For me, it’s always exploratory – discussions with Craig Thompson

I met Craig Thompson at the Komiksowa festival in Warzaw, Poland, where strangely enough his book Ginseng Roots made its international debut. The hefty graphic novel has since been published in several other languages, to great acclaim, but the English edition is not due out until spring 2025. Anyway, we had lunch at a nice little restaurant and talked for almost an hour about Thompson’s work and his sometimes convoluted, stressful creative processes, until he had leave to attend a seemingly endless signing que at the booth of the Polish publisher.

- Fredrik Strömberg

FREDRIK STRÖMBERG: Your new book is gorgeous, but I can’t help noticing that you tend to make humongous graphic novels. First Blankets and then Habibi, which was like what, 700 pages?

CRAIG THOMPSON: Yes, just short of. It's 666 precisely. No one has ever commented on that, actually.

But that was a choice?

I worked pretty hard to make it 666 precisely. [Laughter.]

So why make books that are that long? You don't have to, you know.

No, but with Blankets, it was deliberate. At that time, the graphic novel had not yet exploded as a format. But that book was inspired by Lewis Trondheim's incredible Lapinot et les Carottes de Patagonie, where he had challenged himself to draw 500 pages because he didn't know how to draw. And it’s all completely improvised. So, I just gave myself the same challenge. I also wanted to make a 500-page book. It was very deliberate.

And I guess with Habibi, I had to repeat myself to some degree because it was my sophomore effort. So, I thought it had to be at least as impressive a physical object as Blankets. The problem of doing a follow up ... Then, after Habibi, I really didn't want to make big books anymore, and I did not intend Ginseng Roots to be big. I thought it would be … well, to me, the perfect size is maybe 200 pages. 250 tops.

That's still a lot. [Laughter.]

Well, yeah, I get that ... But that seems very doable by my standards. So that was my goal. Let's make a 200-page book.

But Ginseng Roots is still more than double that in length ... You just couldn't stop?

Yeah, maybe that's my shortcomings as a storyteller, but I tried to make this book very dense, because it was serialized in the U.S. as 32-page booklets. Each chapter being self-contained. It forced me to work in a more traditional method of cramming as much information as possible onto a page. In the past I was able to indulge a lot more in spacious compositions.

Was that good or bad?

Both. I feel like I learned how to make a more traditional style comic where you condense your narrative to fit the smaller space. But I also missed the breathability of a book like Blankets, where I could just have a full-page illustration, or just two or three panels on a page. In this book it’s a lot denser.

So, if you'd done it the way you did Blankets, then it would have been much longer?

Yeah. It would be at least double the length.

That's double the time of drawing, which is a problem of course.

Well, European comics artists sometimes seem rushed in getting their story told in as few panels as possible. And then you have the Asian market, where they are almost stretching things out. For me as a reader, I like something that's sort of in the middle and gives you a story that moves along, but also the possibility for me to slow down sometimes. I don't know if I'm making the kind of books I want to read per se, but I would like to work on small books. Like a hundred pages. Something I could accomplish in a year, rather than a decade.

I love the fact that you think 100 pages is a small book. [Laughter.]

That seems minuscule. Even my first book I did when I was 21 years old was 120 pages.

Which is one of my wife’s favorite books, by the way. Anyway, artist talking about length the way you do are usually inspired by Asian comics, where a normal book is 200 pages and there’s like 38 volumes of them.

Well, I grew up with that first wave of manga in the U.S. That's when Akira was being serialized as comic books by Marvels imprint Epic. So, that sort of spacious storytelling was imprinted on me as a child. But I think I stole my style the most from that first wave from the French alterative publisher L´Association. David B. is great for instance, but Baudoin has some very specific way of moving his hand across the page that really hits me when I look at it. I see him as a mentor.

I can see thta inspiration, definitely. He was sort of a mentor for the whole of L´Association as he was from an older generation, for like David B. and Marjane Satrapi.

