American Ginseng – Back to the roots

Craig Thompson spends his childhood in Marathon, Wisconsin, a town of a thousand souls, somewhere centrally in the rural middle of a fertile province, far from Lake Michigan and far from the big cities of Green Bay and Milwaukee. Joylessness and hard work are the family’s top priority, and not just for financial reasons. The children don’t spend their holidays indecently with vacation and boredom. No, every day we go to the fields with our parents, like in the good old days of the Christian settlers. In Marathon, however, it is not rye and millet that are grown for self-sufficiency, but rather American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius). As an export product, it is one of the most expensive roots in the world. Ginseng is the truffle of root drugs, while ginger is just a mushroom on this earth.

In 2003, Craig Thompson replaced Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelmann (“Maus”) as the figurehead among serious comic artists – with his breakthrough work “Blankets.” Translated into twenty languages ​​and sold hundreds of thousands of times, he dealt with his own life. It was about growing up in the strict religious environment of Jehovah’s Witnesses, about violent parents, about repressed sexuality and apostasy. Often the path is the goal and the process itself is the actual discovery: In “Ginseng Roots,” which has now been published in German by Berliner Reprodukt-Verlag, a man deals with his second life crisis on almost 500 drawn pages. It is the secular version of his own retelling and at the same time its continuation.

So while others are having fun in Disneyland, twelve-year-old Craig, his brother Phil and his sister Sarah are digging in the dirt. They are allowed to keep at least some of the starvation wages of their child labor. Craig invests in comics – the only escape he is given at a tender age. Thirty-five years later, Thompson is confronted with his trauma again. The year is 2019: After the global success of “Blankets,” commercial flops followed for the author; he hasn’t published anything for four years. Not only does his mind resist a new project, his hand also shows symptoms of wear and tear. A mysterious form of osteoarthritis bends his fingers. Is it due to emotional stress or childhood exposure to pesticides? Thompson has to go back to his roots, to the “ginseng roots” that made him a man and an artist.

Today, there are countless graphic novels about historical events, with increased volume over the past ten years or so, mostly poorly told. Hard work that doesn’t go beyond the investigative approach of a Wikipedia article. Pretty pictures and speech bubbles that comment on history and stories from their most obvious, innocuous position. It exists about Anastasia of Russia just as it exists about David Bowie. There are stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall just as there are about the Holocaust.

Such comics thank the keywords and sell. All too often, Thompson’s research doesn’t go beyond the “feeling” of an amateur reporter. He examines the cosmos of ginseng from all possible positions – cultural, geographical, geopolitical, colonial, individual. Entire chapters digress and stand on their own as drawn real poetry. One is about the fate of the Hmong in the Vietnam War, a Laotian ethnic group who make up the majority of field workers in Ginsengland. Then Thompson travels to China and South Korea and finds himself “lost in translation.” There is a lot to tell about ginseng as an economic and ecological factor – producers and consumers have their say.

Cultivating ginseng is complicated, we learn. In artificially shaded giant gardens, it grows only once as a crop and leaves behind a depleted land. Mystical and evident healing powers are attributed to the roots; their anthropomorphic form reminds people of their mirror image. It’s about medicine, including traditional Chinese medicine and its methods. And above all, it’s always about the people who have something more or less qualified to say everywhere and who are somehow connected to this bulb across the globe.

Craig Thompson travels around the world, searches for himself and finds many small answers in the conglomeration of questions. Nevertheless, he does not grant the reader a summary. Anyone who thinks for themselves but doesn’t think strictly will find a lot of beauty and meaning in this huge, overwhelmingly designed book. In the sum of his trails, which come to nothing, the reader gets much more than just a report that, like its counterparts in the genre, constantly gets caught up in inexplicable superficialities.

Craig Thompson: Ginsengwurzeln. A. d.Engl. v. Matthias Wieland. Reprodukt, 456 S., geb., 39 €.

Thompson has to go back to his roots, to the “ginseng roots” that made him a man and an artist.

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