Guy Delisle and Craig Thompson at ICPL, co-sponsored by Daydreams Comics and Prairie Lights!

Join us with award-winning graphic novelists Guy Delisle and Craig Thompson at the Iowa City Public Library! Delisle is best known for his graphic novels about his travels including Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Craig Thompson’s Blankets was his first, but not last, highly acclaimed graphic novel. Blankets won numerous industry awards, and was soon followed by award-winning books Good-bye, Chunky Rice and Habibi. They will talk about their latest books, Muybridge and Ginseng Roots. Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Comparative Literature Corey Creekmur will join them.

Critically-acclaimed cartoonist Guy Delisle will talk about his engrossing biography Muybridge, about the 19th century English photographer known for his ground breaking studies of photos in motion. Despite many career breakthroughs, Muybridge would continue to be hampered by betrayal, intrigue, and tragedy. Delisle’s keen eye for details brings this historical figure and those around him to life through an uncompromising lens. Through Muybridge, Delisle turns a spotlight on what lives in the shadow of an individual’s ambition for greatness, and proves that Eadweard Muybridge deserves to be far more than just another historical footnote. Born in Québec City, Canada, in 1966, Guy Delisle now lives in the south of France with his wife and two children. Delisle spent ten years working in animation, which allowed him to learn about movement and drawing. In addition to his well-known travelogues, he has expanded his oeuvre with the nail-biting thriller Hostage, a Doctors Without Borders acquaintance’s story, and Factory Summers, a story of his his teen years and first summer job. The Guardian praises Delisle’s work, saying, “[Delisle] must be counted as one of the greatest cartoonists of our age.”

Craig Thompson’s first graphic novel, Blankets, published in 2003, is a seminal memoir about first love and faith lost in rural Wisconsin; it debuted to rapturous acclaim. The winner of two Eisner and three Harvey Awards, Blankets is, to this day, considered one of the all-time great works of graphic storytelling. Now, in Craig’s long-awaited return to the autobiographical form, comes the story that Blankets left out. Thompson will discuss this new novel Ginseng Roots, which follows Craig and his siblings, who spent the summers of their youth weeding and harvesting rows of coveted American ginseng on rural Wisconsin farms for one dollar an hour. In his trademark breathtaking pen-and-ink work, Craig interweaves this lost youth with the 300-year-old history of the global ginseng trade and the many lives it has tied together–from ginseng hunters in ancient China, to industrial farmers and migrant harvesters in the American Midwest, to his own family still grappling with the aftershocks of the bitter past. Stretching from Marathon, Wisconsin, to Northeast China, Ginseng Roots charts the rise of industrial agriculture, the decline of American labor, and the search for a sense of home in a rapidly changing world. Joe Sacco, author of graphic novels Palestine and Paying the Land, praises Ginseng Roots as “a sweeping story, gorgeously drawn and beautifully told — this is Craig Thompson’s masterpiece.”

We hope you can join us for this special event at the Iowa City Public Library- Meeting Room A! Additional details about this event can be found here: https://www.icpl.org/events/60653/guy-delisle-and-craig-thompson-author-visit