Blankets

I've just read Craig Thompson's Blankets - a graphic novel about his upbringing and first love. It is a painful story but is also full of hope, and it is easy to understand and empathize with the central character (himself) - an introverted artistic boy from a Christian family, trying to understand his own convictions as he is surrounded by hypocrites and the strange characters that fill everyday life, trying to separate the sacred and secular, and reality from imagination. The drawings show the intertwining of his ideas and reality. Like Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's graphic novel Skim, it is about an outsider, but I think it is more effective because of its autobiographical nature - it is more real because it shows how Thompson's childhood experiences and imaginative thoughts feed into how he experiences the present.