Eisner winner Craig Thompson’s latest graphic novel, Ginseng Roots—an exploration of ginseng farming in rural Wisconsin—has autobiographical elements and a global scope. But it’s a very different work than his previous books, including Blankets (2003), Carnet de Voyage (2004) and his 2011 historical graphic novel Habibi. This time around, Thompson drew inspiration from the work of Joe Sacco for a wide-ranging look at ginseng, both in the region where Thompson grew up and through landscapes an ocean away.
Ginseng Roots also emerged out of a challenging personal time for Thompson. He addresses chronic health issues within the narrative—and he relocated numerous times while working on the book. “This book started in Fall of 2016,” he told PW. “Ever since then, I have not had a stable living environment or location.” Thompson spoke with PW about his ambitious book and the crises that fueled its creation.
Ginseng Roots is an investigation of what determination looks like through difficulty. How did these difficulties end up dovetailing for you in a way that made you realize that the struggle was the project?
The book was born out of a certain midlife crisis, both in terms of my age, but more so where I was at in my graphic novel career, having done this for 25 years, and going through a real profound questioning and doubt if this was the career I was going to continue with for the second half of my life. A lot of people went through that process with the pandemic and reevaluating their work. For me, it was helpful to go back to my first job, which I started when I was 10 years old, working in ginseng agriculture. What are the odds that this tiny rural town where I grew up in Wisconsin was the biggest producer of this Chinese medicinal herb, at least the American variety, in the world?
I was also going through big life upheavals, a big breakup and some friends dying and family going downhill a bit. I felt like I had to go back to the place where I grew up, which I'd spent my whole lifetime running from. It was the right time in my life to go back to where I grew up and reconcile some of those demons, to get my hands dirty, back in the old soil, and deal with some of that stuff at the midlife point.
Ginseng Roots feels like a return to where it started for you, and the territory of Blankets, which was a mildly fictionalized memoir. But this does something very different: it’s not a pure work of memoir but instead is a work of agricultural history and family history and journalism and therapy.
Blankets was a book that was gathered from my own memories and reimagined dialog. This is far closer to a documentary. I was taking my inspiration from Joe Sacco in his comics journalism. All of the dialogue in the book is recorded, transcribed, and then vetted with the interviewees for their edits and approval. It's more collaborative in that sense. Starting with my family; my parents didn't even know I was working on Blankets when I created it 20-something years ago, whereas with this, they were involved in the process, for better and for worse, to give their feedback. One of the first things I learned in the first month of doing interviews is that within my family of five people, we all had different recollections of the same memories.
How did you come to realize that the way the book needed to be written was about the writing of the book itself?
Part of that was that the book was serialized over 12 issues, 32 pages apiece. I bristle when people refer to the new graphic novel as a collection of the series, because they are quite different, and there was a lot added to the book to make it this final graphic novel. I've always drawn a complete rough draft of the book before I started drawing final art, and in the case of this project, I only focused on one chapter at a time. I was trying to make each issue self-contained and tearing off bite-sized chunks for myself. I was not confident enough, I suppose, to just isolate myself for a decade to work on the graphic novel. I wanted to have smaller increments out there that were malleable.
Also, I wanted the research to develop as I was producing the issues. I hoped and expected fact checkers to show up as I was releasing these very research-driven chapters but also hoped that new interviewees would rise to the surface. I don't know if that exactly happened, but my life certainly changed a lot. The lives of the people I was interviewing changed a lot, and that influenced the direction of the final project. There were some pretty huge overhauls in the book from the series. I ended up including the pandemic, which I originally was not going to put in the book. Two funerals happened related to people I interviewed for the book. In fact, four people that I interviewed died during the course of this project.