David B. was my first love in the French industry. Obviously, Epileptic is gorgeous. I went to Paris for the first time in 1996. I went to community college for a year, part time as I was working full time at a newspaper, and I lucked out and got an art scholarship and traveled to Paris for two weeks. Before that it had never crossed my mind that an American could travel to another country, because I grew up in a very sheltered, working-class life. My parents don't travel. The only people I ever met who spoke another language were church missionaries. So, I didn't know what it meant when I got an art scholarship to Paris, and I didn't care. And then of course, it changed everything. I experienced a profound cultural shock returning from that trip. That's when I finally saw America from a more global view.

At that time, I was just getting back into comics, reading comics by Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, and the other 1990s independent comics artists. I knew there was an important comic scene in France, but it was hard to find at that time. I remember poking into all these Bande Dessinée shops, and nothing grabbing me. It was all these full color fantasy albums and that wasn't my jam. But then in the basement of one of these shops, I found a small collection of mini comics, the 1990s Cornelius editions with silkscreen covers.

Oh, they're beautiful!

And I bought some by David B. and some by Jean Christophe Menu, and they were treasures. I struck gold in that basement. And a year or two later, the French scene exploded, and that's where I drew most of my inspiration from.

Let's go back to Habibi. You started that in 2004. Am I correct in assuming that 9/11 had something to do with that?

Yes.

I wrote an article on the depiction of Arab and Muslim superheroes in American comics post 9/11, and a lot of Americans seemed to do their best to try to add positive Arab and Muslim characters into comics.

Unless they were Frank Miller ... I feel like that era in the U.S. is the opposite of what we're experiencing now with the war in Gaza, where there's tons of sympathy towards the Palestinians. But after 9/11, there was a wave of Islamophobia that was very tangible. Everybody that looked even remotely Arabic were framed as a terrorist. My buddies at my favorite Indian restaurant were being constantly harassed in the streets of Portland.

And, as far as my own shortcomings, I was living in Portland, Oregon, which historically is a very homogenous, white city because of its history and its location in the U.S. It's slowly improving on that front, but just barely. So, living in this small city in America I didn't really know any Muslims. But, yeah, the fact that there was so much pushback against Muslim culture is what pushed me towards wanting to learn more about it. And of course, the very first thing I learned, and the main motivating energy throughout that book was that if you grew up a Muslim you kind of grew up the same as I did, with the same morals, the same family values, the same stories.

So, I was operating from that base drive of seeing connections rather than separations. That's a theme in all of my work. But also, after Blankets, I wanted to do either something fantastical, and in my imagination that meant like Sandman or Lord of the Rings, or I wanted to do Joe Sacco-style journalism. And then, when I read A Thousand and One Nights for the first time, I felt like I'd found my genre. I thought that this genre would be the perfect context to process a lot of these contemporary concerns around globalism, climate change, religious clashes, with sexual trauma being the most personal of all the elements. And that worked out with A Thousand and One Nights, as It's such a scandalous collection of folk tales. Just full of violence, sexuality, scatology, humor, and adventure. I wanted a bit of all of that in my book.

But you didn't plan it for it to be 700 pages to start with.

No, again, I thought I would do a 300-page book.

How do you go about doing that? Because if you plan on 300 and end up with 700 pages, does that means that you haven't done thumbnails all through before you start?

In fact, I spent almost two years on thumbnails before I even started drawing any final art. And that as a full-time job. Maybe I'm not a great writer, because most writers say they know the ending and then they work backwards. I've never known the ending of any project I've worked on. For me, it's always exploratory, trying to figure out the puzzle and hoping I arrive there. So, everything is labored over, and it takes time. But there is also a sense of not having a safety net, because I don't know where I'm going to arrive.

And with Habibi, the first draft took about a year, and then I ran into a serious creative block, because I was making it up as I went along, in my thumbnails, in my sketchbooks. And that's scary. I hit a dead end with Dodola being in the Sultan's Harem. The whole narrative just dried up at that point. So that's where I ended up taking the narrative and shattering it to pieces and bringing it together in a non-linear fashion, which became the new structure. As I was despairing, I recognized in my sketchbooks this little talisman, the magic squares, and that symbol sort of became the structure of the book. A nine panel sudoku of sorts. I decided to use that as a skeleton to drape the narrative around, and that solved the first round of creative block.

