I grew up in a very working-class family and also a very fundamentalist Christian family. We lived a 10-minute drive outside of town, in the country, on a highway.ĬT: Yeah. My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant. MJ: Did your parents work in the factory?ĬT: They didn’t, actually. The elementary school and the high school are on pretty much the same block, and pretty much your entire life is there. There’s a cheese factory there, and that’s sort of the center. What’s it like there?Ĭraig Thompson: The town, when I was growing up, was population 1,200. Mother Jones: I grew up in Madison, but never got as far north as Marathon. “So I think those two modes met somewhere in the middle: a social-political fairy tale. “I wanted to do a book that was bigger than myself, either something sort of fantastical and epic like Lord of the Rings or something with political relevance, like Joe Sacco‘s documentary work, “ says Thompson, who is now 36 and living in Portland, Oregon.

The author weaves the adventures of his slave-child protagonists with tales from the Bible and the Koran, numerology, and themes of imperial debauchery and environmental degradation. Maus creator Art Speigelman sent him a laudatory letter, and Time dubbed Blankets the year’s best graphic novel, while Paste magazine would later name it the decade’s best.Īt a staggering 672 pages, Habibi, Thompson’s new book out this week, is a richly rendered love story set in a fictional Middle-East that’s simultaneously modern and medieval. He followed up with the mini-comics Bible Doodles and Doot Doot Garden, but it was Thompson’s 2003 release of Blankets, an autobiographical coming-of-age saga that earned him a shower of awards and cemented his place in the comic pantheon-even as it led to a family rift. His 1999 debut, Good-bye, Chunky Rice won a Harvey award and was nominated for an Ignatz-named for the beloved Krazy Kat character.

But comics flew under their radar, so that’s where Thompson, then a socially awkward nerdling, ended up gravitating. Craig Thompson grew up in rural Wisconsin, where his access to media was strictly controlled by his fundamentalist Christian parents.

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