She likened the illustrations to pornography and was concerned that the comic art would attract children… the library would be frequented by the same people who go to porn shops” (). In 2006, according to the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund’s website,Ī 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. His exceptional b&w drawings balance representational precision with a bold and wonderfully expressive line for pages of ingenious, inventively composed and poignant imagery.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. Thompson manages to explore adolescent social yearnings, the power of young love and the complexities of sexual attraction with a rare combination of sincerity, pictorial lyricism and taste. The two eventually fall in love and the experience ushers Thompson into the beginnings of an adult, independent life. Beautiful, open, flexibly spiritual and even popular (something incomprehensible to young Thompson), Raina introduces him to her own less-than-perfect family to a new teen community and to a broader sense of himself and his future.
By high school, Thompson's a lost, socially battered and confused soul-until he meets Raina and her clique of amiable misfits at a religious camp. Thompson's grimly pious parents and religious community dismiss his budding talent for drawing they view his creative efforts as sinful and relentlessly hector the boys about scripture. But escapist reveries can't protect them from the cruel schoolmates who make their lives miserable.
Skinny, naïve and spiritually vulnerable, Thompson and his younger brother manage to survive their parents' overbearing discipline (the brothers are sometimes forced to sleep in "the cubby-hole," a forbidding and claustrophobic storage chamber) through flights of childhood fancy and a mutual love of drawing. Revisiting the themes of deep friendship and separation Thompson surveyed in Goodbye Chunky Rice, his acclaimed and touching debut, this sensitive memoir recreates the confusion, emotional pain and isolation of the author's rigidly fundamentalist Christian upbringing, along with the trepidation of growing into maturity.
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