The second round was when I was working on the narrative, and still couldn't figure out the ending. I had the first two acts of the book, but I'd spent two years doing that. So, it was time to start drawing. I could do the planning stage forever, especially when you're talking about research. I find research to be a labyrinth of procrastination.

It can be a rabbit hole. I know exactly what you mean.

So, I decided to just stop. I was absorbing so much about Islam, about geometric design, calligraphy, Sufi poets, Iraqi poets, just reading, excited and absorbing, but I wasn't making anything of my own. I finally gave myself a deadline, and I drew for at least two years, without knowing the ending. I drew the first two acts of the book, over 300 pages, and I reached that same wall once again, where I'm like: “Where does this go? What is this book? I don't even know!” So, I took three months off, to just write multiple endings before I found the one that worked. It's a scary phase, having put so many years into it, and it's not a smart way to work. However, I would argue that I discovered the story at the same pace as the reader.

I’m not sure there is a right way to do this. Some comics artists I talk to are very organized and want to finish a full script of a book before starting to draw in earnest. However, for some that kills the joy of creating. If you have everything planned out, then you just turn into a drawing machine for that part if the process. Do you recognize yourself in the latter category?

Yes, I had a loose outline, but nothing was really written in stone for the ginseng book. It was all based on journalism and interviews, so even though I knew the themes I wanted to explore, I couldn't determine where it was going to take me. By the time the series of separate publications was completed, I sat down and read all 12 issues together, and I was super disappointed. I thought there was no narrative cohesiveness. Each issue worked on its own, but as a whole, there was no connecting thread.

So, you had been too focused on getting each issue to be a self-contained unit that worked for the reader?

Yeah, that was the goal. I didn't want it to be like the 1990s alternative comics that I loved, but where you would wait a year for an issue and you'd get just 20 pages of narrative, and a new cliffhanger. I wanted them to be stand-alone. But that narrative arc was missing, so I had to shatter the narrative once again. I ended up adding 60 pages to the graphic novel and adding some major themes that weren't in the series, including a couple of funerals. And COVID 19, which I had challenged myself not to put in the book, but then realized it had to be in there. Also, my own ongoing health crisis. I was resistant to include that, because I didn't want it to come off as whiny. But I realized everybody has some sort of health crisis they deal with, so it's very relatable, universal. If I expose my own vulnerabilities, it will allow other people to process their own.

I think you're completely right. For me, the difference in reading Blankets and Habibi is that there is some sort of strange contract between you and me when I’m reading something that is more or less autobiographical. It creates a special kind of attention when you know it's for real. I liked Habibi, it’s beautiful, but it didn't hit me the way Blankets did.

That's good to hear because a few years ago, I had a discussion with a fellow cartoonist who thought that autobio was the easy route, as you don't have to make anything up. The work is already done ... But I think it's the opposite. Especially once I got to the end of Ginseng Roots, realizing I'm not allowed to make anything up and yet must make this a story. So how do I do that? It's like being a documentary filmmaker who has 200 hours of footage that they got to edit down into one hour or two hours. Even though you strive to make it objective, it's still subjective. It's still your version of what happened. As I worked on the book, I realized that all media is fake media. OK, so I'm obviously teasing when I say that, but I realized that to be any kind of pseudo journalist, I had to take this raw material of life and impose a structure on it, edit it. And then you're fictionalizing, you're imposing your own objectives.

Yeah, definitely. So, on that theme, you're portraying yourself and talking about things that are maybe not perfect in you and your life, which most people would say is fine. But how do you feel about doing that to others, who are depicted in the book?

I hate it.

Because, I would say that's the main objection to your cartoonist friend. If you do autobiographical comics, you have to do all these ethical decisions continously. So, this person was an asshole. Do I show him as an asshole? Do I depict him so that people can see who that is? Do I put his name on the character? Do I change the sex or whatever to, to make it less obvious? I mean, these things that presumably are happening in your head all the time when you do autobiographical comics.

