Marks On a Blank Surface: Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003)

11 min readMar 4, 2021

Almost twenty years after the initial publication of Craig Thompson’s Blankets, it remains one of the most controversial comics on the market, with numerous attempts to censor it throughout the US alone. In 2006, according to the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund’s website,

a resident of Marshall, MO, filed a request with the Marshall Public Library Board of Trustees to have Blankets removed from the shelves because of the allegedly obscene illustrations. She likened the illustrations to pornography and was concerned that the comic art would attract children…[and] the library would be frequented by the same people who go to porn shops” (cbldf.org).

Though the request was ultimately denied, it is not surprising that the work remains a lightning rod for people who claim to “know pornography when they see it.” Thompson, who both wrote and illustrated Blankets, fills his five-hundred-plus-page opus with a kid-friendly style that belies its adult narrative. Like many coming-of-age novels, the main character deals with the pains of adolescence in graphic detail, from bullying, sexual abuse, lovemaking, and heartbreak. This is too much for some readers, who see comics as a G-rated medium, refusing to believe that graphic novels are exactly that — novels. Of course, this is exactly what Thompson set out to do when he wrote the book: to see if this once-humble medium, born of Sunday funnies and superhero slugfests, can emerge from its awkward adolescence to become a viable medium of storytelling and art.

In essence, Blankets is a snapshot of Thompson’s journey to adulthood, documenting how he escaped small-town Wisconsin and found his calling as an artist. The impetus for doing both is his first love, Raina, whose irreverent take on the world makes him question his values. After falling for her at a local church camp, Craig continues to woo her long-distance over love letters and drawings. Within a few months he convinces his parents to let him spend a few weeks with Raina’s family, though they are unaware of his true feelings — or that Raina’s parents are in the midst of a messy divorce. But Craig also fails to realize how Raina has become the de facto parent to her two special-needs siblings, and has little time for a serious relationship. As the weeks go on, their differences become more and more pronounced; they spend the nights avoiding reality, and the days avoiding each other. Once he returns home, Raina gradually breaks it off, and Craig has to decide how to find his own identity apart from Raina, as well as a future outside of Wisconsin. He ultimately does this through his art, which gives him the strength to leave his parents’ religion and make his own “mark[s] on a blank surface…no matter how temporary” (581–582).

As if to sidestep the autobiographical nature of the work, Thompson subtitled Blankets “an illustrated novel.” However, writing in his 2019 comic, Ginseng Roots, Thompson admits, “Readers ask if it’s all true. Nothing was added. The fiction is in what was removed.” (Ginseng Roots #2). Recent interviews have also confirmed that his parents were horrified by the frank depiction of their lives, which they viewed as a sinful act. Clearly emotions were still raw during the writing of the comic, as the judgment of his parents and community is a consistent theme. An example of this occurs when Craig depicts a Sunday school teacher who belittles his drawings. When Craig claims that he could celebrate God’s creation in art, the teacher scoffs, “But, Craig…he’s already drawn it for us” (138). This is the crux of his teenage angst: his desire to draw cartoons might seem selfish and worldly, though it is a true calling — unlike his vague plans to join the ministry, forced on him by the local pastor.

In response, he decides to “burn his memories” (59) and destroy every trace of his cartoon past. But in the same breath, he looks for a compromise: “What if I were to draw — like — Christian cartoons — to win people to the faith?” (140). We then get three frames where he attempts to doodle a kid-friendly bear that leaps off the page and befriends a smiling, crucified Jesus. As the bear tells us that “whosoever believeth in him should not perish…but have ever-lasting life,” the cartoons belie this message with their cute, bubble-gum figures and cuddly eye-winks and floating hearts (141). He quickly abandons the endeavor, leaving an empty page staring back at us. This becomes a familiar image in the novel: Craig poised over the blank page, unable to draw, unable to move forward.

His first breakthrough comes from one of Raina’s packages, which contain “perfumed packages overflowing with flowers and poems, tape-recorded songs, and sweet high school nothings” (145). Yet each box is a missive from another universe, a world where self-expression is an end unto itself, without guilt or regret. What he particularly notices about these packages are her letters, and more specifically, how she writes them: “Most revealing was her handwriting — including the indentions traced on each page from the page above (she must have been pressing her pen hard). An alluring line looped her “l’s.” Her “f’s” were “l’s” that instead of linking with the next letter, fell” (146).

