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Francesco Giannone
Professor Peter Sarram
CMS 318
10 December 2014

Thompsons Blankets: Meta-comics Issues and the Specificity of Graphic Novels in

Autobiographical Narrative

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As Duncan and Smith point out in their chapter titled Developing of a Medium,
following the first appearance of Superman in the first issue of Action Comics in June 1938, the
comic book medium was associated for a long time and still is today with adolescent power
fantasies of muscular men in costume and tights (32) as well as, to a certain extent, with cheap
disposable commodities. The success of Superman stories is to be found precisely in the
specificity of comics, which allows the representation of constant movement and actions
juxtaposed in space. Time speeds within and across panels and gutters themselves become
dynamic: as the word action in the title Action Comics suggests, the focus is on pure
movement. Superman embodied both the triumph but also the limitations of the comic book
medium. The popularity encountered by Superman, in fact, assured the financial success of the
new industry, but, at the same time, crystallized the medium with a particular genre, the one of
superheroes and cheap entertainment.
Things started to change with the appearance of the term "graphic novel," popularized
within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978.
The term became familiar to the public in the late 1980s following the commercial successes of
titles like Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight
Returns. The development of the graphic novel as a comics medium genre has resulted in the
comics being now fully appreciated as a sophisticated art form. As Heer and Worcester point out
in their introduction to A Comics Studies Reader:
The rise of comics studies is concomitant with the increased status and awareness of
comics as an expressive medium and as part of the historical record. The revaluation is
testified to by the commercial and critical success of the graphic novel; the greater
attention comics are receiving in museums, galleries, and libraries, and the growing
interest in teaching comics in the classroom. (xi)

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The process of the artistic assessment of the graphic novel has analogies with the process
through which the traditional literary novel gained its undisputable cultural status.
After all, if we look at the literary novel as we know it today, its preeminence in the world of
literary culture was achieved only relatively recently not before the end of the 18th century. Until
then, the novel was considered inferior to poetry and drama, and was seen to be a form of
entertainment for the lower classes, rather than serious literature, not dissimilarly from comics,
which have long been considered escapist literature. Another analogy of the graphic novel with
the literary novel is that the first texts we now call novels were serialized and did not appear right
away in book form.
Throughout this discussion I will try to show to what extent the graphic novel succeeds
in being a meta-comics work of art, and how precisely because it relies on the specificity of
the medium it is best suited to narrate personal and/or autobiographical content. In particular, I
will look closely at Craig Thompsons 2003 graphic novel (or as the book cover reports
illustrated novel) Blankets. I will focus on the extent to which meta-comics issues are present in
Blankets, that is, how this graphic novel contains a discussion of the comics medium itself,
illustrating the inner working of the comics medium. Through the analysis of specific panels I
will discuss how the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical subject matter of the book could
not have been conveyed in any other medium better than in the graphic novel. To introduce the
discussion on autobiographical elements in Blankets I will also briefly refer to other authors of
successful retrospective graphic novels, especially Marjane Satrapi and Art Spigelman.
In Comic Books Go to War, a 2006 documentary by Mark Daniels, author Marjane
Satrapi stresses the complexity of the comics language, a language which works deux, in that it
is the language of writing through images. Art Spiegelman himself prefers the definition of co-

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mix, so as to stress the dual nature of the medium. In Satrapi we see that images are not only a
form of writing, but are the primordial form of language. Satrapi speaks at length about the
marriage of image and text. Drawing, in particular, becomes, in her account, the primordial, as
well as the most universal language. Satrapi is concerned with a lack of familiarity the public
and some critics show with the comics medium. She questions the fact that cartoonists should
often be forced to justify the use of their medium of expression, especially, she insists, when
their work deals with autobiographical content. Thompson too is inevitably faced with similar
issues, since Blankets partakes of the autobiographical retrospective graphic novel genre.
In 1996 Thierry Groensteen identified a number of traits common to the narrative
component of autobiographical comics. The two most revalent of these were recollections of
childhood and recounting of intimate or sexual encounters. Indeed, Blankets is no exception as it
chronicles Craig's adolescence and young adulthood, his childhood relationship with his younger
brother Phil, and the conflicts he experiences regarding Christianity and his first love. Major
literary themes of the work include first love, child and adult sexuality, spirituality, sibling
relationships, and coming of age. Though written chronologically (the book opens with Craig
and Phil as kids sharing the same bed) Thompson uses flashbacks as a literary and artistic device
in order to parallel young adult experience with past childhood experience.
As Benjamin Stevens points out in his essay The Beautiful Ambiguity of Blankets:
Comics Representation and Religious Art, Blankets ends with five pages of silence (578-82).
Since Blankets is a graphic work and thus consists entirely of visuals (including conventional
visual representation of verbal and other auditory events) silence means that on those final five
pages no sounds are explicitly depicted. The first three of those pages (578-80) are wordless

