The Intimacy of Comics: An Interview with Craig Thompson https://ift.tt/UmBc7ZW
When I first meet Craig Thompson over Zoom, it’s the morning of March 10th, 2025, and he’s in Barcelona on a book tour for Ginseng Roots, surrounded by bookshelves in the background of a little box on my computer screen. We had scheduled an earlier date, but due to a lack of wifi and privacy had to switch to a different day and time. The internet connection is spotty, but I’m just grateful to meet him and to talk comics. The huge successes of his previous graphic novels: Blankets, Habibi, and Goodbye, Chunky Rice, have brought him all over the world. I learned a lot from reading Ginseng Roots, namely the history of the plant, his origin story, and his childhood spent working hard labour, as well as the powerful symbiosis that can come from thinking of words and pictures as one language. Doing so leads to an authenticity unique to the medium, one Craig Thompson has mastered in his graphic epic Ginseng Roots.
Craig Thompson is a cartoonist and the author of the award-winning books Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, Good-bye Chunky Rice, and Habibi. He was born in Michigan in 1975 and grew up in a rural farming community in central Wisconsin. His graphic novel Blankets has won numerous awards, including the Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Awards, and has been published in nearly twenty languages. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
What made you want to write and draw Ginseng Roots?
Well it started with a number of things I guess. Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism work. I always looked up to Joe and wanted to work in that sort of format of comics journalism and nonfiction essays. And then I read Michael Pollan’s book Botany Desire which is about plants and I really wanted to do a book about plants for, if no other reason because we live in an age of environmental crisis, I wanted to do a plant centric narrative. And then I guess those were the first two major motivations and then as I was thinking about plants and the fact that I don’t really have any botanical knowledge. I’m not a scholar. What plants might I have any experience with? I remembered my childhood working in ginseng. So starting when I was ten years old I was working forty hours a week during the summer in ginseng cultivation and again I really hadn’t thought about it in thirty years it was just my first job, my childhood summertime job, but when I started meditating on the memories and then doing the research about the plant ginseng, it became super fascinating to me and that was when I was like “Oh I want to do a book about this.”
How long did it take you to write and draw the book?
Longer than any other book I’d ever done. It’s hard to measure. I guess I started working on the book in, I actually started working on the book in December 2016, one month after Trump’s first election, so I think that was also an inciting factor. I didn’t finish the book until March of 2024. So, not quite eight years, but still the longest I’ve spent on any book, even longer than Habibi. I mean there’s a number of reasons it took longer. One is because it was serialized as a comic book series and that extra process just made everything more complicated. I also moved a lot. I moved twelve times over the course of this project. So I was kind of unstable, constantly destabilizing, but also because it was all research and I didn’t get to make anything up. I didn’t have that luxury. That also made it slower. And I spent so much time, doing the interviews, as you understand, and transcribing.
With a project that’s more research heavy, do you start with a script or do you still work panel by panel?
I never really worked with a script before. I usually work with a thumbnail storyboard with all of my books. So I’m always working with drawing as I’m writing but with this book, because it was interview driven and I would transcribe those interviews and start with the blocks of text, I did work more in a script format for the first time really in my career. And as I mentioned I was serializing this originally as a comic book series so each chapter was thirty pages. I worked on each chapter at a time from beginning to end first with a script process, then thumbnails and pencils — a bit different from how I usually work because usually I do a rough draft of the entire book before I start doing the final art, and this one I focused on one chapter at a time.
When you go about serializing it, do you still have the whole arc in mind? Or, how is is it different from doing a whole book?
Yeah I had a twelve issue outline. I pictured it as these twelve distinct chapters and I did adhere pretty close to that outline but at the same time I was only writing one chapter at a time.
I’d only focus on the chapter at hand and making it self contained. I didn’t want the issues to feel like cliffhangers either, so it was just trying to make each issue self contained and satisfying as its own object. This book that’s coming out with Pantheon is different because it has about sixty or seventy new story pages added that weren’t in the series so essentially it’s like fourteen chapters. There was something missing once I finished the series, like a narrative arc that tied all twelve chapters together was lacking and so I had to kind of edit and rewrite and rework things to bring in a bigger narrative arc.
In the book you talk about how your portrayal of life in Blankets differed from interviewing your father in this book. What was that like for you to go back and compare?
