As a series, Ginseng Roots is a litany of successes; some are unimaginable because of the content (who knew Wisconsin ginseng farming trivia could be so engaging), but the overall success is creator Craig Thompson’s ability to present the information. This issue’s all about the current ginseng industry through the perspective of one company—Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises. While the comic’s not exactly an advertisement for the company (though I’m curious what science says about all the health claims), the issue is impossible without the company. Specifically, Thompson’s interviews with the owners about their business and what’s going on with ginseng.

I always wonder how much license Thompson takes with the interviewees’ statements. Are these direct quotes just visualized, or what? Because the flow is terrific. Everyone Thompson—comic Thompson—interviews has just the right personality for presenting the information. They’re likable, even when they don’t seem like they’re going to be (the Hsu guys seem nice, the white guy competitor initially seems like a jerk but turns out to be a-okay too).

The issue also features a cameo from Trump, tied to the Wisconsin Foxconn factory debacle, which has entirely fallen apart since Roots #9 dropped. Thompson didn’t have time for a follow-up in the issue itself, so there are some links and quotes for more current information on the inside back cover. It’s interesting to see some positive perspectives on it—the Foxconn executive is wild about ginseng and its ostensible health potential (this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease)–but since it turned out to be hooey, it’s complicated.

Ditto all the health stuff. Either ginseng really does help with gene regeneration, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, are the ginseng companies knowingly hyping a false product and so on. Presenting the issue like a visualized annual report from Hsu’s Ginseng actually helps with the accuracy responsibility; Thompson’s interviewing and presenting those interviews, not making his own statements.

It’s actually incredible this issue’s so good, given all the caveats.

Though a lot less than usual, Thompson does get in some personality throughout. There’s a great Swamp Thing reference when discussing gene regeneration. Almost every page is a design masterpiece, fitting in all the interview content but visually exciting, even when it’s just fields.

There are a couple things Thompson hurries through (Canadian ginseng), and all the content seems very pre-COVID-19. Still, the issue’s also very concerned with current business conditions, so it’s just another caveat Thompson overcomes.

Thompson would probably make a fortune illustrating company annual reports. Or he should anyway.

It’s not the most exciting Ginseng Roots, other than being a success against the odds, but it’s another excellent one.

It’s another “wow” issue, though a more gradual one. This issue pairs with the previous one, still telling the story of Chua, creator Craig Thompson’s ginseng pulling peer growing up. Only while Thompson was going to high school, Chua had to drop out to help with the family business.

Thompson’s presumably illustrating an interview with Chua, with Chua’s words providing the text for the issue. It’s a fascinating approach to oral history (presuming Chua’s okay with the accompanying visuals, including when feeling like he was sacrificing himself to the ginseng to save his younger siblings, the image being his father ritualistically stabbing him with a ginseng root). Chua’s in the letter pages so it seems like he’s cool with it.

The issue is a brief history of Chua’s family business, while also addressing the Hmong as a new generation of Wisconsin shang farmers. The story wraps around to the ginseng festival, where adult Chua gives Thompson the lowdown on the ginseng market and how it’s changing; specifically how the farmers get crap prices for selling their crop wholesale and it’s no longer worth it for the Hmong farmers—the latest immigrants to Wisconsin to farm the shang. It’s a very aspirational American tale, especially when Thompson gets back into Chua’s father’s story (he fought for the Americans in the Vietnam War).

The finale’s quietly devastating, even after we’ve had some previous devastating when the comic gets into Chua’s unrealized dreams. It’s a very heavy issue, because nothing in Chua’s tale improves throughout. Other than his father realizing sometimes it is actually too cold to work. But Thompson keeps it all nimble enough to pivot from emotion to emotion as Chua tells the story. Once we get to meet him in the present, amiable even as he foreshadows doom… it’s beautifully done.

Ginseng Roots continues to astound. I can’t wait to read this issue and the previous one back-to-back someday. The way Thompson integrates the Hmong cultural visuals is awesome too. Roots is such good work.

There are some things only comics can do. There are some things only comics memoirs can do. This issue of Ginseng Roots mixes the two into something even more singular and rare; it’s a truly exceptional reading experience, far and away the best issue of the series so far; it’s going to be very hard to beat given the content, which is sort of the point of the content; Craig Thompson is a very impressive cartoonist. Like, I don’t know how he pulled it off. I spent the entire issue waiting for him to leave the subject—the story of a Hmong kid who grew up parallel to Thompson as a Wisconsin ginseng farmer’s kid—and sticks with it.

The first few pages are setting up the Hmong from Thompson and his family’s perspective. It starts with a harvest season MacGuffin but Thompson spends enough time on it while building towards the main subject, it’s not really a MacGuffin. It’s just the quickest, most edifying way get to go. It’s never hurried (and doesn’t skip things—bringing up racism right away); Thompson’s really good at efficiently setting the ground situation, which is going to play in pretty soon in the juxtapose—but when he moves on to the kid’s story, which starts with the Hmong dad’s story being a Hmong teenager in Laos and the Vietnam War. I turned back a page to make sure, but while I don’t know how Thompson could maintain the intensity of the issue, his segue is observable and worth reading thrice. First, second to confirm, third to appreciate. It’s stunning start to finish. The best comics.