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(text- less indeed) except for the page numbers, hand-drawn (but non-diegetic), in lower lefthand (on verso) and right-hand (recto) corners.

The closing two pages (581-2), instead, with a total of three panels, show one small narrative box
per panel, but even those texts depict no spoken language: they convey the inner thoughts of the
book's main character, Craig, who in this scene is by himself.

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Stevens explains that Blanketss final scene may thus be read as depicting the main character's
final development in the book: in perfect silence, he privately meditates on what it means to
leave a mark on a blank surface. What seems to be a private meditation, though, is not private at
all in the ordinary sense of the word, since Craig is sharing personal memories and
considerations on his life with the reader or viewer. This problematic point does not apply only
to Blankets, of course, but it is common to much narrative works, particularly to autobiography,
and not only to narration in the comics medium. Blankets becomes then a meta-narrative story: a
comics story that explores the comics medium itself and the possibilities of comics storytelling.
Stevens points out how Blankets presents its final scene in full awareness of how things like
silence, privacy, and a feeling of meditation are not naturally given but effected by conventions
in comics representation. In the final three panels the reader is thus asked not only to share into
the main character's private meditation on human life, but also to experience somehow the whole

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work in a deeper way. The final scene becomes also a metaphor for the artists ink strokes on a
blank page, and we read: "How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a
map of my movement no matter how temporary.
In the bottom panel on page 578 we notice a dotted curving line on the white snow, left by
Craig who walks away from his parents house. The dotted line of his footsteps shows that he
walks by a metal barrel without stopping. This is the same barrel in which as a youngster he had
once burned his own art drawings (57-60) as well as presents and souvenirs from Raina, his first
love (526-7). The fact that he simply walks past the barrel clearly signifies that, as a young adult,
Craig is now reconciled with life and his own calling as an artist, and has overcome his
childhood and adolescence traumas. The curved dotted line of Craigs footsteps leads towards
the bottom right hand corner of the panel suggesting it will continue in that direction, with Craig
moving forward. The corner of the panel is left unframed and the white of the snow, on which
Craig leaves his mark, blends seamlessly into the white of the page.
Blankets exemplifies, as it does in these panels, that just as the comics medium is perfect
to represent movement and action (which was its primary goal at the beginning of its
development), the medium is also most suited to capture and convey emotions, personal
reflections, and slow transitions between panels as well as feelings of stillness.
In Blankets the title itself carries a strong meta-comics meaning. The word blanket can
clearly be associated to the blanket (actually a quilt) that Reina gives Craig, and the only item
from her he does not burn when their relationship ends. The title also points back to the blankets
of snow covering the setting where the characters live. But then the title can also be a reference
to or even a symbol of the invisible blanket Craig puts up against a world he cannot understand
or in which he cannot fit.

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On page 183 the hand-made quilt/blanket which Raina made for Craig becomes a metaphor for
the comics medium itself. The different squares of material ordered together according to a
specific pattern make up a beautiful blanket, just as the different panels joined together in
sequence form a comic page.

Formally, page 183 is a splash page, a full bleed page at that, but then, this page is made of what
seem to be small juxtaposed square panels with no gutters between them, making it intriguingly
enough a sort of inset paneled splash page. The tiers represented (which are a synecdoche for the
whole blanket) are positioned as slightly oblique, as if the blanket were nonchalantly set over the
page. The different fabrics and patterns of the blankets squares make up the background of the

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panels on the page. Craig and Raina are portrayed moving in and out of the different squares
patches of cloth with their words in speech balloons as if they were (and actually they are) drawn
figures in the different panels on a comics book page. Craig will later on explicitly describes
Rainas blanket as a comic strip on page 566: Each square had a different texture a visual
sound and read in sequence, like a comic strip, they told a story.

