Ginseng Roots
Craig Thompson
Pantheon Books
$35

With lush brush strokes and delicate line work Craig Thompson returned in the spring of 2025 to the memoire genre of his multiple award winning Blankets in a new work titled Ginseng Roots. The most recent graphic novel is also a return home to his family and the people of his hometown Marathon, Wisconsin. While Blankets from 2003 is Thompson’s coming of age story in a Christian fundamentalist home Ginseng Roots is a reflection of a different aspect of Thompson’s formative youth.

Thanks to Google maps zooming down on and looking at street views of Marathon is easy. By first impression Marathon appears as non descript as any small Midwestern town I’ve encountered during my decades spent in a swath of Illinois stretching from the Mississippi to near the Indiana border. Nestled by farm fields, it’s the type of a town where adults heap praise on it for it being the quintessential good place to raise your kids because nothing terrible ever happens. A couple gas stations, a McDonald’s and Subway are conveniently near highway 29 that will take you to the big city of Wausau to the east. Every Friday night the family diner offers the traditional Midwestern “fish fry” special.

Those farms though? That’s where Marathon’s distinction lies. Ginseng is planted in some of those fields rich with red granite and that makes the town the ginseng capitol of the United States and Marathon grown ginseng is highly prized in China and Korea. Ginseng is a labor intensive crop and with few to no other job prospects in the small town many folks turned to working in the fields. Money was tight for the Thompson family with just enough income for the bare necessities. At the same time a lonely fourth grade Craig had just discovered the magic of reading comics his mother decided to start working for a farmer. Unable to pay for a babysitter she enlisted her children as workers.

The prospect of reading more comics was enough incentive for Craig and brother Phil to accompany their mother weeding the fields that summer earning the grand sum of a dollar an hour. So it went year in and year out until Craig left home for better prospects that eventually would lead him to creative endeavors. Little could Thompson foresee a time during his forties in which things would conspire against him and put his life as an artist and a storyteller into jeopardy.

Just shy of 450 pages, Ginseng Roots is more than Thompson’s reflection of growing up in a working class family and how those experiences shaped his life. It is a collection of stories, history, and folklore woven into a compelling narrative. Some stories are personal like that of Craig’s once stern parents quietly softening over time just as the Thompson kids have come to their own emotional understanding of their parents.

It’s a portrait of a once thriving town with its farmers and non farmers alike trying to adapt to changes beyond their control. The humble Abraham Vang saved many fellow Hmong villagers from death during the Vietnam war before coming to the US and eventually settling in Marathon to make a home for his family and shepherd his fellow Hmong immigrants. Thompson offers historical perspectives on the ways American colonists profited via nascent trading with China at the expense of Indigenous People and how immigrant Chinese were blatantly discriminated against by society and government. By no means is Ginseng Roots an exhaustive source the rich folklore of the plant and its many uses. Nonetheless Thompson offers an engaging and informative primer if you will inspired in part by trips to China, Korea, and Taiwan. Thompson, who typically limits himself to black and gray tones for his interior art, made quite liberal use of various shades of red in tribute to the bright red berries of ginseng ready for harvesting.

Thompson first serialized Ginseng Roots in comics format through Minneapolis publisher Uncivilized Books before taking the story to Pantheon. Containing seventy pages of new material including notes, this hardcover edition benefits from the same high quality treatment Pantheon gives to all its hardcover books. In particular is the machine sewn binding which makes books durable for decades. The red and yellow and black and white endpapers featuring a mass of tangled ginger roots a la Where’s Waldo are a nice touch.

The end result of Thompson’s efforts in Ginseng Roots is a long and complex story. Some sections read quickly while others should be lingered over uninterrupted perhaps with your favorite drink at hand. Even then, this is the sort of story which will reward additional readings.Even then, this is the sort of story which will reward additional readings. Anders Nilsen’s Tongue’s is an example of such a story. Look for copies at your local comic shop or your localindy bookstore.

Other bookshops include:
Barnes & Noble
BAM!
Bookshop
Powell’s

If all else fails or if you prefer, copies may be purchased from Amazon.