And then I ended up including my health crisis with my drawing hand, which was something I was dealing with since the inception of the project. I only decided to reveal it and include it once I revised the series for the graphic novel. My initial reluctance around it was that if I included my own health crisis, it might have a kind of whiny ‘woe is me’ energy that I'm wary of in memoirs. Then I realized it was very relatable and universal, because everybody's experienced some health crisis of their own. It's a very easy emotional entry point for the reader. Even if you're perfectly healthy, we have all been living through a pandemic together, and that's affected all our lives.
What did the additions to Ginseng Roots from the single issues to the collected edition involve?
The comic book series has the same first page and it has the same last page. And there were barely any pages removed from this series. I added 60 or 70 new pages of material, but that involved tweaking scenes in every chapter, starting with the first chapter. The ending of the first chapter of the series is in Los Angeles, and the ending of the first chapter of the book is in China, in Yangshuo. When I sat down and read all 12 issues once I finished the serialization, I thought they all worked on their own as standalone chapters. It was just like there was a glue that was missing. The narrative arc wasn't there. I guess I hadn't planned it out, and once I decided to expose my whole experiences with my hand health crisis, that was really the thread that was needed to sew it all together.
Perseverance in the face of doubt seems to be a very consistent theme in your work.
Because I grew up in this very fundamentalist household that very much censored the media and the arts, I think that's part of where my lack of self-confidence and imposter syndrome comes from as an artist. I do think most artists have this, but mine is really coming from religious instruction. I grew up in a family that censored and devalued the arts in literature and education. So, I think that's at the core of my doubts in what I do, and if this is a worthwhile way to spend my time.
How did the journalistic elements of Ginseng Roots prove a challenge to you personally, both as a reporter and as an artist having to illustrate dialogue you didn't write.
I was taking inspiration from Joe Sacco’s comics journalism. I always wanted to work in that sort of format, and again, didn't quite have the confidence. Joe Sacco is someone who studied journalism, and he goes and gets embedded with troops in war zones. I don't have any of those specific skills and training. So, I lucked out with ginseng, because it was this pretty broad global topic that I did have an immediate personal entry point with. It was a pleasure to do the interviews. I was so grateful for this opportunity to get out of the isolation of my drawing studio.
I think making comics will warp your mind, it's really time consuming. Cartoonists are already introverts, and it can be aggravated by just hiding in your drawing studio for years. So getting outside in fields and meeting people from all walks of life, everything from farmers—very working class, salt of the earth, physical labor-type people—along with scientists and distributors, the diversity of people I was able to interact with was really refreshing—to be able to exercise that more extroverted part of my personality. I get so sick of being in this mind; it can be toxic to me, so I hadn't thought about it before. But even the way ginseng is grown in dense cultivation, that makes it much more susceptible to disease, and maybe the same is true of the creative mind.
You write in Ginseng Roots about your complicated feelings about writing about another culture after your prior experiences. Did you feel reassured for taking that risk again?
My first research trip to China was one month after I completed Habibi in April 2011, but after doing a couple of weeks of research, I did feel really discouraged at the time. I didn’t know if I had the energy and expertise to delve into another research-driven book about another culture at this time. It was five years before I came back to the ideas for Ginseng Roots And when I did come back to the idea, I started on a micro level of talking first to my family and then talking to my first employers when I was a kid, these small-time farmers who had since retired from the industry, before I worked my way back up to the broader world.
It was a book tour in South Korea that prompted my return to Asia to rekindle the ginseng research. And by the time I got to Korea, that was really the emotional crescendo of the project. I was traveling with my brother. I was visiting the real epicenter of ginseng cultivation in the world, both Geumsan, South Korea, and the Jilin province of China. But I experienced the greatest degree of enthusiasm for this book there, because when I was working for a couple of years in the U.S. on a book about ginseng, nobody knew what I was talking about. When I would try to describe it to them, it was very abstract to them, but it made perfect sense to people in China and Korea why there would be a graphic novel about such a subject. They have such a reverence for the herb itself and its place in Chinese medicine, but also a reverence for my home state of Wisconsin. It has an identity there on the other side of the world, which was encouraging and exciting for me to realize.