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Three panels on page 538 show further instances of meta-comics features in Blankets. As
Duncan and Smith point out in their chapter titled Experiencing the Story, focusing on the
background details and lack of thereof on page 538 three functions of comic book images
(sensory diegetic, non-sensory diegetic, and hermeneutic) can be analyzed.

The pictures of the landscape in panel one are sensory diegetic images, in that they give us
enough detail to understand that we are in a woodland setting. Though not hyper-realistic, the

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drawings of the trees clearly provide the idea of woodland setting through the process of
synecdoche. The background details in panel two demonstrate that images function on different
levels, constantly calling for closure on the part of the reader. Duncan and Smith notice how the
background here has shifted to the realm of internal faculties not accessible to the senses,
functioning as non-sensory diegetic images which illustrate a blending of Craigs memory and
imagination. In the second panel, images in the background are exaggerated and surreal,
working as more than representing an internal state or the characters mind. The images also
carry a hermeneutic function, because Thompson uses them to warn the reader that he is an
unreliable narrator and that his fertile imagination cannot always be trusted (168). In a way,
Thompson is using an equivalent of what Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini refers to as free
indirect subjective technique which allows a director to use his protagonists internal perspective
as an alibi for his abnormal visual style. These background images are a commentary on Craigs
fervid imagination and can only be fully understood when considered in relation to the blank
background in panel three. A comic book artist may often decide to drop out the background
details and focus on characters. However, as Duncan and Smith suggest, in panel three the choice
to use no image is clearly hermeneutic when considered in relation to the previous two panels.
The blank background (which is in stark contrast with the backgrounds in the previous panels) is
a visual metaphor for Phils lack of imagination. This metaphor is reinforced by the matter-offact words in the speech balloons coming from Phil, who, we learn through the story, has
abandoned his own inclination to drawing and, therefore has narrowed and rejected his
imagination.
We are at a point in the story when Craig is back home for his brothers graduation and
they go out for a walk visiting the places where they used to play when they were kids. In

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particular, they are looking for a cave which had intrigued them at the time. As they no longer
find it, they start to ponder whether it ever really existed. The cave holds particular importance
since earlier in the book Craig recalls Platos cave myth when his relationship with Rainas is
getting to an end point (496-501). Retrospectively, the Platonic reference gives philosophic
coherence and weight to many of Thompsons stylistic and imaginistic choices. With the myth of
Platos cave, Thompson appears to confer philosophical justification for his predilection for
striking chiaroscuro effects achieved by his strong brush strokes and masterful use of shadows
and shadowing.
Having in mind Platos myth which stresses how we are blind to the truth of actual reality,
and that the reality we perceive is only illusory or imaginary, Blankets can be interpreted as a
reflection upon the eluding and deluding nature of the comics medium itself and a warning from
the author asking the reader to discern historical autobiographical truth from the artistic truth. In
an interview of January 2004 appeared on the blog Erasing Clouds, Thompson himself explains:
I've been reluctant to use the word autobiographical for Blankets. It doesn't
actually appear on the book because enough details have been changed and edited,
so it's only deep down a version of my life at that time. There are details that
actually happened so it might be right to use that word, yet it seems a little bit
presumptuous to use the word autobiography.
As Bart Beaty points out in his essay Autobiography as Authenticity, two ideas predominate in
the study of autobiography: the relation of the text to historical truth and the relation of the text
to the conventions of biography. Timothy Dow Adams, for example, argues: a promise to tell
the truth is one of the earliest premises of autobiography. He suggests that autobiography is an
attempt to reconcile ones life with ones self, and that, therefore, the core of autobiography is
not historical accuracy but metaphorical truth. Indeed, Blankets focuses on Thompsons very
metaphorical autobiographical truth. Philippe Lejeune identifies the referential pact as central

