Craig Thompson Interview: On Comics and Ginseng Roots

Craig Thompson is a cartoonist and the author of the award-winning books Blankets; Good-bye, Chunky Rice; and Habibi. He was born in Michigan in 1975, and grew up in a rural farming community in central Wisconsin. His graphic novel Blankets won numerous industry awards and has been published in nearly twenty languages. Thompson lives in Portland, Oregon. In this interview, Craig Thomspon discusses his new book, Ginseng Roots, published by Pantheon. Publication release date is April 29, 2025 and it is available for pre-order.

Ginseng Roots explores class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300-year-long trade relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond between two brothers.

From ages 10 to 20, Craig Thompson (the author of Blankets) and his little brother Phil, toiled in Wisconsin farms. Weeding and harvesting ginseng—an exotic medicinal herb that fetched huge profits in China—and funded Craig’s youthful obsession with comic books. Comics in turn, allowed him to escape his rural, working class trappings.

This new book is the result of Thompson having worked in serial form, creating a bimonthly comic book series, the first time he’s done this in his career. Ginseng Roots is part memoir, part travelogue, part essay and all comic book. In this conversation, we chat about the book, and life as a cartoonist, from as many angles as possible.

Henry Chamberlain: Craig, would you kick things off with an elevator pitch for folks who are new to Ginseng Roots?

Craig Thompson: Sure. This is my new book. It is half memoir and it is half documentary. When I was a little kid, starting when I was 10 years-old, during my summer vacations, I would get up at the crack of dawn, and load up in the car with my little brother and mother. We’re driving on gravel roads and muddy fields, in the middle of nowhere, in rural Wisconsin, to giant ginseng gardens. Ginseng is a medicinal herb prized in Chinese medicine. We worked eight hour days and forty hour weeks, throughout the summer, weeding this delicate medicinal plant.

It was the first job of my life. It spanned from age 10 to 20. When I started, I was being paid one dollar an hour, which translated to one comic book an hour. So, it was ginseng that first fueled my obsession with comic books and kind of led me to where I am today.

This book is about myself and my childhood but also about that herb and all those labyrinthian tangles that it weaves around the world.

Considering your other long-form work, what can you tell us about how you built up your new book?

So, this is the first project that I serialized in comic book form. A 32-page, twelve issue series through Uncivilized Books, based out of Minneapolis, the amazing cartoonist Tom Kacyniski’s publishing house. At this point in my career, this was the first time that I’d worked in the comic book format unless you count mini-comics and zines. That was my introduction to everything: going to Kinko’s and photocopying and hand-stapling my own zines. So, I sort of had missed out on the whole ’90s indie comics thing. I serialized the book first as twelve issues. But the book and the series are different beasts because, once I finished the series, it was missing some key components, some glue to hold it together, to help me transform it into a book. It went through an overhaul: I added some 70 new pages. I moved the order of things around a bit.

The final Pantheon edition, this new book, is twelve chapters. As you say, there are things you have refined or expanded on.

Yes, for example, the series has twelve issues and the book has twelve chapters but the ninth chapter in the new book does not exist in the series. That one focuses a lot of my personal health crisis–it was part of the glue that was needed to hold the whole book together: to be vulnerable about my own health and how ginseng related to that too.

How did it feel returning to the subject of childhood and growing up, which you covered so beautifully in Blankets–what did it feel like to go back to that in Ginseng Roots?

Quite different. Because of my age. When I started Blankets, I was 23 years-old. I worked on that book from ages 23 to 27. I was only about five years away from the events that took place in the book. So, it was pretty raw and I was still a kid. I was still living those experiences and trauma.

Now, I’m turning 50 and I’m the age my parents were when Blankets was published. So, it’s definitely a mid-life sort of perspective that I have now. The dynamic with my parents has shifted. They are in a much more vulnerable position than they were back then. It’s now a more nuanced and empathetic view that I have of my parents. It’s a whole different view of my childhood. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and I hated growing up there and always wanted to get as far away from there as possible from this suffocating small town, this rural farming community. That led me to the West Coast and Portland, one of the most liberal cities in America, with its artistic circles.

