Pulling the Blankets From Our Eyes: The Relevance of Graphic Novels by Olivia

Pulling the Blankets From Our Eyes: The Relevance of Graphic Novels by Olivia - February 2015 Scholarship Essay

There's a swelling problem in literature today, growing from well-meaning roots, but developing into a weed that's choking out diversity. Banning books has become a trend in political correctness, and the situation is dire. For the classic Huckleberry Finn, because it accurately portrays the racial -and often racist- terms its time period, we fear it, shun it, decide that it's ugly. Those are the dark chapters of our history, that we should never face again. This is understandable, if still controversial; it's human nature to look away from horror. Especially if it looks familiar.

However, when a library in Herefordshire decides to ban The Very Hungry Caterpillar for promoting obesity, I believe we've reached a breaking point in our logic. The fact is that art often depicts things that scare us, things that are unconventional, or worse that make us question the conventional. So if a young person in this strange setting is going to read a book to get some perspective before graduating, let it be Blankets, by Craig Thompson.

It's not a very well-known work by most standards. It's not so politically earth-shaking as 1984, or as meditative and gentle as Tuesdays With Morrie. In fact, it's a graphic novel. It's unconventional. Even better, it questions the conventional. It's autobiographical and flows through the life of the author, Craig, first as he grows up in a harsh and unforgiving Christian childhood. It explores intensely the concepts of brotherhood and isolation, of the tiny flinches we adopt as kids, and carry throughout our lives. Craig is bullied, abused, confused by the nature of his own existence, and by the religion he tries so desperately to accept into his heart.

As he becomes a young man, suddenly he's our reader. In high school, his relationship to God and the teachings of the church begin to separate, and we are torn with him as he struggles to reconcile these two ideas, along with all that they represent.

Ironically, Craig then meets his first love, Raina at church camp. For once he's able to fully express himself to another person, and this is something that all people, but especially young people, need. He's exposed to the awkward pressures that come with love though, and even as he takes steps forward with Raina, he's tripped up and wrestling with the contradictions that his upbringing presents to him.

Slowly, he considers what family really means as well, as Raina's parents divorce, and he is forced to consider his own now estranged brother. Every teenager is influenced by their siblings, or their lack thereof. Thompson illustrates this elegantly by showing us Raina's caring yet parental interactions with her adoptive siblings, both with Downs syndrome. Yet she has little and less love for her biological sister, who regularly abandons "the baby" to others in the pursuit of fleeting pleasures.

The depth of this book is especially potent for teenagers who are overwhelmed by media and mixed messages, by the idea that more is actually more, and that when you're thinking, or quiet, or God forbid sad, that there's something wrong with you. That you need to be fixed by this product or that, by making yourself skinnier or stronger or by listening to music you will learn to like or else. In this kind of environment, it has never been more critical that we question. To learn that we can sit, and listen, and still disagree, that it is important that we think for ourselves and think long and hard about just who exactly we are.

Yes, this book has pictures. Beautiful brush and ink illustrations, but still, pictures. Yes, this book depicts the naked human form and a few scenes from the Bible. These scenes that are often deemed inappropriate occur rarely though, and are absolutely important to keeping both a young reader interested, and to being real and honest about life. Human beings have sex, they do drugs and they make fun of young church boys for not doing them. Humans are cruel, beautiful, abusive, and forgiving. So if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a sequential page of images in context worth? How much is a scene that is beyond words in its emotional scope worth? These are snap judgments we make arbitrarily, and out of the conditioned fear that for some reason, getting emotional impact from an image is something for children. It's something we should grow out of.

We try to close our eyes to the controversial, because we want to believe that if we can't see it, it doesn't exist. If this process is what we teach young people, who are learning, and confused, and who have been until now been rigidly instructed in almost every aspect of their lives, then we've failed them. This behavior is self-destructive. It's how human beings hurt themselves, and those they love. It's how we end up denying our true feelings and saying yes everything's okay when really maybe we just want to die more than anything. If you are afraid of controversy, are afraid of human expression and the peaks and valleys or our species, I have nothing for you. Go read The Magic Treehouse. However, you want to educate a young person not what to think, but why they should, and even better, that it gets better, I wholly recommend Blankets, by Craig Thompson.