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to the process of autobiography explaining that as nonfiction texts biography and
autobiography are referential texts, which, just like scientific or historical discourse, claim to
provide information about a reality exterior to the text, which is information that can be
verified. The aim of biography and autobiography is not mere verisimilitude, but actual
resemblance to the truth, not the effect of the real, but the image of the real.
Narratologically speaking, according to Lejeune, the distinguishing feature of
autobiography is the identity of author, narrator and character and he specifies that the narrator
has, in relation to the story recounted, a retrospective viewpoint. On closer examination, this
identity of the three instances of author, narrator, and character is far from obvious, particularly
in a medium split between verbal and visual enunciation. As Groensteen notices, this is because
the character is a purely conventional representation, a stylized, arbitrary, and shifting graphic
construction.
In autobiographical comics narrations added complications result from the paradox that
the events narrated (which took place in the past) point to the future, or, as Spiegelman explains
to Hillary Chute, the readers and viewers are offered past, present and future all on the same
page: before decoding the single panels, the reader has already visually perceived them all
together represented at the same time on the page. Everything that happen in the past is presented
as a point of view from the present and memory allows to jump from past to present and vice
versa.
Finally, of significant importance in discussing autobiography in a graphic novel are
some considerations by Julia Swindells. Swindles calls attention to the way in which
autobiography itself has served as a liberating space for oppressed peoples and, by extension,
oppressed individuals: autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the oppressed and

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the culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both for and beyond the individual. As Beaty
puts it, autobiography becomes a mode which foregrounds both realism and the sense of the
author as an artist demanding legitimacy. Far from bringing forth the death of the author, as
Barthes and de Man would have it, autobiography in comics holds the possibility of giving the
author birth for the first time.
Anyone who has ever felt rejected and even bullied in school will easily identify in
Craig/Thompsons recall of such painful experiences. Is it really necessary to suffer and be
marginalized in order to achieve Thompsons artistic mastery? Similarly, the importance of the
innovative contribution of autobiography in comics leads to questions concerning the roles of
fans, whose contribution is of crucial importance in conferring status to the medium. They often
are isolated or marginalized in a niche set aside of the mainstream. However, when the comics
medium gets the recognition it deserves thanks to them, what are the possibilities for cultural
creativity in a society dominated by mass culture, where the industry produces standardization,
commodification and pseudo-individualization, as Adornos pessimistic view suggests?
Thompsons great freedom in drawing originates precisely in his having had difficulties in
coping with mainstream or authoritarian sectors of society. It is not surprising, then, that
Thompson's works are published by Top Shelf, one of the most vibrant and experimental comics
publishing houses. "They're really laidback he says to Battista, whether it's to my detriment or
not, they don't make me change anything They just take what I do and publish it. This simple
statement implies that the auteur/creator works at his or her best when feeling free to experiment
with the comics medium, when creativity is unchained. In the end, creative freedom is just what
was sought at the beginning of the development of the comics medium by artists like Eisener,

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who masterfully experimented with graphic lettering and splash pages, or, later on, by artists of
the underground comix scene.
Conclusions
Throughout this paper I tried to briefly highlight some major aspects of Blankets as a
meta-comics autobiographical graphic novel and how Thompsons work is to be praised for
adding status to the art form. Blankets has accomplished a deed foreseen by Eisner, who
dreamed of lifting comics works to the level of aesthetic creation, addressing a mature, and even
sophisticated, adult public. Blankets and the best of graphic novel texts have proven once again
the great flexibility of the comics medium, which is capable of rendering the dynamicity of
movement and action, but also of delving deep into the human psyche and human emotions.

Works Cited
Battista, Anna. Blanketed by Success: Interview with Cartoonist Craig Thompson. Erasing
Clouds. January 2004. Web. 10 Dec. 2014
Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2007. Print.

---. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 20012. Print.
Chute, Hillary. The Shadow of a Past Time: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.
Twentieth Century Literature. June 2006, Vol. 52 Issue 2. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New
York: The Continuum International Group, 2009. Print.

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Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tampa, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Print.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Print.
---. Comics and Narration. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Print.
Heer, Jet and Kent Worcester. A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Print.
Stevens, Benjamin. The Beautiful Ambiguity of Blankets: Comics Representation and Religious
Art. ImageTexT. Vol. 5, 1. Winter 2010. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
Thompson, Craig. Blankets: An Illustrated Novel. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2004. Print.
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