Ginseng Roots was an opportunity to go back to where I grew up and to reconcile a lot of things. And to feel differently about that place that I grew up in discomfort as a child.

I picked up on that. You are more tolerant about certain things. There are layers of wisdom as we get older. As we go through the book, I’m on a page where you daydream about what it might be like to live the life of a cartoonist. Maybe, someday, you too can be Bob Hope or Jack Lemmon, in silk pajamas at the cartoonist drafting table.

Yeah, growing up working class, you know. My dad was a plumber. And everyone around me were either farmers, truck drivers, carpenters or electricians. I didn’t know adults who had university educations. It wasn’t my class. My first job was outdoors, working an agriculture job, dealing with all the elements of the outdoors and all the discomforts. Besides the fact that I loved comics, working as a cartoonist sure did seem like a very cushy lifestyle, hiding from all the physical elements of weather and get to make-believe and draw.

Younger people can totally relate to wishing for their lives to just get on with it. Older people can relate to looking back at the good things. Maybe someone learned how to fish or paddle a canoe because of a parent.

Yeah, now I miss being outside. Maybe it seemed like a bad thing as a kid but, after twenty-five years creating graphic novels, it sounds nice to get out of the house a bit more often. And this book brought me out of the house. It wasn’t something just created from my imagination. It was documentary work so I had to get out in the field. And interview people. I interviewed nearly 80 people for the project. Generally, any dialogue in a word balloon is from some recorded conversation I had with someone I interviewed.

You do this so smoothly. You just do it. In the spirit of the best comics journalism, like Joe Sacco.

My biggest inspiration of all is Joe Sacco. Certainly for this project since I wanted to deliberately work in comics journalism. Also, thinking more broadly. Joe is a friend of mine, full disclosure. You know, he’s a mentor, a great role model or artists. I always wanted to do comics journalism like he does but I don’t have his background, or his intellect. I don’t know if I quite have that sense of adventure that Joe has, going to war zones and whatnot and being embedded in places of conflict.

But then with my book, I had this very organic subject matter that was kind of unique to me and so I had my entry point. I had wanted to write a book about plants. That’s sort of my tagline. I was really influenced by Michael Pollan, the food and plant writer. He’s known for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind. The book that really influenced me is The Botany of Desire, and it’s about four plants that shaped human civilization as much as we manipulated them as a species. After that, I really wanted to do a book about plants. Again, I’m not a botanist, I don’t have that background like Michael Pollan. And so I just meditated on what I knew and ginseng surfaced right away. I started researching and I knew there was a lot to work with.

One thing I wanted to emphasize to readers of my review of your book is what prose novels and graphic novels have in common. Each begins as something small and then mushrooms into something much bigger as you add to it. I’ve done my fair share of graphic narratives and I know that once you have a compelling subject, you find yourself having to read this or that book. It just keeps growing.

Sometimes I’d read an entire book just to inform one panel. There are certain chapters that are a little more dense; and some areas that I didn’t know at all. I’d have to get through a pile of books just to write that one 32-page chapter.

This is a monumental book, on the same scale with Blankets and Habibi. Can you share with something about the freedom that you have when you have such a big canvas to work on?

I guess I’ve always tended towards this longer format. Blankets was 580 pages, at a time when that was pretty novel, so to speak. I like books that are fully immersive, you just kind of get lost in them, get disoriented, have this opportunity to sort of wander labrynthian routes and work you way back to the main narrative. In the case of this book, I serialized it first. The twelve issues was arbitrary, it just seemed like the right amount for the series. I liked the numerology. I work from an outline and then I focused on one issue at a time. I’d write, pencil, ink it and color it–and publish it–before really digging into the next section. Each issue was self-contained when I was putting it out as a series. The goal was to have each issue stand alone along with having the momentum to have the reader want to seek out the next issue but not like cliffhangers.

