Blankets: Chapters 8-9

I found it strange that so many people did not enjoy Blankets as we were discussing it in class the other day. I personally loved it and was confused as to why such animosity was present. Some claimed that the novel’s overall content was not interesting enough to fully justify the level of egocentricity it transmits. I disagree.

Maybe I am partial to Craig’s story because I find it so easy to correlate it to my own life, but I did not find Craig’s experiences in church and church camp and his relationship with Raina to be as inconsequential as others seemed to believe. Some people gave the impression that they did not believe the book had an underlying thesis to warrant its length and subject matter. However, I believe Craig’s final monologue in chapter 9 brings everything together.

He spends so much time worrying about his religion and his relationship with Raina that he doesn’t realize how insignificant those things are in the grand scheme of his life. His obsessive nature doesn’t allow him to look beyond his immediate reality. In the end, however, even holidays with family are reduced to mnemonic device. While Craig will always remember his religious experiences and Raina, he refuses to let them control his life in the way they once did.           

Blankets & Understanding Comics Chapter 3

During one of our first class sessions we discussed the purpose of the frames used on page 52 of Blankets, in which Craig is shown changing from a child to a high school student as he falls through clouds. At least two parts of Craig’s maturing body are in each of the three frames, and therefore Craig’s body must infiltrate what McCloud calls the gutters between the three frames.

While McCloud states that gutters are the locations where reader imagination is supposed to fill in any empty spaces in the narrative, Thompson complicates the traditional use of gutters through allowing his characters to break into them. On page 52, therefore, a reader may mentally fill in whatever events he desires into Craig’s life between the frames, but Craig’s ability to escape the frames adds an additional level of fluidity to the page and to what might have otherwise been an awkward transition from childhood to high school.

I also appreciate Thompson’s use of both moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions within short amounts of space. In chapter 7, for instance, moment-to-moment transitions are used as Raina falls asleep, signifying Craig’s strong attentiveness to Raina’s physical features. Shortly after this, Thompson uses aspect-to-aspect transitions to show a number of features of the landscape, including snowdrifts and leafless trees. The aspect-to-aspect transitions place Raina and Craig within a rather barren landscape, making the moment-to-moment transitions seem even more important through increasing the reader’s sense of Craig’s fascination with Raina.

Blankets: Chapters 2-5

While reading Blankets, I have come to appreciate the artwork more and more because of the correlations I find between Craig’s experiences and my life. I feel the simplistic facial features Thompson uses emphasizes McCloud’s position that more basic character drawings allow those viewing the drawings to project themselves onto the drawn characters. Since I find strong personal correlation between Craig’s life and my own in terms of being scolded for creative works, religion, and even Craig’s relationship with Raina, I am already invested in the story itself, but my ability to see myself as Craig due to Thompson’s relatively rudimentary facial drawings has increased my level of investment. Since the novel deals with such common but deeply emotional subjects (divorce, religion and its relation to sex, bullying) and uses simple facial constructions, I can understand why some have read through the entire novel in one sitting. McCloud also states, however, that simple character features cause one to focus more on the words that are being spoken by those characters. For this reason, I find it interesting that many pages of Blankets seem to have little or no dialogue or text at all (pages 256-258 for example).

Blankets: Chapter One

Last semester I took a course on writing processes and pedagogies in which we discussed multimodality often, especially as it relates to fonts, images, visual transitions, etc. One of the reasons I am taking this course is to work more with images as they relate to text, which also prompted me to take a course called "Tangible Textuality" this semester. There were a couple of images that caught my eye in the first chapter of Craig Thompson's Blankets. I noticed a strong correlation between the final image of Phil in "the cubby hole" on page 17 and the final two images of Craig on page 25. The markings left by the brothers' hands on the door and mirror represent two different modes of entrapment, Phil being physically trapped in "the cubby hole" and Craig being trapped in a life he does not want for himself. Escapism seems like it will play a large role in the novel, and I found it to be an absolute tragedy when Craig burned all of his artwork. I also appreciated the use of text, dialogue, and thought bubbles on page 53. Thompsons use of a thought bubble to block his teacher's words seems to imply that religion itself has become a new mode of escapism replacing artwork. I also found the content of the frame to be somewhat humorous, despite Craig's dismal situation.

I enjoyed the first two chapters of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, but I also found chapter two to be fairly confusing at times. I recognize and appreciate the echoes of Saussure, but I don't know if it's something I'm ready to tackle in my blog before we've had any class discussion on the material.