Forty Days in the Wilderness

CRAIG THOMPSON: There was a month there, a few months into my senior year, where my parents didn't exactly know what they were doing. My sister and I were pulled from public school and then we started exploring other options. We checked out a local Christian school, and it was terrifying. It was a one-room schoolhouse where they teach kindergarten to senior-year high school all in one room. Very strict dress code -- the girls wear bonnets and full-length dresses and the boys have black pants and suspenders. The staff sized me up, because I came in there with my little grunge kid's combat boots and long hair. The teacher spoke at once: "First off, there's a strict dress code. You'll have to get a haircut...." Wear these Amish clothes, basically. I think all three of us, my mother, my sister and I, left feeling really discouraged and depressed, like, "Whoa, what kind of weird, exclusive, old-fashioned community was that?" My parents may have been morally conservative, but they were very acceptant of a certain expressive individualism - the right to wear your hair long and stand out from others.

We started visiting other people in the community that were home schooling. It was more of the same. These are people on the fringe of Mennonite cultures -- real traditionalists, like German Baptists. They're all around us in Wisconsin. Women had to wear floor-length dresses and bonnets and men wore suspenders. Committed to farm-building communities [where] there's not a lot of technology.

It was terrifying. I remember meeting these families where the kids wouldn't talk at all. It was the man that'd talk. The wife would be sort of submissive, and the kids would just be these little wallflowers dangling in the background. It didn't make any sense to me.

Senior-year home schooling was my Jesus-wandering-for-forty-days-and-nights-in-the-desert experience. The only social connection in that year was visiting Raina for two weeks -- no wonder that experience became profound to me -- then weekly visits with other home schoolers, which were very isolating. The rest of my time was spent alone, or with my mom or sister immersed in Bible studies, and then wandering the forest. I started to go crazy...

I had some health issues that really flared up that year. I guess I've always been medically fragile. [Laughs.]

I neglected to represent any of this drama in Blankets, but the Raina relationship existed as it did in the book. We had very flirtatious postal courtship which blossomed into this really exciting sexy two weeks together, and then things started to crumble a bit after I left. It was a quick fantasy fling.

Music Hath Charms

CHARLES HATFIELD: So your parents forbade secular music at home. After being denied it for so long, did you make a head-first plunge into rock?

THOMPSON: It wasn't a headfirst plunge at all. It was the bizarre world of Christian rock. The seed was planted in junior high with Stryper. I was probably in the fifth grade when Stryper was first coming out. It's such cheeseball, light metal.

HATFIELD: Didn't their name come from the Biblical saying, "by His stripes we are healed" [Isaiah 53:5]?

THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah. It didn't take me long to realize, "These guys are pop rock, they're not metal..." But then my brother and I got into all these Christian metal and thrash metal bands like The Crucified and Tourniquet and Vengeance Rising. The Christian equivalents of Slayer [laughs].

HATFIELD: Vengeance Rising?

THOMPSON: Yeah... Christian death metal and thrash metal. [Hatfield laughs.] It's funny. We'd order these music videos of Vengeance Rising, and the lead singer would crawl out of a coffin with zombie make-up and flaming skulls dripping blood from their eye sockets surrounding him, and he'd be growling/grunting like an angry Cookie Monster. Then after the video, they'd have an interview with him, and he'd be like [in a sincere voice], "I'm a pastor at the Church of Heavy Metal here in Canada..." He'd be a very a soft-spoken pastor. They're just trying to appeal to the youth, [to] what kids loved. So we went very quickly from regular metal to speed metal, thrash metal to Christian punk.

Some of this stuff I still have a lot of respect for. I can look back at it and say some of this is very sincere. For instance, I love this band Scaterd Few; they were all these post crack-smoking junkies from L.A. with a very crazy blend of punk and metal, even reggae. And the Danielson Family, so adored in indie-rock circles, create a sound like no one else. On the other hand, most Christian rock is just fabricated -- [in a preacher voice] "We need a band that sounds like Nine Inch Nails" -- totally insincere music, designed to propagate their propaganda. Then there's other bands, like Scaterd Few, people that are really from the streets, and have had horrible upbringings and traumatic experiences. They found Christianity, and it gave them some comfort, with a street church-service mentality. We would go to some of their shows, and they had a real punk energy, you know?

HATFIELD: Sort of a post-punk version of the Jesus Freak?

THOMPSON: Yeah, and it fit in with the '90s straight-edge movement. There'd be these kids, they loved Fugazi, but they also loved all these bands like The Crucified. They didn't drink or do drugs or have sex, because that's like selling out to The Man. They could be "punk" about it in a way. And that had an easy crossover, because of what was going on in hardcore mainstream music. That's where I made the crossover. Straight-edge rock, these bands, punk rock, at that time, was synching up with a very puritanical set of values.

HATFIELD: Clean living, but militantly upheld?

THOMPSON: Yeah! And then by the time I was in high school, my parents weren't monitoring us too strictly, so I had the usual discovery of Jane's Addiction and The Pixies, all that good stuff. I was a total grunge nerd, too. Typical Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr.... I confess, I was a total Generation X dork, loving all that grunge stuff.

HATFIELD: Well, it's left its fingerprints all over Blankets.