I was thinking about how to get a handle on the book and I thought we could focus on one of the chapters, “Make America Ginseng Great Again.” It’s a very timely chapter. I enjoyed viewing a talk given by Will Hsu, of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises, one of the leading growers of ginseng in Wisconsin who you profile in your book. This gives us an opportunity to cover ginseng from many angles.

Yeah, this is Chapter 5 in the book and Issue 9 in the series and it focused on the Hsu family. Paul is the father and Will is the son who took over the family business. Paul Hsu emigrated from Taiwan with a degree in Social Work but ended up becoming a ginseng farmer, and growing the business into a mega-growing operation, partly because they diversified, developing all these other products. They also have strong family connections in Taiwan that provided advantages in trade routes and all kinds of leverage and knowledge that the typical white ginseng business would not have.

“Make America Ginseng Great Again” was a tagline that Will Hsu used in 2018. The Hsu family has a lot of political ties. They’ve had ties to the Bush administration, and tangential ties to the Trump administration and local government. They’re a big business and big business ends up tangled with politics. When I traveled in Asia, I was in China, South Korea and Taiwan. In Taiwan, I met with my publisher’s foreign rights agent, Joann Yang, and she talked about what she’d heard about Wisconsin ginseng, and that was connected to the Taiwanese version of Trump, Terry Gou, who has ties with President Trump and they’re both getting involved with Wisconsin ginseng.

It’s a bit of a convoluted story. So, people are now hearing more about Pres. Trump trying to get more industry and factories in the U.S. Well, he made a deal with Terry Gou, who is the CEO of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. They employ more people than anyone in China. That’s where iPhones come from, and Xboxes and most of the electronics and they wanted to start a company in Wisconsin and they were able to score the biggest state subsidies in U.S. history, something like 4 billion dollars. They were going to bring all these jobs to the area and none of that quite materialized. They have only about a tenth of the staff they have promised. Back to the ginseng, Gou teamed up with the Hsu family to develop a high-end version of ginseng products. So, a lot of the business and science behind all of this is covered in this chapter. A lot of the future of ginseng focuses on breaking down the compounds of ginseng, and synthesizing it for pharmaceuticals.

What can you tell us about misconceptions that the general public has about ginseng?

There’s a lot. Either people have never heard of it or don’t know what it is. Often, people will call it, “ginger roots,” since they’re familiar with ginger, which is also a medicinal root. People will also associate it with these power energy drinks that you might get at a gas station. Those are derived from Asian ginseng which is a stimulant, like caffeine. American ginseng has the opposite properties. It is more of a cooling adaptogenic herb which is better for long-term use for overall health. It’s the American ginseng that is more prized in Asia.

You begin your book talking about your love for comics. Could you share with us a bit more about what it is that attracts you to the comics medium?

I’m like a lot of people, more of a visual learner, visually oriented. Unlike other content, like film, video games, other digital content, it just washes over you, bombards you, is moving over you. Comics is much more intimate, something a reader can take in at their own pace. I love prose but it has a sort of arms-length technology of being typeset. So, you’re looking at a font that has been typed. Whereas with comics, you’re actually seeing the handwriting of the author. There’s a great intimacy in that. You’re seeing the handwriting in the lettering and in the drawing itself. I’ve always been into the calligraphy of cartooning. And the sort of strange time travel of comics: you can exist in different times on the same page. I don’t know of any other medium that can do that so effortlessly. It takes skills for us as readers of comics. It’s also something we’re sort of indoctrinated with and so we know how to read them. Once you do, there’s a lot of potential.

It becomes intoxicating!

Yes! I love that!

It’s happening instantaneously and simultaneously. You look in every direction and something is happening.

I just got back from several months of touring in Europe. The A.I. question always comes up. If I feel threatened by A.I., my general response to that is: while I think all jobs are threatened and even human life could be threatened, I don’t think that comics is specifically threatened. I think because A.I. can do a lot of things “better” than humans, the things that people will value more in the arts is the humanity, the fragility, the flaws, the vulnerability. That’s why I like paper and ink. Because it can transmit those things. I don’t want to draw digitally because of the perfection and the cleanness of the line. I want to see the humanity in the line. I think that’s going to become more common. As A.I. takes over all of illustration and the images we see, we’re going to be seeking out images feel more human in their flaws.