Well, with Blankets I thought: “Sorry, but I'm going to do that, and add things that are needed.” And my favorite scenes in the book are completely fiction. There's a scene where Raina's father takes her brother, Ben, to a learning center for people with developmental disabilities. That's a totally fictional scene. I love that scene because it's refreshing to step away from my whiny, naval gazing narrative. There's another scene where her father walks in on us sharing a bed basically. It's also a make-believe scene. But for me, those were the moments that felt the best, because it was not so self-focused, and it needed those breathing moments with another character's perspective. Since I'm not inhabiting their consciousness, these scenes are fictional, but you need to do that. Life is not narratively structured, it just things happening. So, when you are telling a story, in comics, or me telling you a story about something, you put a narrative spin on it, always.

So, there are a few things that happened with Ginseng roots. One, I wanted my parents very intimately involved, because with Blankets I did it all without their knowledge, and it hurt their feelings. So, with Ginseng roots, I was very clear about my objectives, and I wanted to include them in the process. And my parents were happy to participate. They were happy with the first issue, but when the second issue came out, they shut down.

Oh, they didn't!

Yes, sadly. I stepped into a too intimate territory, and after that they really didn't have anything else to say. The same process almost happened with my brother, who was super eager to participant in the beginning, but as we got deeper into the process and he could see some of his own intimate life emerging in the narrative, he started to bristle against it. I would try to convince him that this made him a more well-rounded character, and that it was relatable for the readers. These are some beautiful moments, and if you don't have them there, it just becomes impersonal. It would be the same problem I was having with Blankets, that it's just going to be my imagination, my thoughts all the time. I need other people's nuances and intimacies.

The third problem was that, in the first couple issues, I interview retired white farmers that I grew up working for. They were happy to participate, and I published the issues without following up with them. But around issue four or five, when I was interviewing an Asian farmer, I became acutely aware, that this must be completely approved. So, I didn't give the same courtesies to the white farmers. But because of the ethnic differences, I thought that the Asian farmers had to sign off entirely. And from that point on I made sure everybody I was interviewing signed off on the final material.

Good practice. But that must have been nerve-wracking moments.

Yeah, because if they push back against it, they might want to remove the best parts, the most honest parts of the narrative. I was terrified that people would say: “No, redraw that! Take away that! Don't do that!” I Interviewed some very corporate farmers who's Taiwanese American and if they pushed back against the personal stuff, what was left would just be an advertisement for their companies, it was not going to express anything else. Thankfully they didn’t. Everyone was very supportive.

This practice was also a result of me finding myself annoyed with journalists who had interviewed me and not followed up. I've seen so many interviews with me that misrepresent me, where I'm like: “Did I actually say that?”

This is why I record my interview. I don't do notes because that would just be me putting words in your mouth.

I think for this upcoming release tour, that's probably what we'll have to arrange with Pantheon. Because I feel like I've been misrepresented and misquoted so many times. I don't recognize myself in interviews, and it frustrates me. Cause that's just a character they created, it's not me.

Some of the problem was also because it's comics and you can only fit so much into a word balloon. I would trim down someone’s dialogue and take one sentence from the paragraph. And they'd be like: “Well, that doesn't fully explain it. This is how I would say it”. But I don't have the space for that, and no one wants to read a comic where everyone’s speaking too much and too long. So, I have to get that core phrase. I transcribed hundreds of pages, and then I'd take half a page of material from those 100 pages. I don't know how Joe Sacco does it, but it's all about editing.

Can you talk a bit about the way you do your visual storytelling? You use some traditional panels, but it's a lot of images spread out on the page that gives me the feeling of Will Eisner in the later stage of his career when he was doing graphic novels. Is that a fair comparison?

Yes, in the sense that I think of the page as the main frame.

Do you think about the page or the script first?

I think about the page first, which makes it hard to edit. I envy the cartoonists that use a six-panel grid. Just squares. Chester Brown works that way, focuses on one square at a time, which you can edit easily. But I've always thought of the page as the base for the composition, for better or for worse. It's probably for the worse since books are going away with everybody reading digitally.

But your pages are beautiful!

Thank you! Still, I think it's for the worse.

Maybe work-wise, but your pages are works of art, so don't stop doing that! But you could of course work faster with a grid of the same size panels on each page.