THOMPSON: Yeah. The first Radiohead album...

HATFIELD: And then Raina and her crowd, too, where Craig doesn't quite fit in, but...

THOMPSON: Well, grunge seems goofy now, but I appreciate how it merged a lot of misfits. It brought together long-haired metal kids and shaven-haired punk kids. There was some meeting ground, and that was nice.

The Worst Thing I've Ever Done

HATFIELD: There's a scene in Blankets where you, I mean young Craig, are chastised for drawing a picture of a naked woman [pages 203-208]. This was based on a real happening?

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: In this scene, there's communication of a sort going on but no one is actually facing anyone else. As if you're all talking about something so important that you avert your gaze from each other.

THOMPSON: Yeah, there's more communicated in my father clearing his throat, than in what he actually says...

HATFIELD: There's a real sense of awkwardness about the poses: [points at page] the head bowed, eyes staring at the floor, etc. Clearly, your parents thought that this was an important moment in your upbringing for them to address, but...

THOMPSON: Here is definitely an example where I'm painting them as sort of menacing monsters. But I'm drawing it from an emotional standpoint.

HATFIELD: Your father's shoes are here depicted as larger than your entire body!

THOMPSON: [Laughter.] Yeah, and for them it must have been a really awkward and horrible experience to have to go through. They were just trying to rear me in what they thought was a spiritually pure manner.

HATFIELD: The manipulation of scale definitely leans toward caricature.

THOMPSON: A positive family outcome from Blankets is that I grew much closer to my siblings while working on the book. Previously, we shared the same sad lack of communication, but while I wrote the book, I called more often to discuss the intimate workings of our lives. The naughty drawing scene you're pointing out is one of my brother's favorites, because he shared similar chastisements. I was so self-centered and insecure that I thought I was the only one in the family that had these experiences, but both my brother and my sister had these moments where they were taken into the bedroom; the door was locked and it was all dark, and my parents were flanking them on both sides and confronting them on some issue. I remember my brother saying he used a swear word at school, or something, and he had the same sort of punishment.

This past summer I was hanging out with my family -- we were with cousins, too, so it was a more free-flowing reunion atmosphere. My cousin had this amazing story of how when he was a kid he burned down 40 acres of forest. He started a brush fire, and because he didn't know what to do with the fire, he just ran away. Later that night on the news, he learned that 40 acres of forest were destroyed. Nobody ever found out, and he never confessed. Amazing. So the whole group of us got going telling stories of terrible things we did as children. It's confession time. Another cousin had a really great story about how he borrowed his big brother's car, and just destroyed it, and tried to hide it from him and pretend he didn't borrow it. He took it through the woods and was mudbogging with this prize car. My sister and brother had great stories, too. My sister's story was "How I accidently killed my brother's gerbil" when we were little kids. It had gotten out of the cage, and she was trying to catch it, and she smushed it. So she put this little smushed gerbil back in the cage, and ran downstairs crying, saying that one of the gerbils had killed the other one. She not only killed my brother's pet, but she lied about it. What a great story!

Everybody's telling these stories, and they're like, "Craig, what'd you do that was really bad?" I was really disappointed -- maybe I've deluded myself, but I really couldn't think of anything that bad. This scene in Blankets [with the nude drawing] depicts one of my guiltiest moments, but in fact, looking back I hadn't done anything wrong. Drawing a naked girl seems normal and healthy for a young boy to do. But then the next day, I recalled the worst thing I ever did as kid. When I was in my first year of high school, where I made that transition from trying to fit in, to kind of breaking off from that...

HATFIELD: What you called your "boring" year?

THOMPSON: Yeah. There was this retarded guy that went to my high school, a guy that I grew up with. He was like a community figure, several years older than everyone else, and he'd been in special education classes from first grade upwards. He wasn't the "sweet" and "cuddly" kind of developmentally disabled person that you wanted to take care of, but one of those loud, swearing, angry types. He would get really pissed off at people, and start screaming and swearing in the halls, and we found it kind of funny. I'm so ashamed that I found that funny. If he was the good-natured, sweet guy that got picked on, I'd have felt horrible for him, but because he was always enraged like this, we thought that was funny.

A friend of mine and myself -- we were immature and kind of mean-spirited kids that were picked on ourselves, so we were continuing on with that energy -- we would hang out and talk with him, and we secretly thought it was very funny to have conversations with him, because he would start getting angry -- not at us, but at other people. He had a condition where he had to wear a scarf and a hat and mittens, even in the middle of summer, and one day my friend grabbed his mitten as we were sitting there talking and we just took off running, with him chasing after us, screaming at the top of his lungs. We ran in the bathroom and locked ourselves in, as the retarded guy wailed on the door, and it was just this crazy, loud, chaotic moment.

A teacher came into the bathroom and broke it up, and then he sat down with my friend and I, and said, "This guy gets picked on by a lot of people, and he's had a really hard life. Admittedly, this guy is easily angered, and it's kind of amusing, and I would sort of expect this from some other student, but you two... I had more respect for you two, and I'm just really ashamed that you would do something like this." We felt the same, pure shame. That is the worst thing I've ever done in my youth.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #268.]

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