Craig Thompson is a graphic novelist, well known for titles such as Blankets and Habibi. Now that his serialised comics Ginseng Roots are being released in the UK as one larger graphic novel, I spoke to Craig about the project and his inspirations behind it.
For those who don’t know, what is Ginseng Roots and what inspired it?
Ginseng Roots is a half-memoir and half-journalistic documentary about ginseng, the medicinal root used in Chinese medicine. The documentary side follows the trade relationship between China and the US, as far back as 1718, and it’s about how it connects these countries. In the memoir element, it was my first job; starting when I was ten years old, I was working 40 hours a week during my summer vacations in ginseng cultivation. The tiny town I grew up in, population 1200 people, in rural Wisconsin, was the largest producer of cultivated American ginseng in the world when I was a child.
In the book, you mention how a love for comics was a key inspiration for you as a child artist. In other interviews, you have referenced the work of David B., Chester Brown, and Julie Doucet as inspirations. Obviously, Ginseng Roots has a lot of links to Asia – were you inspired by Asian art when creating Ginseng Roots?
Hokusai, who is Japanese, was one of the biggest inspirations. The term ‘manga’ comes from his mid-1800s encyclopaedic volumes of drawings; I think there was something like 18 volumes, where he just drew every possible thing. They were meant as instructional manuals for art students and drawn in a very calligraphic style, translated to wood block, and printed in black-grey-orange tones – so that was really the biggest inspiration for the visual look of the book. And then, more broadly, Chinese wood block printing and watercolours in general, where often that limited palate of black, grey, and red was used. You mentioned some cartoonists, but I would say that Joe Sacco was actually the biggest influence on this project, especially in terms of the documentary.
I find it interesting that documentary is central to this project. Have you taken any inspiration from other mediums, like documentary film, in terms of of constructing your narrative and how you pulled all the pieces together?
I love documentaries but I don’t think I directly drew any inspiration from any. Around the time I was working on the book, the documentary American Factory came out – it’s amazing. It’s about a Chinese auto-glass producer that buys a defunct auto-manufacturing plant in Ohio and there’s a common theme of Chinese companies attempting to establish work in the US, keeping on half the American staff from the plant and then bringing in Chinese workers – so it’s about culture clash in terms of work style and ethic. I was amazed by the correlation with Ginseng Roots.
I name drop the author Michael Pallon a lot because his book, The Botany of Desire, was a big inspiration, as was Robin Walls Kimmerer with Braiding Sweetgrass, and Richard Powers with The Overstory, in terms of narrative. That’s what I like to read too, books which are sort of informational, educational, entertaining books.
I think merging the documentary aspect with illustration is appealing. I bring up documentary film because there have been several interesting animated documentaries over time, merging something which is associated with fiction or falsehood with the truth of the documentary format. There’s a documentary called Tower which informs viewers on a 1966 shooting at the University of Texas and allows us to understand the subject matter in a different way, in a way which expresses the emotions of those impacted; in it, the animation also allows the viewer to see these people at the age they were and, in that sense, it is more real than filming them at their current age. I think your work is similar in that there are the more grounded, real aspects, and the more fictionalised elements too.
Yes, in terms of that dynamic, I think it was impossible to avoid the anthropomorphised ginseng root because there’s so many Chinese legends of these little roots coming alive. When I travelled in China, everybody had some story about the little ginseng root popping out the ground and running away from the hunters. So, as a cartoonist, I had to draw that. Very early on, it felt like such a fun image to weave throughout the book.
Another thing I think is similar to film documentaries is they have the advantage of using voice-over on top of footage which is more dynamic than the original interview setting, and I exploited that same technique. Some of the interviews I did were in an office but, later on, I would go on a tour of the farm and that’s what I would draw because it was the interesting visual. Then, I would transplant the dialogue to those settings.
Building on your drawings, could you explain your process of putting a page together? The composition of each page is really beautiful.
Again, I will reference Joe Sacco, because I love how he doesn’t just stack a bunch of frames – you know, the six-panel or nine-panel grid – his pages are their own compositions and everything flows and weaves together. That appeals to me so, whenever I can, I lose the panel borders. I think of the page as the one panel.
It’s a little more challenging to try and get the readers’ eyes to follow, to be directed properly, without the compartments of the panel. It was easier in Ginseng Roots because of the organic quality of a lot of the subject matter: fields, farms, dirt, trees. These organic landscapes make it easier to be organic with the layouts.
This book is a lot more dense than a book like Blankets. In Blankets, the whole intention was to have this breezy, breathable book where I would spread something I could do in two pages into, like, ten pages. This was the opposite because I was serialising it initially as a comic book series and so I only had thirty pages to tell each chapter, which forced me into denser compositions and to condense the dialogue into that space too. I had to really think about each page because I couldn’t waste any real estate!
