Blankets

Craig Thompson

Blankets is a book that has gotten so much good press over the past year that it seems almost superfluous to write anything else about it if you've got a single good word to say. And for the record, it is a good book. I'm just not sure if it's all that and a bag of Fritos.

Another entry in the "graphic novel memoir" category, Blankets is Thompson's exploration of his own childhood-- specifically, falling in love for the first time, but there is a great deal of other stuff that goes along with that and takes us through his whole childhood. There's a lot of material to cover here (which shouldn't be surprising given the book's almost-six-hundred-page doorstop status), and perhaps the most impressive thing about Blankets is how unobtrusively Thompson is able to cover it all within the scope of the main storyline he pursues; there are a lot of flashbacks to his childhood, some of which cover some pretty thorny ground (and kudos to Thompson, doubly, for not overplaying some scenes that most authors would have made the central events of their books), but Thompson never allows them to grow far enough in importance to sidetrack his story. Structurally, the book's a marvel of restraint, and for that reason alone, not only graphic novelists, but writers of all stripes, should be using Blankets as a textbook for how to present emotional sucker-punches for maximum effect.

The downside to this structural mastery (there's always a downside, isn't there?) is that it exposes Thompson's powers of emotional manipulation. And, again to his credit, Thompson eschews the normal American emotional shortcuts so prevalent in our books, movies, and other media; Thompson's building of character and relationship is almost Japanese in its simplicity and willingness to simply let the actors' actions telegraph their emotions. This is all too rare in American letters, and it is welcomed with open arms.

Oddly, despite myself, I seem to be writing a rave review of a book which, in the final analysis, I enjoyed, but wasn't really taken in by. I think the reason for this is, ultimately, just like it was with Chester Brown's I Never Liked You (which covers much the same ground, but without anything approaching this sort of scope and majesty), it's nothing we haven't seen before many, many times. Blankets is deliriously popular with the emo-kid set because it covers much the same ground as all those same-sounding bands they listen to-- coming of age, falling in love, blah blah blah. And the messages to be found here are no different than the ones you're going to hear in any random Hawthorn Heights or Fall Out Boy song you care to listen to/endure. My hope, however, is that some of the devotees of this book will realize the subtle differences in quality that turn it from basic teen-angsty emo dreck into something literary, understand them, and (when said devotees inevitably do) wander off to create their own poetry, music, graphic novels, whatever, will think about those differences and use them to raise the benchmark, however slightly, for the quality of teen angst art. Lord knows it could use some benchmark raising.