Also, when you're working with grids, like even Chris Ware is working with some form of a grid, you can in a way manipulate the reading rhythm easier than when you're working with a full page, because you aren't controlling the speed the same way. I'm always trying to find a balance and keeping a rhythm of panels, but I find page composition more interesting than a bunch of cluttered boxes together. I think comics can be an off-putting medium to the non-initiated, so if you give them page compositions, I feel it's easier to enter if you're not already conditioned to the medium.

Do you think you have a lot of readers that are not traditional comics readers?

I feel like it's always been my primary audience. I was at a party a couple of years ago, at this kind of a hoity toity wine bar. Mingling with people, I met this very kind, attractive, athletic couple. He was this really jockish man, a military veteran. They ask me what I do, and when I say I'm a cartoonist they wonder if that’s like animation. So, when I explain that it’s more like graphic novels and describe what a graphic novel is, they're like: “Huh, we've never read a graphic novel. Oh except for one. It's called Habibi.” When they found out I did that book, they suddenly fan out like nerds. And I was like: “Well, these are my people!”

You‘ve had an on-off relationship with comics yourself?

Well, I grew up with comics, but in my high school years, I distanced myself from comics, like a lot of people do. I was a nerdy, lonely, isolated child, and when I got to high school, I wanted to meet girls and have a different life. I tried to become a normie for one year, and that didn't work. I mean, it worked, actually. I was in a bunch of extracurricular activities, like track and drama, but I was also feeling like it didn't represent me. So, I realized my crowd was this rock and roll, punk-rock, skateboarder crowd, as well as creative, artistic people. I think it was healthy for me to spend those years away from the medium, outside of it. When I last read comics, I was into superheroes and stuff, and I needed this buffer before I rediscovered indie comics.

I was thinking about that when you talked about your parents reading issue one of Ginseng Roots and then not wanting to participate. That reminded me of Peepshow, when Joe Matt starts issue two by telling us that his girlfriend read issue one and broke up with him. That's a true artistic sacrifice.

Yeah, that's real consequences. That was powerful to me. What I was hoping for with Ginseng Roots was something similar, in that as an issue or two came out, it would draw people out of the woodwork, experts who might want to talk to me, clarify or expand on things. That didn't necessarily happen, unfortunately, but that was my goal.

So, how did the project work out once you started doing all the interviews?

In 2017, my hometown hosted their first ever international ginseng festival. That was a catalyst for all the interviews I conducted, both with farmers that I grew up with that are now retired, and contemporary farmers. And the story took some directions that I maybe wouldn't have predicted. There are two issues that are allnabout the Hmong immigrant experience, for example.

Hmong people don't have a homeland. They were from China, but the Chinese displaced them, and they inhabited the mountains of Laos, but were also rejected culturally in Laos. And then during the war in Vietnam, the CIA were running secret operatives in Laos to intercept munitions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and get around the Geneva Convention Accords. The CIA was recruiting a guerrilla army among Hmong people, and then of course Saigon falls in 1975, the Americans pull out, abandon all their allies and then there's an ongoing genocide of those people that's still happening to this day. They only got a couple thousand refugees out during the fall of Saigon, but then over the next 20 years there would be people that had escaped to Thai refugee camps that were slowly evacuated and getting to America. I think America has the biggest population among the Hmong refugees. Minnesota and Wisconsin have the two highest populations, and California is third. So, my small hometown, has the second largest population of Hmong people in the world, which is ironic, as I grew up there in this very isolated, homogenous, white town.

When I started the project, I didn't know I was going to talk in depth about that story. And there were lots of people saying I couldn't tell that story because I already got into trouble with Habibi, being accused of cultural appropriation. But in fact, you can't write about the ginseng industry without acknowledging the majority of the workers, and how their immigrant experience plays into the work they ended up doing. The industry would not exist without them.

This farmer I met, Chua Vang, to me he's the heart of the book. He was one of the warmest persons, and the best storyteller I’ve met. I interviewed more than 70 people, and maybe a tenth of them made it into the book. It's not just farmers bragging about their equipment to me, I have so much of that. No reader's going to care about those details, but they will care about the immigrant experience. Right now, other than climate change, one of the main narratives of the world are about refugee crises and people living in other parts of the world than where they grew up.