This graphic novel, as well as Blankets, is clearly quite personal, not just for you but for your family too – is there any fear which comes with that, with putting such details out there? How is that overcome? Why put it into the world when it is arguably easier not to?
I kept Blankets secret from my parents when I was doing it. I was definitely consulting my brother and sister but I was fearful that my parents’ judgement would shut down my creativity. With Ginseng Roots, I approached things in a different way. The first chapter went smoothly enough and my parents really liked it. The second one, not as much because that one does focus more on the family. They really just wanted the book to be about farming. I could feel their participation withdrawing as I went further into the book, which was really frustrating. It was hard… whilst it was definitely a challenge, in the end, especially with my mum, she signed off on it; there’s overt reference in chapter 12 to when I talked to her about their feelings about the book and she’s like “our feelings may be different but it’s your book and you should be able to tell it”.
It’s funny because there were times when she was like “I never said that” but I had made recordings and my siblings had been present, vouching that “she said that hundreds of times”. It is so stressful though to the point where at the end of every bio project I’m think I’ll never do it again.
I loved that we don’t just see your personal moments and your perspective but we also see your brother Phil’s perspective in Ginseng Roots, told through his own illustrations. How much of this was a collaborative project? Do you prefer to work collaboratively, independently, or some place in between?
I’ve never worked collaboratively, apart for some freelance projects, where I was a hired gun back in my early 20s. Otherwise, my entire career has been solo writing and drawing. I have been restless to collaborate in recent years. I’ve been bogged down by the isolation of working alone.
When this project began, my brother was the biggest cheerleader for the idea. I was hoping we would be much more collaborative and that never really panned out. He can draw but he’s not really much of a drawer. In the series, there were more pages drawn by him; he even did his own little booklet of 16 pages. I would’ve loved if he had drawn half the book but, after he had done his pages, he was like “that’s pretty much all I have to say about ginseng”. Meanwhile, I needed another 450 pages to get it out of my system – he’s a more healthy, well-adjusted person!
One of my future projects that I have been stalling on for more than a decade is with 83-year-old, French cartoonist named Edmund Baudoin. We started that book in 2014 and there’s about 180 pages finished and we’re both writing and we’re both drawing but the biggest complication with that process is that we don’t speak the same language; Edmund speaks no English and I speak kindergarten level French. At this point, we can cheat with Google translate but I want to capture the awkwardness of what collaborating without a common tongue has been – but I dropped the ball on the whole process. I keep promising to pick it up again.
One particular personal detail you shared which struck a chord with me were your health struggles and how they impede on what you love and on your work. It’s relatable. Why was it important for you to share this?
When I completed the Ginseng Roots series and read all twelve issues in succession, it felt like a narrative arc was missing to tie all the chapters together. That’s when I decided to add the element of my ongoing health crisis. At first I was reluctant that it might seem whiny or “woe is me.” But I realized that most everyone goes through some version of their own health crisis. And, in fact, my deteriorating drawing hand was an escalating drama throughout the whole project. It just got worse and worse from the beginning of the novel, and unfortunately continues to worsen. My injury started in China at the very beginning of the project, which happened exactly as it is in the first chapter; I was on a bamboo raft, and then I was helping the boatmen carry the raft, and then I slipped and fell on my drawing hand. A Chinese tourist took me on his motorcycle to a herbal pharmacy and got me this sports injury spray, which was basically made of deer antler and ginseng. Amazingly, it worked. Remembering that whole story, it was ginseng that helped heal me from that very first moment.
How are you getting on now?
Well, it’s not really healed. That was 2011 and it’s only escalated since then. It got really aggressive after I got radiation treatments, which is what my Western surgeon suggested – that somehow made the condition worse. So, I’m still panicked about it.
I’m on book tour right now and touring is good for my hands. They get worse with each passing week of touring and it’s not the kind of thing you recover from, the deformities are permanent… so I don’t know. Nearing the end of completing the book, I was convinced it would be my last and I would have to shift to a different career. I wasn’t sure if I had enough skills to be a stand-alone writer, or what. I’m trying to find some time to have a sabbatical to see if I can recover some strength and health.
To finish up, you mentioned the possibility of us seeing a collaborative project from yourself and Edmund Baudoin, but is there anything else we might expect?
There’s a couple of things I am tinkering with but, at the moment, they are too amorphous and premature. Whilst I’m in the midst of tour, it is so all consuming to work on new projects. Maybe when I was younger, I could do that but now just surviving book tour takes all my stamina. I’m in Europe for another few weeks and then I have another month of touring when I get back to the US. And it never ends. As it gets started, more and more invites start accumulating. Usually after a year of touring, I realise I have to start on something new. I get really restless! Right now is too soon to know what is next but I certainly have some ideas.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson, published by Pantheon Books, will be available from April 29th.
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