{"id":17497,"date":"2025-04-30T14:07:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T18:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17497"},"modified":"2025-04-30T16:04:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T20:04:16","slug":"episode-636-craig-thompson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-636-craig-thompson","title":{"rendered":"Episode 636 – Craig Thompson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 636:
\nCraig Thompson<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_636_-_Craig_Thompson.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“I’m not that interested in what I can just see or know; I’m much more obsessed with the mysterious and the things that I don’t know how to communicate or understand.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Artist Craig Thompson<\/a> joins the show at long last to celebrate his new book, GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir<\/a> (Pantheon). We talk about how he spent 10 summers of his childhood helping farm ginseng, how that herb connects rural Wisconsin with China and South Korea, how he balanced history, journalism, economics, and memoir in the pages of his book, and why he chose to make Ginseng Roots<\/em> as a serial comic rather than a standalone book and how that affected his creative process. We get into how the book serves as a sort of midlife revision of his breakthrough book, Blankets<\/a>, how the last chapter of the book had to happen in near-real-time, how a degenerative condition in his hands became a unifying theme to the book while almost derailing it, how he found the design language of the book and obsessed over a two-color process (to amazing results), and whether this is his swansong for comics (spoiler: it’s not!). We also discuss what home means to him, 8 months into being on the road, what it was like discovering that he had a global audience, his ongoing relationship with his evangelical Christian upbringing, his editor’s concerns that Ginseng Roots<\/em> could open him up to accusations of cultural insensitivity (and how he got over it), all while geeking out over our fave cartoonists from the ’90s indy period (go, Dylan Horrocks<\/a>!), and more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read GINSENG ROOTS<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“There were moments in the flow of the book where I didn’t know wha the next issue would be, so it took time to figure it out.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n