So we get Thompson telling this kid’s story as first person, but with him—Thompson in the comic—listening. Now, the story is an adult’s story, but it’s coming from the fifteen year-old comics version. And it’s about the dad. There are all these layers to it and then Thompson’s already an additional couple comics artifice things goin on (which refer back to previously established ground situation to create a particular reference and effect). It’s just incredible work.

The story comes up to the modern day (so past where we were initially hearing the story in the nineties or whatever when they’re fifteen), with Thompson not just taking the time to cover the Hmong in Wisconsin but also their involvement in the Vietnam War (and the CIA’s involvement in the Vietnam War). And he’s still got time for a sincere, aspirational twist. Thompson tells this story with appropriate reverence. Like I said, it might just be impossible to beat because the historical content is the historical content.

It’s even higher level stuff from Thompson than I was expecting and I’ve been expecting greater and greater things from Ginseng Roots.

It’s such a dark issue. How is it such a dark issue. I mean, it’s clear why it’s a dark issue—creator Craig Thompson juxtaposes the seed process of ginseng with he and his siblings going into high school, getting baptized, and suffering serious abuse, so there’s simultaneous this literal expansive life thing for the seed (and the kids) along with accompanying traumas.

Very dark. But bright and full of amusing moments. Also petrifying ones (Thompson says a lot about being raised by religious parents without saying much about religion).

The art is stunning from the first page, with these intricately composed pages, the “narrative” flowing from page to page as he describes the complicated, years long process of getting from ginseng seed to ginseng plant. In addition to the growing process, there’s also the accompanying work the farmer has to do to plant the seeds, which of course gets covered. There are also some nice textual asides, but it’s mostly a lesson on the seeds.

The issue’s also a lot more lyrical in structure than usual. Even with the long cycle for the seeds, Thompson doesn’t stick too much to the set timeline, sort of easing in and out of it, skipping ahead nine months in as many panels then slowing down to a halt and zooming in to inspect something going on either with the seed or he and his siblings. His parents get to be active (fretting over evil secularism or worse) in a few panels and it’s always part of the flow.

The sister gets a lot more to do than usual (though usually she’s not even present); here, she’s a full sidekick, complete with her own observational asides. But Thompson even distances himself (as a teen), zooming out to look at himself in comparison to his siblings. It’s not until after the home schooling decision Thompson really zooms back in on himself, but it’ll be a story for another issue (or maybe not). Because the story of the seed, and therefore the issue, is coming to a close. It’s incredibly successful and I guess not too bold a move given Ginseng Roots knows its audience; the end comes abruptly but the issue doesn’t feel abrupt. I keep waiting for some zinger as I read the last few pages, fingertips feeling the end near with every page turn, but no. Thompson just does the issue and ends it.

It’s maybe the best way to finish a heavy chapter in a serial.

So good.

Maybe half the issue is the fascinating world history of the ginseng trade—it was actually an American export to China hundreds of years ago too—while the other half is a more colloquial info dump on how pesticides affect ginseng crops. At one point I remembered something I’d learned about ginseng growing from the previous issues and paused to appreciate how incredible creator Craig Thompson is with the exposition. Ginseng Roots never feels like a lecture, never feels like a TED Talk, always feels like… well… Ginseng Roots.

We get to meet some more of the neighbors as Thompson and his brother continue visiting people and talking Shang. There’s a bit about the brother getting into guns as the first hobby he had to himself (creator Thompson wasn’t interested) and then there’s an incredible moment when the sister pops up for a panel and comments on it. I can’t wait to read the comic in a sitting someday and seeing how that subplot perturbs.

Just because there’s so much history—the discovery of American ginseng in the 1700s came from a Jesuit priest who read an article written by another Jesuit priest in China who thought maybe there’d be some there if the climate was similar. It’s nimbly executed but Thompson manages to convey the worldwide scope of it, not to mention how tied the ginseng would end up being in relations between China and the eventual United States.

The only part where Thompson loses some ground is when China goes Communist. All the understanding Thompson’s had for the inevitable Wisconsin Trumpers he’s been lionizing goes out the window and the text all of a sudden feels like it’s out of a CIA fact book.

He never really has to recover since the history’s almost done, but it’s almost pointless. And is a missed opportunity to look at how ginseng production and consumption changed.

But a small (though not insignificant) gripe.

It’s been almost a year since I last read a Ginseng Root and I’ve been lallygagging on getting back into reading because I was worried I’d be lost without a reread. But this issue’s a nice concise look at creator Craig Thompson and his brother’s experience picking rocks for comic book money.