There are at least three intertwined themes in your book: your childhood memories, your life today, and facts about the ginseng industry based on all these interviews. How did you find your way through that material to telling a coherent story?

Initially I did not want myself to be relevant in the story. I feel the main crisis of the world right now is environmental, and within that narrative, humans are the problem. Hopefully we might also be an element of the solution, but it'll only be through plants. So, I wanted a plant, the ginseng, to be the main protagonist. I envisioned it with a little ginseng telling the story. However, the publishers weren't interested, and it didn't seem like the readers were either. Everybody wanted the autobiographical thing; they wanted Blankets volume 2. Their eyes would glaze over when I would talk about the information that was in the new book, but when I said that when I was ten years old, I was working 40 hours a week in the summers, in these fields, they wanted to know that story. So, I realized that in order to keep the reader’s interest, I had to base it on my personal experience.

Well, a straight book about ginseng would probably have a smaller reach. It’s like Sacco's Palestine, where he's prominent as a character, adding humor in the narrative and the drawings. But in later books, he as a character has gotten less and less prominent. As reader, I miss the personal angle and the humor needed in order to take in all the horrible things he’s telling us about.

I agree, we need that playfulness.

I've told him that several times when we’ve met. He's very good at retelling other people's horrendous stories and making you experience them, but we need him there. The levity is like breathing spaces. With for instance Safe Area Gorazde, you must put that down, you can't read it in one go because it's just too much, and I missed the happy go lucky, weird Joe Sacco character. On the other hand, there have been people trying to do Sacco-like books, where they have focused too much on themselves and too little on the culture they're meeting.

It's a balance. It really is.

You have spent quite a few years making Ginseng Roots. Do you have, like, 200 new ideas on que now, or do you even allow yourself to think about other projects?

Well, if you had interviewed me two weeks ago, I would have said that I'm retiring from this career altogether. I feel like the last decade in comics has been a real slog, and I've lost the drive to do it. But after two weeks in Europe, I feel invigorated. And I do have a few playful projects that I could start. One is resuming a collaboration I started with Edmund Baudoin.

Whoa! That’s THE master.

Yeah. In 2014 and 2015, we worked several months on a collaborative book together. But I dropped the ball. Edmund was happy with the results, but I couldn't see any narrative in there, because we were improvising, which is the way Edmond tends to work.

So, what was the process? How did you do that together?

We had one solid month of traveling through France, and during that time we were kind of doing a “Carnet de Voyage” together. But during that time a theme emerged, which was that both of us had younger brothers that we grew up drawing with, but our brothers became capitalist professionals who left drawing to become successful adults. And then the older brothers decided to be struggling artists. That's the opposite of the normal family dynamic, where the younger child usually becomes the irresponsible one. We spent some time in Nice, in the south of France, with his younger brother, Piero, from the book Piero, and he’s this hyper-successful interior design architect. And then we did a similar journey in the U.S. We drove from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, to Minnesota and Wisconsin, where my family is. That's like driving through about ten U.S. states.

And my brother is a brand manager in advertising, and also financially successful, stable and grounded in life. So that was kind of the structure we were going for, and that we were mirroring the dynamics we shared with our brothers as kids, because now we're these adult kids drawing together. But there's a huge language barrier, because Edmond speaks no English, and I've never had any formal lessons for French. So, our first week of traveling together, I thought we we're doing a pretty good job of communicating. Second week, I felt we'd already run out of ways to meet, we'd hit a barrier. Third week is when I realized everything I thought we were communicating was not getting communicated ... But, if we resume the project, it'll be different because now a lot of translation technology exist, which will help with our communication.

Also, the themes I was wrestling with ten years ago have become so much more amplified. I was experiencing a midlife crisis, and crippling self-doubt as an artist. And Edmond was trying to encourage me to regain a freedom in drawing. Those themes are going to be even more pronounced now, because the last several years, I have been ready to throw in the towel completely on this nightmare disaster of a career. I have planned to learn how to make a proper living, learn how to be an adult, being done with this struggle. But being in Europe for a bit, I'm getting more wind in my sails and energy to resume the struggle with being an artist, because arts are more appreciated over here.