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Blankets cover
FEEL THE FISSURE SEE THROUGH IT

Blankets

by Craig Thompson

The memoir that proved comics could break your heart.

For you if

you grew up being told your feelings were wrong, and you're still sorting through the wreckage.

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$30 MSRP · Paperback
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Craig Thompson grew up in rural Wisconsin in a fundamentalist Christian household — the kind where faith wasn't a comfort but a boundary, drawn tight around everything you weren't supposed to think, feel, or become. Blankets is the graphic memoir of what it cost him to leave that world behind, and what he found on the way out: a first love with Raina, a girl he meets at church camp whose family is even more broken than his; a fierce, private relationship with drawing; and eventually, the terrifying freedom of understanding that the world is bigger than what you were taught. Thompson's pen-and-ink drawings are among the most extraordinary in American comics — delicate and monumental at the same time, capable of rendering snow and shame and longing with equal weight. This is the book that defined what a graphic novel could be.

In effect right now

Somebody decided you shouldn’t read this. Read it this week.

It only works if nobody notices. Get a copy, pass it on, and tell the people who made the call that you did.

Back the lawsuit ↗Get Your Copy →

Blankets has been banned statewide in Utah under HB 29 for being "sexually explicit" — one of the tamest uses of that label you'll find, applied to a Pulitzer-nominated graphic memoir depicting what it actually feels like to grow up inside evangelical Christian shame culture. The 2006 Marshall, Missouri challenge called it "pornography." The library put it back on the shelf. The real threat isn't the nudity: it's a book that renders, with devastating clarity, what fundamentalist religious community does to children's bodies, minds, and sense of self. Banning a memoir about religious harm for "sexual content" is a nearly perfect crystallization of the problem the book documents.

The record

  • Utah

    Aug 2, 2024

    Removed statewide (state law or state board rule) · Every public K–12 school

    Public libraries (students may not bring copies to school)

    Initiated by: government or statute

    In effect nowLast verified Oct 2, 2026Source ↗

Where This Book Lives

Themes
art-makingcensorshipcoming of agecreative rebellionfaith and doubtfamily and traumalove and desire
Topics
book banning in the united stateschristian nationalism

The sex scenes in Blankets are why it gets banned. They're also why it works. Thompson depicts adolescent sexuality not as titillation but as discovery inside shame — two teenagers raised to be afraid of their bodies, trying to be present with each other in the dark. Strip that out and you lose the whole argument: that the religion meant to protect these kids did the opposite. The nudity is the point. The discomfort Blankets produces in conservative communities is precisely the discomfort those communities produced in the children raised inside them. P&P puts this in the catalog because banning it is an act of profound bad faith — and because every young person who grew up in a house like Craig Thompson's deserves to see their experience named and drawn with this much care.

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