Blankets is largely autobiographical and deals with the authors childhood in a strongly religious rural community. It's certainly brave and it feels like a privilege to be let into his quiet and secretive world. This is a coming off age tale and it's remarkable how much of the author seems to be on the page. Initial disappointment at the lack of colour vanished as the quality of the drawing and their sheer naked expressiveness sucked me in. A few minutes of Amazon based research lead me to Blankets, the reviews were so good and the praise so high that I was quite excited when Postman arrived, less so when I thought he'd brought me the Littlewood's Catalogue by mistake, and then very pleased - from a value for money standpoint at the very least - to find all that size and weight were pure comic book.Ī few pages in and I was aware that this was something quite special, and quite unlike anything I'd ever read before.

In the light of all this positive propaganda and never one to miss a good bandwagon, I decided to submit and join the club. The message is clear, comic books are cool. Seemingly every movie or TV series coming out of Hollywood is based on one or at the very least, will have a character who is a proudly confessed `Comic Geek', and not the Comic Geek of old, they've started getting the girls.

They've been hard to avoid these last few years.

Beautifully rendered in pen and ink, Thompson has created a love story that lasts.īlankets is the first Graphic Novel I have ever read. This groundbreaking graphic novel, winner of two Eisner and three Harvey Awards, is an eloquent portrait of adolescent yearning first love (and first heartache) faith in crisis and the process of moving beyond all of that. It's a universal story, and Thompson's vibrant brushstrokes and unique page designs make the familiar heartbreaking all over again. Over time though, their personal demons resurface and their relationship falls apart. Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of escape. Craig Thompson's poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence. ' -The Guardianīlankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. 'Quaint, meditative and sometimes dreamy, blankets will take you straight back to your first kiss.

Novel blankets