Review by Win Wiacek

In no way a sequel to his landmark masterpiece Blankets but every inch and ounce as compelling, engaging and important, Ginseng Roots sees auteur Craig Thompson return to an incredibly harsh – nigh-dystopian – childhood to craft another incredibly engaging paean of love and fond wonder to his home, his family and his extraordinary life.

In a book encompassing biographical revelation, philosophical rumination and religious re-exploration we see the auteur share incredibly candid events from his profession and career. Wrapped up in a most engaging, amusing and occasionally distressing tutorial on the history and global cultural significance of ginseng, we see Thompson return to Wisconsin. The Thompson kids were raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, with the Rapture anticipated any day now, but it wasn’t all bad. They were loved, if ruled hard, and here we see how that panned out. It shows the transformative power of comics via a broad, deep and astonishingly informative yarn viewed through the ruminative lens of the Thompson family’s recollections of being child labourers for local farmers growing American ginseng in the 1980s.

The way it all worked is unpicked with remarkable even-handedness, as the man who became a major force in his field of graphic narrative expression revisits those formative days before embarking on a quest to learn all he can of the How and Why of it all. This involves returning home before ultimately crisscrossing the world with little brother Phil to research a new graphic novel undertaken in the light of potentially losing all he could be to an inexorable physical decline: one destined to take away his self-defining ability to draw.

Ginseng Roots teaches of a wonder herb, global trade, Chinese medicine, big agriculture and pesticides, many flavours of immigrant workers, exploitation and corporate ruthlessness, the economic history of many nations, the narcotic tendencies of comic books of grade school kids, and so much about human nature, that you’ll probably laugh, cry and become angry quite a lot.

Originally serialised as Covid ravaged the world, Thompson was also confronting presumed career burnout, impostor syndrome and the loss of his ability to draw. Craig, Phil and their sister Sarah reunite at the parental homestead and trade tales of the old days. Their reminiscences blend with flashback and flashforwards as the story of ginseng from America expands, covering the history of Wisconsin – especially the region around Marathon – and growth of ginseng trading.

Interviews with old friends and former employers follow before Craig’s declining health is more extensively explored. This leads to a vast expansion of purpose that culminates in fact finding missions all over “the Orient” before the global and historical interconnection is pulled together and laid to bed.

So much better read than read about, this marvellously moving memoir and ruminatory treatise is backed up with full contextual notes, genuinely evocative acknowledgments and bonus art from the little brother/willing accomplice and henchman Phil.

Loving, informatively wistful and never angry or condemnatory, for such a weighty tome, Ginseng Roots is a remarkably quick and easy read, with Thompson’s imaginative and ingenious marriage of text and images carrying one along in the way only comics can. Expect his cartoon avatar of the root to be pinched and copied by ad men for some time to come!

Charming, engrossing and irresistible, this may well be Thompson’s best and most enduring book, but if fate and ginseng will it, not his last as it is another perfect story in pictures.