Craig Thompson at the Scuola Holden
A special lesson with a great storyteller
Craig Thompson, the graphic novels author who became famous with “Blankets”, chats and takes a look at the school, as he waits for the beginning of the conference. Seeing a great writer around here isn’t rare. What is rarer is seeing an author who is capable of illustrating his work clearly and efficiently. In the following three-hour long lesson Thompson manages it: he presents his works and career through a series of slides, showing how his style has evolved. From his first childhood drawings to his education at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, from “Goodbye Chunky Rice” to “Carnet de Voyage”, running through his milestone, the autobiographical graphic novel “Blankets”.
Speaking about comics in general, or about a particular graphic novel, is nothing like seeing an author’s path through a career spanning over twelve years. When you attempt a creative work it is easy to become disappointed with your own mistakes. The enormous divide between your own work and a successful author’s can frighten even the most courageous debutant. From this point of view, seeing how Thompson improved his style is incredibly helpful. If in “Goodbye Chunky Rice” his characters were “verbose” (seven lines of text can be found in a single balloon!), in Blankets (and even more in his latest work, Habibi), Thompson shows that he can perfectly manage the structure of a panel, using the vignettes to not only frame his characters or to give a rhythm to the sequence of events, but also to show his style.
At the same time, however, Thompson underlines how there are autobiographical elements in all of his work, not only in blankets: the biblical theme of the stories in “Bible Doodles”, the trip that Chunky Rice decides to undertake abandoning his friends (just as Thompson abandoned his paternal home to move to Portland, Oregon) or the travels described in “Carnet de Voyage”.
After having shown us his authorial path up to the present day, Thompson decides to amaze us, showing us some panels from his latest work, Habibi. A work that isn’t autobiographical, but that nevertheless speaks about religion, sexuality and the traumatic growth of two characters, Dodola and Zam, who try to survive in the brutal Wanatolia empire. A work that has garnered great hostility from orientalists, because it seems to depict the Middle East with great approximation, by inserting modern elements into a story from A thousand and One nights.
There are those who say that “you write because you can’t play an instrument or draw”. I don’t know if that’s true, but when Thompson explains how he made certain panels of Habibi, it’s difficult not to envy his abilities as a graphic designer and as an illustrator, as well as as a writer. Using a mixture of grotesque drawings, realistic drawing and Arabic words (as well as magic squares”) Thompson has managed to create evocative panels, which lie somewhere between the fable-like atmosphere of A Thousand and One Nights and Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism.
After the autographs, questions and answers, Thompson takes his leave to prepare for the meeting in Turin’s Circolo dei Lettori and then Lucca Comics. Habibi was a long and difficult work for Thompson (it took more than seven years and seven hundred pages to complete it), but it looks like it is only the beginning of a new phase of his career: the “superficial” use of Islamic culture and of the oriental image can be criticised, but the fact that he has managed to develop his artistic style through twelve years of hard work cannot be denied.
After having followed a lesson like this, the natural reaction is to cross your fingers and get down to hard graft.
Editorial by Dino Antonio Tappatà
