Michael Mechanic

Craig Thompson grew up in rural Wisconsin, where his access to media was strictly controlled by his fundamentalist Christian parents. But comics flew under their radar, so that's where Thompson, then a socially awkward nerdling, ended up gravitating. His 1999 debut, Good-bye, Chunky Rice won a Harvey award and was nominated for an Ignatz—named for the beloved Krazy Kat character. He followed up with the mini-comics Bible Doodles and Doot Doot Garden, but it was Thompson's 2003 release of Blankets, an autobiographical coming-of-age saga that earned him a shower of awards and cemented his place in the comic pantheon—even as it led to a family rift. Maus creator Art Speigelman sent him a laudatory letter, and Time dubbed Blankets the year's best graphic novel, while Paste magazine would later name it the decade's best.

At a staggering 672 pages, Habibi, Thompson's new book out this week, is a richly rendered love story set in a fictional Middle-East that's simultaneously modern and medieval. The author weaves the adventures of his slave-child protagonists with tales from the Bible and the Koran, numerology, and themes of imperial debauchery and environmental degradation. "I wanted to do a book that was bigger than myself, either something sort of fantastical and epic like Lord of the Rings or something with political relevance, like Joe Sacco's documentary work," says Thompson, who is now 36 and living in Portland, Oregon. "So I think those two modes met somewhere in the middle: a social-political fairy tale."

Mother Jones: I was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, but never got as far north as Marathon. What's it like?

Craig Thompson: The town, when I was growing up, was population 1,200. There's a cheese factory there, and that's sort of the center. The elementary school and the high school are on pretty much the same block, and pretty much your entire life is there.

MJ: Did your parents work in the factory?

CT: They didn't, actually. My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant. We lived a 10-minute drive outside of town, in the country, on a highway.

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