I don’t see A.I. replacing you or Kate Beaton or any other cartoonist. For one thing, comics is too idiosyncratic. Where I see A.I. having clearly taken over is hyper-realistic illustration. Basically, A.I. is regurgitating human content–spewing out generic results.

A.I. will just make it easier to get generic but the more personal content will require humans.

Let’s talk about hand-lettering. You still do all your own hand-drawn lettering, right?

Yes. It’s all hand-drawn.

I hesitated to ask since I felt I knew that. It’s something that always comes up, the pros and cons of hand-drawn and using a font. If you’re an auteur cartoonist, you do everything, including the lettering–and it’s hand-drawn. There’s no getting around the fact that hand-drawn lettering is part of the art.

Yeah, I like it being embedded in the art. It might make it more difficult to work on the foreign editions. But, for those, we have a font. There’s a digital font created from my hand-lettering for the foreign editions. I want the lettering to be on the page. I start with the word balloons first to see how many words I can fit. I want the balloons to be kind of minimal, not too dense and wordy. I use a sort of felt tip pen that’s archival, a Micron, which is loose enough to keep the character of my handwriting. It’s not as stiff as using a more traditional tool to slowly letter. I want to retain the looseness of my hand-lettering.

As I get older, I keep looking at other options. I prefer using a Speedball. It does have that resistance but, if you like it, then you can’t help but want to use it. And, if you prefer a Micron, then you use that. One person once told me that it’s no use overthinking it. And I’ve concluded that you’re best served by using what keeps you wanting to draw, what keeps you productive.

That’s great advice. I agree with that for sure. Although, I do admire you for using the more traditional Speedball style. I was never patient enough. And, I guess if it takes a bit longer, it’s giving you more time to think about how the words fit in the balloon and other decisions on the page so there’s a benefit to slowing things down.

It’s going to be a tough nut to crack. I tell folks that it’s going to be time-consuming not matter what you do. It’s going to take time whether it’s all analog or digital so pick whatever method works best for you.

Yeah. Agreed. That’s solid advice.

I have a high concept question for you. Looking at the issues that you cover in your new book, what do you think it will take for better economic outcomes for folks in rural areas?

Wow, that’s a great and broad question. In my hometown, population 1,200 people, this town that I’d found suffocating as a child, now I have a nostalgia for it because it was all these home-grown businesses. The grocery store, the diners, the general store and the pharmacy that had the spinner rack where we bought our comics–all of those were local businesses owned by families in town. And now all of those have been gutted. There’s no real businesses there except for just on the outskirts of town and that’s only corporate things like MacDonald’s. It makes me very sad to see the loss of all those local businesses.

And the ginseng industry has dried up, even in the course of working on this project. Part of that is due to climate change. The growing region has started nudging north–and I saw that happen in the span of the six years I was working on this project. The gardens migrated north because it was too warm to grow south of my parent’s house.

As a kid, I felt my hometown was sheltered from everything else going on culturally. I have some fondness for that reality now. Because, now, everybody is online–so culture has become pretty homogeneous and global. Instagram has made interior design generic for wherever you go in the world.

I was just in a cafe the other day in Portland and we were commenting on how all cafes look exactly the same now. We’ve been spoon-fed this specific aesthetic via Instagram algorithms. Whether you’re in Portland, Iowa City,  Barcelona or Beijing, all the cafes look exactly the same. I miss the strange cultural isolation of where I grew up now.

One of my favorite things in life, for many years, has been spending time in coffee shops in Seattle. I’ll just mildly correct you in saying that Seattle still has its fare share of independent coffee shops, in all its neighborhoods, and they can all be a bit different, have some well-worn homey/comfy vibe to them.

Maybe Seattle has managed to keep the integrity of that. Portland use to be like that too but I wouldn’t say that about Portland now. They all look the same: that minimalist inoffensive hipster style.

The minimalist style you see world-wide, for sure. All tones of gray and beige.

