Bible Doodles, Nickelodeon, and Working Toward Blankets

HATFIELD: Bible Doodles [published in 2000] is a very revealing book for people who are navigating their way through your work. The Old Testament adaptations, the verses from Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes -- these were all done in short order, in late August of 1999, around the time of Chunky Rice. Had Chunky been published by then?

THOMPSON: Yeah, Chunky Rice came out in, like, July?

HATFIELD: Summer 1999. So you'd been done with Chunky for some time.

THOMPSON: Yeah. At this point I was already writing Blankets, and I was certainly experimenting with some drawing styles and ideas that would influence the look of Blankets.

HATFIELD: At times the drawing style in Bible Doodles cleaves to that of Chunky -- much slicker. [Pointing to the book] This "Isaiah" strip, with all these glossy waves, could even be an image from Chunky. On the other hand, within a matter of days, in this "Ecclesiastes" strip for instance, there's a strong contrast. This strip was a gift to a couple?

THOMPSON: Yeah, all those were gifts.

HATFIELD: So, this is all conscious stylistic experimentation, in the run-up to Blankets? But long before you started doing the finished art for Blankets?

THOMPSON: There are different styles I operate in. "Style" seems like a sort of contrived notion, but it's important to note that while working on Blankets, that whole time, my living was owed to [comics editor] Chris Duffy at Nickelodeon magazine: I was paying the bills churning out pages and pages of these children's comics for the magazine, done in my slick Chunky Rice drawing style. So when Blankets came out, it was a real surprise to Chris, because he knew me fairly intimately on a creative level. He knew my output, and he was used to this slick, goofy, cartoony Craig. Yet all along I was working on Blankets. Two different modes.

HATFIELD: When you made these Old Testament strips, you knew that Blankets...

THOMPSON: ...would have a similar style.

HATFIELD: ...that Blankets was the next thing, the big, consuming thing that was coming?

THOMPSON: For me? Yeah, I had already begun writing it.

HATFIELD: It's interesting that, in terms of technique, the final "Footnotes" chapter of Blankets harks back to the Bible Doodles, in that there are these slick-line, Chunky-like, overstated cartoon pictures of happy pigs putting their house together. Eventually it's all going to be huffed and puffed and blown down by the Big Bad Wolf of Doubt, of crumbling faith. When your faith does come crumbling down, the slick line comes into conflict with a more organic line and dry brush technique. These images of happy animals are so slick as to be almost banal, whereas the images on top of them more closely resemble other passages in Blankets. Interesting. Now, there were two years of work between Bible Doodles and these passages in Blankets?

THOMPSON: I was still operating in that style, though, in all my Nickelodeon strips...

HATFIELD: The Chunky style only shows up occasionally in Blankets. For example, when you show yourself contemplating a career as a Christian cartoonist, the images are cute, rounded, functional, simple...

THOMPSON: So I guess in some ways I think of [that style] as being insincere, or as being contrived.

HATFIELD: You wouldn't want to say something so bad about all your Nickelodeon work now, would you?

THOMPSON: No, but there's a separation there between something that's personal and artistic, versus something that's supposed to be entertaining.

HATFIELD: Now, what I recall from the Nickelodeon work is that some of it is really antic. Some of the layouts are more puzzle-like, or like interactive games -- maze-like pages with a "Chutes & Ladders" feel, full of movement.

THOMPSON: I was trying to entertain kids, for one thing. Remembering what I enjoyed as a kid -- getting lost in this insane amount of detail -- that was part of the constraint of having just the [single] page. With Blankets I had no limits to the amount of space I would fill. It was as many pages as I needed to communicate the story. With Nickelodeon it was always a page, so I would always end up going off on some formalistic route: "What can I do with this very limited space to make it more interesting, to manipulate this limited space?"

Blankets gets kind of wispy sometimes in terms of the amount of information that's on the page. [The pages] are designed for you to move through quickly in the same way that manga is. When I was a kid I was really into manga, and I think that's influenced some of the ways I draw comics. Again, I find a lot of comics, most comics, really claustrophobic, and I have trouble reading them, and [finding] a proper place to rest my eye or move my eye on the page.

HATFIELD: Of course it's difficult, as you well know, to produce a work as long as Blankets, one that allows you to create an easier reading rhythm. The manga style is a tough basis for comparison, because the pacing of manga results from a routinized form of studio production, as well as weekly serialization; it's hard to do that kind of pacing in American comics without the same weekly serials or the same kinds of support or the same studio and apprenticeship situations they have in Japan. It's really hard to sustain that pacing in American comics. And, with a work like Blankets, it would have been very difficult to control reading rhythm if the work had been parceled out through serialization -- which you avoided completely.

THOMPSON: There are some good cartoonist friends of mine that tried to convince me to [serialize Blankets]. One was Mike Allred and one was Dave Cooper, both great cartoonists and friends and inspirations. They were trying to convince me to serialize, like, "You could make a living while you're working on the book, you know. Right now you're not making a penny on the book. Put it out there in chunks. You'll satiate your fanbase, so they'll have something. You're just off the scene right now; [give them] something to nibble on, and you'll make some sort of living off of the work itself so it can be published later."

I was really resistant to the idea right from the start. This book isn't gonna work if it's read in small chunks, even if it's a sixty-page chunk. Because of this sort of breathable pace, I don't know if there's a lot of meat in just a 60-page chunk. It's a holistic experience.

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

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