Understanding Comics

The effect is manipulative; Thompson uses a device and tosses it away like a well-prepared stage magician. The book becomes an endurance test: How many visual metaphor's for adolescent guilt and longing can we handle? A reader might feel fairly insulted by the way Craig Thompson holds his formal devices in reserve, deploying them for maximum melodramatic "effect." If form follows content, then form must read like a consequence of content, rather than authorial flourish. "Blankets'" formal devices, good or ill, are each presented sui generis: they fail to cohere with one another, and they fail to fully engage form as a way of telling a larger theme or themes. If Thompson values formal innovations, it is ultimately unclear why. Formal structures used simply for dramatic effect become nearly contentless. Thompson's formal devices become the comics equivalents of film music: manipulative crescendos that inflect a scene and tell a reader how to feel.

Thompson has failed to meet the inherent challenge of creating a total, unified 592-page book. For all "Blankets" offers, the book pales in comparison to the much shorter "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary," "Blankets'" nearest topical analog. It is gripping to watch Justin Green define a particular iconography and then take his dominant graphic device to every extreme as he describes his delusional, phallus-obsessed, compulsive Catholic guilt; it is far less compelling to wade through 592 pages of Thompson's girlfriend drawn as an angel, or hulking, overbearing parents constantly lit from below. "Binky Brown" concisely communicates an adolescent experience with a mature graphic intelligence. "Blankets" is an adolescent book not because of its theme, but because the text itself acts like an adolescent, simultaneously self-absorbed and ostentatious. Thompson delights in each new discovery, but fails to understand that if the page can act like a unit, then so must the text.