For that matter, it is unclear how any of the story could be called ‘private’ in an ordinary sense, since with rare exceptions the story consists of Craig narrating personal details and life events to the reader. The final scene may thus be read as depicting the main character’s final development in the work: in perfect silence, he privately meditates on the real but passing pleasure of human life.įigure 2: “a silent meditation (final scene, fourth and fifth pages)” (581, 582).Īn immediate complication of this reading is that the character’s ‘private meditation,’ in the form of his depicted thoughts, is not ‘private’ but presented to the reader or viewer. | To make a map of my movement – | – no matter how temporary” (581-2). “How satisfying it is,” he thinks, “to leave a mark on a blank surface. The last two pages (581-2), with a total of three panels, show one small rectangle of text per panel, but even those texts depict not spoken language but the thoughts of the work’s main character, Craig, who in this scene is by himself. 1 The first three of those pages (578-80) are wordless, indeed textless but for the page numbers, hand-drawn but non-diegetic, in lower left-hand (on verso) and right-hand (recto) corners. Since Blankets is a comic – it calls itself “an illustrated novel” (cover) and a “graphic novel” (front matter, unnumbered 4) – and thus consists entirely of visuals, including conventional visual representation of verbal and other auditory events, ‘silence’ means that on those final five pages no sounds are explicitly depicted. Volume 3, Issue 2: William Blake and Visual CultureĬraig Thompson’s Blankets (Top Shelf Productions 2003) ends with five pages of ‘silence’ (578-82).Volume 3, Issue 3: Comics and Childhood.Volume 4, Issue 1: The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman.
Volume 6, Issue 3: Shakespeare and Visual Rhetoric.Volume 7, Issue 1: Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers.Volume 8, Issue 1: Monsters in the Margins.Volume 9, Issue 2: Mixing Visual Media in Comics.Volume 10, Issue 3: Comics and Fine Art Forum.
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