Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Blankets

Every year I teach this book in my YA course it comes up as one of the top three favorite texts in the course. I might go so far as to say it is one of the top ten or twenty graphic novels of all time. Powerful, gorgeous, touching, expressive, it’s among other things a meditation on first or young love, with sweeping and /or anguished art accomplished in the romantic tradition, with all the emotional highs and lows of young love. Thompson’s story might be described as autobiographical fiction; set in Wisconsin, where he grew up with his controlling parents and his brother Phil, art and fantasy (he calls it dreaming) and hangin' with his bro are his escapes.

Craig can’t choose what he reads or sees on television. His father is a tyrant. He for a time willingly turns to his parents’ fundamentalist religion as a kind of escape from the world, with that promise of Heaven, and considers the encouragement from his pastor that he, a thoughtful, earnest boy, follow the ministerial calling. But it's a promise also filled with dark threats of Hell; at one point, led by a suggestion from his teachers that art is selfish, un-Christian, the darkly intense Craig burns all of his artwork.

16, at a Bible summer camp, Craig meets and falls in love with Raina, a kind of ethereal beauty whom he fancies is like him, a loner, into nature, increasingly less into organized religion. And he’s physically attracted to her, which is something he struggles with against the backdrop of a religion that forbids this very attraction as the sin of lust. After camp they exchange letters and he is allowed to visit her upper Michigan home for almost a week. She makes a quilt--a blanket--for him, that becomes an emblem of their relationship; in return he paints a tree on her wall with the two of them in it. They have some physical and emotional engagements, and they fall sweetly in love.

I have now read Blankets a few times. In the last reading and review I had developed the idea—I am sure informed by others reading with me—that the girl, Raina, is never quite real for Craig, almost completely idealized, a creation by him of what it is he needs to escape from his oppressive circumstances, his conservative family, his being bullied at school. This may indeed be how much romances begin, but maybe especially for teens; throughout the book we increasingly see Raina with a halo, angelic, and I think: This is an indication of his idealized, entirely romantic view of her. While I think this escape theory is true in some sense, I have come back around to Seth Hahne’s view of the book, that Craig’s view of Raina—her individualism, her body/sexuality, her responsibility for her two special needs brothers and sisters--is part of the construction of his view of her as sacred. Craig really does love Raina, and she is part of his constructing a more positive, human, embodied spirituality. He still believes in God, he still knows the Bible, but he reads the sacred in the world increasingly as different than the restrictive upbringing he was limited to. His is a personal spirituality, not group-think religion. The sacred he sees in the world over time comes to re-include his art as meaning-making; thus the book we read, Blankets. Art, like spirituality, emerges out of patterns, like the blanket of the title, like a blanket of clouds in the sky, a patchwork quilt of personal characteristics and commitments, wrapped around you in beauty and warmth.

The artwork in Blankets is also a patchwork quilt of gorgeous, sweeping, romantic images of the natural world (snow, trees, weather), likening it to patterns in Raina’s dress and hair, open and free and spacious and lovely in contrast to the darker, more sinister patches of his oppressive house and Sunday school. There’s also an emblem or mark that weaves its way through the book, present whenever Craig recognizes something as sacred. At one point that essentially Calvinist-raised Craig even forgives himself enough for his transgressions to even share a halo with Raina. Through her, rather than earning Hell, he achieves the sacred with her for a brief time.

Spoiler alert: When they part, however, as most romances at sixteen conclude, Craig is still darkly intense in--as with his art, earlier--burning all the artifacts and letters Raina as shared with him. He imagines erasing, white-washing, the very painting he has made for Raina. All memories gone, is his goal. Except the blanket, thank goodness, which becomes the basis for the book, and his embrace of the lovely, sweeping patchwork quilt of storytelling that is his style. Thanks for the book, the reclamation of memory of love and spiritual passion.

Blankets is a gorgeously expressive, exquisitely drawn book about first love, religion, spirituality, family, art, nature, memory, blankets, a swirling romantic sweep of a book. It’s also at times a dark book filled with angst and fears, regarding the repressive legacies of some religions. He is one anguished dude, this young Craig, so complicated and messed up by religion and family, and yet he also dedicates the book to his family, with love, and also makes it clear that the sacred remains important for him and others. A must read, and a beautiful work of art.

Craig Thompson interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oumak...