In one of the “pornographic” episodes that some readers object to, Craig masturbates from the excitement of this discovery, which he claims is “the ONE and ONLY time I masturbated my senior year” (147). Though he never has sex with Rania, this moment is symbolic of their true relationship: they love each other through art, through the illusion of looping l’s and the ‘lovebirds’ mural he paints in on her wall. Indeed, when he finally visits her in Michigan, they find their hard-earned proximity somewhat isolating. They use art as a safety blanket, allowing them to share a daydream of love that frightens them in broad daylight. Thompson depicts their shared isolation as Craig paints a mural and Raina transcribes poetry on a typewriter. The next frame transforms Craig into a monk, offering a fiery sacrifice to his ‘god,’ while Raina’s typewriter becomes a pagan shrine. As he remarks, “In the presence of my MUSE, I no longer NEEDED to draw. Why bother with lines…when OBSERVING her was enough?” (337–338). Fittingly, it is not Raina he sees, but the artistic deity, the one he wishes to observe but not interact with.

Here the central metaphor of the work comes into focus, since “blankets” refers to many things in the work: a childhood blanket keeping two kids warm in a freezing upstairs bedroom; the snow blanketing the earth into featurelessness; the blank page, full of endless possibilities; and the covers hiding the warm bodies of two lovers. In the comic, Raina’s first gift to Craig is a quilt made from her old baby blankets. It is a fitting gift, since the blanket is an artistic proxy for Raina, a work of art rather than flesh-and-blood. Not surprisingly, Craig sleeps with the blanket each night alone in his bed, often cradling it in his arms. When Raina finally asks him to come to bed with her, she does so under the blanket, telling him “it’s starting to rain” (417). Yet this time, she offers him a choice: to hide once more behind the perfection of art, or to expose themselves — naked and imperfect — before the sight of God.

This passage is singled out most often as ‘pornography’ by the work’s detractors. Yet this is also the bravest moment in the book, since Thompson risks sensuality and sentimentality to make his point. In a series of frameless, collage-like images, he shows the two exploring each others’ bodies. Though they are not completely naked, the blanket is thrown aside, allowing Raina’s white flesh to dominate the page, like a blank canvas or a snowy landscape. As Thompson writes, “I studied her — aware that she’s been crafted by a DIVINE ARTIST. Sacred, perfect, and unknowable” (429). The depiction of Raina is exactly that, an artist’s study, without sexual enticement or voyeuristic display; simply one of God’s creations, shameless in the light of the sun. When she falls asleep, Craig covers her once more with the blanket and contemplates the portrait of Jesus on the wall above them. In three frames, we see Jesus’ profile bathed in light; then he turns to behold the two lovers, as if in surprise; then, in the last frame, he beams with approval, his eyes shining like twin sons.

In the next two frames, we see the mood candles burning softly, and then going out, the lingering smoke a faded reminder of the previous night. This is effectively the end of their relationship, as by venturing out of the blanket, they have confronted emotions that are too fragile to exist in the daylight (their ‘real world’ outside of art). Coincidentally, Raina is sick the next day and says “Don’t kiss me! I’m contagious” (471). Thompson then lingers on four frames where Craig and Raina each take one side of the blanket and fold it up for his suitcase, twisting it into a long rectangle, then crumbling it up into a sagging heap. In the final frame, the background disappears, and the two are smiling at each other, the distance between them almost collapsing as the blanket falls. But she turns away and the blanket is crammed into his suitcase, with his comment, “Just barely enough room to fit” (471).

Like the blanket, their entire relationship also fits snugly into a single winter. Time and responsibilities seemed suspended, since the familiar became unrecognizable, even magical. With the coming of spring, however, Raina withdraws, realizing how much responsibility she will have to shoulder with her parents’ divorce. Craig begins to see the lay of the land as well, much like the prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which he cites in the final chapters. As Thompson writes, “Gradually, [the prisoner would] realize what he’s known as human was merely the shadow of a statue of a human” (501). Craig loved Raina more as a lovely form under a blanket than the woman herself; in the same way, he ignored his entire family and surroundings wrapped up in his own ennui. For the first time in ages, he connects with his brother, who, to his surprise, has been drawing actively for years. As he pours over the amazing cartoons, he tells him, “You’re a genius! Phil, promise me you’ll never stop drawing!” Phil’s response is an artless rejoinder to Craig’s existential dilemma: “How could I ever CONSIDER it?” (493).

