craig I never really subscribed too heavily in the Christian beliefs everyone seemed to have, I went to a youth group meeting once with a friend, and was so weirded out by the experience that I never went again. I have had relationships that felt like something more than they turned out to be though, and I went through the same emotional arc again with Craig as he got wrapped up in the passion, and then reality came crashing in at the end, I’ve been there. Fascinating too was Craig’s visual representation of feelings, the fires of hell when he felt like he was sinning, feeling uncomfortable in a crowd by crowding the page with people, or finding a beautiful whimsical design to represent the feeling of the breath of the girl he liked as he observed her sleeping. This was clearly a very personal piece to the author/artist and that came through on every page.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment