E book cowl of Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson (all photos courtesy Pantheon Graphic Library, an imprint of Penguin Random Home)
Twenty years in the past, Craig Thompson captivated readers with Blankets (2003) — a gripping and fluidly drawn romance set amid the Christian fundamentalism, poverty, and abuse of his childhood. Now, he’s out with a thick new ebook known as Ginseng Roots that digs into territory that Blankets neglected: a decade of “picking rocks” on ginseng farms in Marathon, Wisconsin.
That Midwestern soil is, improbably, deeply tied to Asia. On a trip in China, Thompson, caught in a middle-aged profession rut, injured his drawing hand and was given ginseng as drugs. The basis — drawn with large googly eyes — implores him to return dwelling to Marathon and its ginseng farms. Certainly one of Thompson’s presents — and a power of the comedian format, which seamlessly blends inside and exterior worlds — is exhibiting us how a weird episode like this may be true.
Initially, Thompson conceived of ginseng because the ebook’s primary character, the way in which timber are in Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2019). His writer steered him towards folks, however there’s nonetheless a way that the guts of the challenge is a mystical, obsessive encounter with the basis itself. It seems that Marathon is a world middle for the ginseng business, with a far older historical past than one may think: The Iroquois, whose ancestors got here from Asia millennia in the past, generally smoked it. They known as it garent oguen, which implies “resembles man.”
Web page from Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson
The reporting in Ginseng Roots is nuanced — Thompson has cited Joe Sacco (creator of Palestine, and the usual setter for graphic journalism) as an affect — and Thompson’s sure-handed strains world-build round voices like Chua Vang, son of humble Hmong ginseng farmers, and Paul Hsu, a Wisconsin ginseng mogul with a surreal connection to Trump.
Graphically, Ginseng Roots is an epic accomplishment. Thompson thinks of your entire web page — not simply the panel — as his unit, making a layered, rhizomatic studying expertise. Whereas deeply reported, like Sacco’s work, this ebook feels much less like hardcore journalism and extra like an immersion within the private, chaotic order of artwork.
Thompson’s beautiful brushwork is a giant a part of that. It’s a boisterous hybrid of types: Mad Journal gonzo maximalism meets classical Japanese gesture. The ebook will get unbelievable mileage from its restricted red-and-black palette, mixing analog inking with digital mark-making for delightfully richly textured pages.
Web page from Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson
However Ginseng Roots isn’t a sugary pleasure. You possibly can sit down and skim Blankets in a single go, however this ebook is just too splendidly compressed for that, with the crafted information-density of a farmer’s almanac, demanding gradual trying. All that is to say that Ginseng Roots is what it must be: a medicinal herb you steep in.
And it’s the correct drugs for the second. It explores the paradoxes which have burst into the open: Trump’s supporters are sometimes caricatured as irrational conspiracy theorists, however almost 80% of farm-dependent counties voted for him — sensible individuals who spend harsh winters welding their damaged ploughs for the subsequent planting season. That is the type of disconnect Thompson is so effectively positioned to humanize. However he additionally complicates it.
When Trump’s tariffs had been introduced, I believed instantly of Thompson’s ginseng farmers. Positive sufficient, there was Will Hsu on PBS Wisconsin, calling tariffs “reliving a nightmare.” This heartland business — reliant on immigrant labor — can be solely depending on exporting to China. Ginseng Roots is a narrative concerning the tendril-like international interconnections that kind actuality, regardless of how the MAGA regime spins it.
Hsu’s existential predicament echoes a second in Ginseng Roots when Thompson, working the fields with the Vangs, admits that his new ebook “might be another failure and ruin me financially.” Artwork so typically feels out of step with capitalism — artistic expression would possibly generally overlap with cash, however on the finish of the day, it constitutes its personal worth system.
“Farmers know that feeling!” Vang replies.
Web page from Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson and revealed by Pantheon Graphic Library, an imprint of Penguin Random Home, is offered for buy on-line and in bookstores.