Thompson reverses the seasons artistically by making Craig burn all of Raina’s gifts and letters to him. He then bundles the blanket into a garbage bag and places it in the cubby hole in his attic bedroom. The next frame is a spare drawing of his bedroom: the desk cleared, the bed without covers, the walls bare. Beneath this is a vast white space with only the words, “I moved out of my parents’ home after my twentieth birthday” (529). A few pages later, we see an image of the mural Craig painted on Raina’s wall; this cuts to a hand dipping a roller into white paint and making broad, slashing strokes over the mural. Frame by frame, the mural is blotted out of existence, until only a completely white page remains. The past has been blanketed by a conscious act of forgetting.

However, the novel’s epilogue gives us one final spring, and one final act of remembering. Returning home years later for his brother’s wedding, Craig decides to confront the boxes stored away in the attic, along with the blanket itself. Inside he finds his bible, conveniently buried in the very bottom of the box. As he flips it open, he confronts the passage in Luke 17:20–21, which reads “The kingdom of God does not come visibly…because the kingdom of God is WITHIN you” (564). However, his edition contains the footnote, “or AMONG” for “within.” We then see him unfolding Raina’s blanket, as an extravagant illustration of Jesus rises over him, swirls of light beaming through the naked souls around him, intoning, “because the Kingdom of God is WITHIN and/or AMONG you” (565).

We then see time fold in on itself, as Craig holding the blanket is connected by the next frame with Raina creating it. He can finally look at the blanket is a precious object, a thing unto itself, and not a bitter memento of a failed relationship. He details the loving care Raina took in creating it, choosing the patterns, finding new and innovative ways to make them fit. He concludes the passage by falling asleep with the blanket, filled by dreams of clutching a naked Raina while they plunge towards a horde of demons, only to be rescued by angels. As he remarks, “That night was colder than the last, and the extra layer — held close to my body — was just what I needed” (568).

In short, the ‘blankets’ in the novel only seem to hide the past. Nothing is ever truly lost or forgotten, and every mistake is necessary to find one’s place in the world. As the novel ends, Craig is trudging through a winter landscape, his footsteps the only marks on an otherwise blank surface. He now realizes the direction he takes, or the marks he leaves, are not as important as the sheer act of making them. Art is the act of creation itself, not whether it succeeds or fails — or even makes sense in the end. The moment recalls the earlier scene where Craig tries to paint a mural on Raina’s wall, but draws back in terror, having created an ‘imperfect’ dot. She doesn’t see anything he creates as imperfect, since “Even a mistake is better than nothing” (340). The last words in the novel are his own way to make sense of this artistic gambit: “How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement — no matter how temporary” (581–582).

Writing in 2019’s Ginseng Roots, Thompson recalls that “When I did BLANKETS I was really pushing against comic book store culture and collector mentality and serial comics. I was sick of the format of comic books” (Ginseng Roots #1). In many ways, Blankets is an anti-comic, in that it ignores all the normal rules of comic-book grammar: there are no splashes of color, few dynamic transitions between frames, and almost no sense of movement at all. The work is as vast as a winter landscape, and almost as still. It’s a book meant for quiet meditation rather the quick, visceral thrills of so many serial comics. Its continuing success is a testament to Thompson’s ability to make the medium speak his language, and will remain long after we find the appropriate name for whatever Blankets truly is, whether comic, memoir, or illustrated novel (but hopefully, not pornography!).

WORKS CITED

“Case Files: Blankets.” Comic Books Legal Defense Fund. <cbdlf.org/banned-

comic.> Accessed 2–25–21.

Thompson, Craig. Blankets. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2003.

Thompson, Craig. Ginseng Roots #1–2. Minneapolis: Uncivilized Roots, 2019.

Marks On a Blank Surface: Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003)

Written by Joshua Grasso