Yes! Beige! The neutral, muted and inoffensive tones of gray and beige. Of course, as we scroll through the book, we’re seeing gray and beige tones too! Everything in the book is made up of just two inks, a black and a red ink–and then gradations of those colors to get a whole palette of sepia tones. I really nerded out of the process, you know, trying to add just the right amount of red to this gray to get this earth tone.

Did you end up tweaking things in Photoshop to any great extent?

Yes. So, everything is drawn on paper with ink, the line art. A lot of the second color I would use bond paper that I would lay over the line art. So, tracing paper for that second color. Then it’s all scanned and composited in Photoshop. To get separate tones, that’s all Photoshop manipulation of many layers of reds and grays.

Speaking of digital vs. analog, Photoshop has been around forever so it has a cred all its own.

I last real job, before becoming a cartoonist, was being a graphic designer back in the ’90s. My first graphic design job was at a newspaper, around 1995.  And in 1996, I was at a small town advertising agency. In 1998, I joined Dark Horse Comics as a graphic designer. So, I came from that background of production. Before I was doing comics or illustration, I was helping out Top Shelf with book design, production work. My ’90s training in Photoshop has been what’s carried me through my whole career.

A lot of people would envy your skill set. I mean, with such an intimate knowledge of Photoshop. The new generation seems to be relying more on Procreate and perhaps not being quite as familiar with Photoshop.

What I’m grateful for is having been around, in the ’90s, when there was still so much paste-up and analog work being done. I still think of making a color page as more like making a screenprint: thinking about trapping, how the colors print out on the plates. There was a printing press in the building so you need see each plate. You would see the cyan, magenta, yellow and black plates printed. How things would come alive.

When I try to tinker with something like Procreate on the iPad, I think it defaults to RGB since most people are using it for online stuff. Right away, that’s jarring to me. I’m so trained in CMYK, the way things are printed. Old school print technology is an obsession of mine. Maybe not on the level of someone like Jordan Crane. He’s the excerpt of those things but we’re of that generation.

What we’re looking at now, a page about the ginseng baptism, speaks to the attention to detail, the beauty on the page, you’re talking about. Any final thoughts on what people can expect from this Pantheon edition of your book?

The book comes out at the end of the month, on April 29th. There’s around 70 additional pages since the series. I changed things around. I changed the beginning. I changed the end. And I added a lot in the middle. The series has its own unique features, art created by my brother and an old-fashioned letters page in each issue. The book is a hardcover edition, 448 pages. When I sat down and read all twelve of the original comic book issues, I felt it wasn’t cohesive enough. So, it went through quite an overhaul.

Let me ask you one last question as we close out. How do you tackle a visual metaphor? Maybe how you used the ginseng root?

Every new project starts with a visual metaphor, or symbol or scene. It’s hard to know how I break it down. That’s one of the unique strengths of comics, that you can illustrate ideas visually with metaphors. It just sort of happens organically. I think my religious instruction also informs that. Because Jesus’ teachings were all in parables and they’re all a little bit abstract and so you have to decipher the meaning from them. Some cartoonist are far better than I at working the magic of having the words say one thing and the images they another and from that dissonance a whole other meaning emerges.

As for the ginseng root, I was drawn to the physicality of a plant root. But it was also the perfect metaphor for this process that I needed to engage in of going back to where I came from: tilling through that soil, the aeration of that soil. One thing that is confounding and disturbing about ginseng is that it can never be grown on the same plot of land more than once. You can imagine how frustrating that is for farmers. And we are running out of land for growing in places like Wisconsin. A hundred years can go by and you still wouldn’t be able to grow ginseng in the same soil and that has to do with ginseng depositing a form of toxin in the soil particular to the plant. So, on a personal level, as an author, best known for a memoir, Blankets, I was very wary of that fact. If you have a plant that won’t grow again in the same soil, is it dangerous for me to go back to Wisconsin, revisiting memoir, and try to plant there again which is what I did with this project.

Wow. Well, that’s a perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Craig.

Than you, Henry.