Ginseng World

Ginseng Roots
By Craig Thompson
Penguin Random House

Craig Thompson made his bones creating the kind of weighty tome that most artists normally spend a career working up to. His debut, Good-bye Chunky Rice, weighed in at a respectable 128 pages. His follow up, 2003’s Blankets, came in at a staggering 600 pages. Your humble author just wrapped on a 360-page project that almost killed him so, respect.

Blankets details Thompson's youth in small–town Wisconsin, the tension of growing up in a strict, Christian Evangelical home, and Thompson’s own faith falling away. Now in its 20th Anniversary Edition, Blankets is the book upon which Thompson’s reputation largely rests. He toured the world promoting Blankets, a true rarity for a lowly cartoonist, and it has been translated into several languages.

Cornet De Voyage, Habibi (672 pages!) and Space Dumplins, which deviated substantially, as a lighter work for young readers, followed. But Thompson’s name is almost synonymous with Blankets.

Doing back-of-the-envelope, publication date math, Thompson manages a new work (not counting anthologies and the like) roughly every five years. The graphic novel has largely displaced the floppy (individual issues) for much of the comics reading public, but rather than do his usual 500-600 page all-at-once drop, Thompson serialized his newest project, Ginseng Roots, over four years and 12 individual issues with Uncivilized Books. I wonder if the choice to serialize was born out of a desire to release more regularly or if it was prompted by some other practical matter. Ginseng Roots was collected as a 450-pages (sorry, I’m still floored by his sheer page count) graphic novel this year.

The book’s title is a pun; the prized part of the ginseng plant is the root, but Thompson grew up in American Ginseng country and spent much of his youth working as a child laborer in his hometown’s, Marathon Wisconsin, ginseng fields. It was a family affair with Mom, little brother and middle sister joining once they were of age. In this case, “of age” seems awfully young, pre-teen.

Ginseng is a plant native to East Asia and parts of the Americas that is prized for its root. The root (which, like the mandrake, can have some human-like characteristics) is used as an herbal supplement and in folk medicine.

In the “A” story, Thompson is prompted to return home (the “roots” in the title) following a career-threatening hand injury that was at least a little responsive to treatment with g qqinseng, for Marathon’s Ginseng Festival. The locals call the crop “Shang.” The “A” story, returning to his now-aging family with his now-adult siblings, largely revisits territory covered in Blankets, and how the story feels to live with 20 years later.

Here’s where the books runs into trouble. There’s an “A” story, but there’s also a whole alphabet of other divergent and interlocking sub and sub-sub-plots along with several deep dives into ginseng’s history, domestic and abroad, its chemistry, farming, trade, cultural impact, mythology.

And, this little motherfucker shows up like a shade-grown, organic version of “Clippy”, guiding us along the narrative.

As a device, “Shangy” only succeeds in distracting and undermining the storytelling. He’s joined in this mission by several other one-time and repeated “familiars,” what are intended to be funny asides and call-backs. I found myself struggling against cross-currents to find the actual story.

Thompson draws beautifully. A self-taught artist, his draftsmanship is unimpeachable. The industry’s trend has been toward underdrawn, “minimalist” and unfinished-looking work. In contrast, Thompson has drawn since childhood and the old school, drawing board, quill ‘n brush chops he’s developed are impressive. It’s easy (and sometimes fun) to get lost in his pages, but the lushness of his rendering comes across often as more ornamental than storytelling. There are a lot of beautiful spreads, splash pages, near-infographics and motifs, but sequential panels are only interspersed.

There is a preciousness to Thompson’s technique that can come across as cloying, particularly with his childhood self. That preciousness darkens into a glib, Disneyfied sensibility with his depictions of indigenous people. While no detail was spared in depicting the undeniably harsh realities of a childhood spent at work, Thompson condensed two centuries of brutal colonialism into ten pages with the white-washing efficiency of a three minute School House Rock. The book is black and white with a red spot color. Those ten pages should be drenched in red, but they are unbloodied.

The most affecting chapters are in the middle of the book, when Thompson folds In the story of fellow former child laborer Chua Vang, who is American-born from a Hmong family. Through Chua, Thompson sees his relative privilege by comparison. The story of Chua’s family’s escape from Laos is harrowing, but even there, Thompson lessens the gravity of the tale by tossing in tawdry asides and 80s Kid cultural references.

In Ginseng Roots, Thompson has woven together a complex, multi-layered story, but there isn’t a through-line apparent. His self-reflexiveness makes the book feel more like Blankets: Revisited than a story of its own merit. The satellite themes of mortality, alienation, betrayal and regret, and the books delving into international trade and Trumpism sometimes make for compelling reading (especially given the administration’s relaxed attitude towards labor law) but the book scrambles to pull it all together.