I did Blankets when I was 23. I started when I was twenty-three years old so I was very young and naive and I didn’t think anybody would see that book, so I never had this sort of expectations of readers or even my family seeing the book. I think it gave me a lot of creative freedom but there was also maybe a naive quality. I was a young person really caught up in the trauma of that moment of my relationship with my parents and their faith and now I’m almost fifty years old. I’m the age my parents were when Blankets came out. It’s a more sympathetic view of them. It’s like we’re kind of trading places, they’re becoming older and more vulnerable, and us children are having to start looking after them rather than the reverse.
But Blankets was just like a reimagined memoir just based on my own memories. Where this is more meticulous like documentary work where it’s really reliant on the voices of other people, and as I mentioned earlier I’m not like making up any of the dialogue, it’s all recorded and then transcribed. And approved with the people I interviewed, especially like my parents for instance. They didn’t have their own voice in Blankets, but they do in this book. Along with my sister who’s not in Blankets. Blankets focuses on my relationship with my little brother. My sister was not a big part of that narrative so I kind of wrote her out of that book and then I fixed that omission in this book and brought my sister back in and her voice.
What was the most fun part to draw for you from the book?
Another good question. Well, maybe it is the cartoon character in the mythology. The very first pages have more of a loose, Blankets-inspired memory-based drawings and those were fun and loose. Then it became more difficult once I started focusing on documentary accuracy, you know, and I was looking at a lot of photo references, everything was referenced, the dialogue, the imagery, and I became very obsessive about getting every detail precisely right. So definitely with whatever book I do next I don’t want to rely so heavily on reference, but this book required it. Sometimes it was a pleasure to get obsessive about those details, and sometimes it was a burden.
What do you think makes comics uniquely suited to nonfiction stories especially with a lot of research?
I’ve always said that there’s something about the sort of handwritten letter quality of comics where you can see the author’s penmanship both in the lettering but also in the drawing style so it has this real intimacy that you don’t have in prose. Because prose has the sort of arms-length technology of typeface — you know it’s already being converted, but with comics, you can really see the handwriting of the author and you couldn’t make a film. Film requires so many people to make and so much money you wouldn’t be able to capture the same sort of intimacy as in a comic book, so it’s a visual medium that’s very intimate unlike film or television or video games. I think that’s the main reasons. I really love reading autobio in comics more than any other medium. I don’t know. There’s just something about comics.
These next follow up questions were asked over email. What was the most rewarding part of making Ginseng Roots?
I interviewed 80 people for this book. But a couple of them became close friends along the way. Both Chua Vang, the Hmong American ginseng farmer “starring” in chapters seven and eight; and Justin Penoyer, the Chinese Medicine practitioner who became my personal doctor, and later friend over the years, who is featured in chapter nine. That’s obviously the most rewarding part of the process — making life-long friendships along the way.
What is it like being a professional cartoonist?
As you might imagine, it has its ups and downs. Sometimes it’s socially isolating, working alone in your studio for years to complete a book. At other times, it’s adventurous and “performative,” like this moment as I travel around for international book tour. It’s often financially risky and spartan… but it beats having a “real” job. Speaking of, sometimes people treat you like you don’t have a real job — that what you do isn’t serious or worthwhile. At other times, you’re treated with great reverence, especially here in Europe.
What has been your favorite part of touring?
So far, I’ve only been touring in Europe — for over four months now. U.S. domestic tour doesn’t start until the end of April. Always, it blows my mind to meet readers from the other side of the globe who connect to the book. What’s surprised and delighted me the most on this tour is meeting first-time readers in their seventies and eighties, who never read a graphic novel before Ginseng Roots. Personally, my favorite part is reconnecting with friends in Europe that I’ve known for over twenty years now, but only see every 4-8 years when I finish a book.
Are there any ginseng treats you would recommend?
I love the taste of ginseng, so all of it appeals to me. In the book, I reference Korean Samgyetang chicken soup (page 317), locally brewed ginseng beer — Bull Falls “Made in the Shade” (page 155), and the herbal formulas prescribed to me medicinally — Renshen Bujing Gao (page 427). An entry level sample for curious readers might be the ginseng candy made and sold by Hsu’s Ginseng, featured in chapter five of the book. As Will Hsu and I discuss there, ginseng is a bitter, earthen flavor that is an acquired taste… but the sweet candy makes it palatable to most anyone.
Is there anything you would like to share or anything you wish people knew about you and your work that isn’t often covered?
Haha not that I can think of. Ginseng Roots covers a lot about my poor, working class roots, and my ongoing health crisis with my hands that threatens my ability to draw. The pages I draw are born of physical pain.
NONFICTION Ginseng Roots
By Craig Thompson
Pantheon
Published April 29, 2025
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