So, while ginseng itself grows fine around rocks—in fact getting by rocks gives the root some personality—those same rocks will break the farming machinery and need to be cleared from the field. Thompson, his brother, and a couple friends they make at school do it summers to great success. The farmer who used to employ the kids has since given up farming—he couldn’t compete with wages (there’s an implication Wisconsin McDonald’s pay fourteen dollars an hour, which isn’t true at all, they don’t even make nine, so the continued subtext of all Thompson’s interviewees being QAnon-ready is even more potent reading it now)—and is now selling ginseng by mail to reasonable success.

Amid the ginseng industry exposition, there’s also some humor, particularly—at least at the start—with Thompson getting a cyst from drawing too much. He never really gets into it, but there’s this palpable fear his parents would make him stop drawing, along with the more unspecific fear they’re going to make he and his brother give up the worldly comic books (they’re Evangelicals). The cyst leads to some bullying, which leads to Thompson making friends with another kid who’s got a same-aged younger brother. Both families are poor and more religious (the friends are Jehovah’s Witness) and they become good friends.

The brothers cameo in the present day and they all go to a ginseng festival and reminisce. There’s nothing particularly amazing about the conversation but Thompson finds the weight in all the aging and all the changes and so on, so it turns into a very nice conclusion. There’s a little more with the farmer as an epilogue and segue to the next issue.

Also discussed—but not thoroughly—is kid Thompson’s young Earth creationism, which he presumably gave up.

But seriously… Wisconsin McDonald’s employees make 22% less than the national average. It’s disgusting.

Thompson does present it all objectively, I suppose, just not correctively.

Confession time—I never read Blankets, creator Craig Thompson’s first big work. And it now turns out Ginseng Roots is a somewhat direct sequel.

This issue opens with Thompson going back to Wisconsin—he’d been living in Portland, OR (of course), which makes the questionable L.A. cartography last issue more permissible—and meeting up with his younger brother, Phil, to drive to the family farm house. Not farm, but farm house amid other people’s fields.

On the way, Thompson introduces a second sibling, sister Sarah, who was left out from Blankets; there’s a bit about the fallout from Blankets, both in terms of the parents and the sister. The parents didn’t like it because it’s about Thompson’s fall from Evangelical faith and Sarah because she wasn’t in Blankets. She even wonders if it won’t be too confusing to include her in the ginseng comic, which Thompson is talking over with his family.

How’d it turn out? She’s on the cover of this issue.

And the parents have at least accepted Thompson’s previous work to the point there’s a copy of Blankets on the bookshelf, which is bare of books other than Thompson’s creative output. Presumably there’s a Bible around somewhere.

Creating a comic lionizing Red State farmers in 2019 is going to be something, but Thompson seems to be aware he’s going to have to address some things. It’s not like Portland is the bastion of social justice one would’ve assumed in the aughts.

The parents aren’t enthused about the ginseng project simply because they were laborers, so Thompson and his brother (who loves the idea of the comic) go to visit some farmers and former employers.

They’re a cute old couple who bitch about Americans not wanting to work anymore and how the environmentalists are ruining things. Turns out at the end ginseng can only be grown on a plot so I’m not sure an economist would agree with their take. But it’s a very nice, very informative sequence.

There’s a lot about how excluded Sarah felt from growing up with the brothers, which is awesome, unpleasant if genial work.

The first issue was good comics but this issue is outstanding comics. Hopefully Thompson can keep it going.

Creator Craig Thompson has a hell of a hook for the first issue of Ginseng Roots—he gets to be interesting. Thompson grew up in Wisconsin in the seventies and eighties when the state was the number one grower of ginseng in the world. According to Thompson; I’m not going to check it because you’ve got to trust your creators.

So Thompson and his brother helped their mother weed ginseng fields as kids. They got paid a dollar an hour, which eventually bought comic books. And Thompson goes into how they weeded the fields and why they weeded the fields and it’s all very interestingly done. Even though the ginseng market crashed in the nineties and ruined some lives, Wisconsin still makes it; they should’ve hired Thompson to do them a pamphlet talking about it. Just great educational comics right here.

Alongside Thompson’s story of growing up in a working class Wisconsin farming community and the associated troubles. In the present—he’s got a very quick and effective way of jumping the narrative ahead forty years—he still suffers class anxiety as he finds himself with all the artsy types.

A chance walk through Los Angeles’s Koreatown and Chinatown—okay, this one I checked and it’s not geographically accurate (hrm)—but on this chance walk narrator Thompson sees ginseng shops and communes with a particular barrel of roots and it tells him to “go home.”

It’s the adorable ginseng creator Thompson has had as gentle comedy relief throughout the comic, offering asides on multiple pages and so on.

The comic’s gorgeous; Thompson’s on not white paper, which gives the mostly black and white art a lot of personality. There are occasional colors, mostly reds. There’s even a letter page, where creator Thompson talks about the plans for the comic—twelve issues—so either the whole thing’s about his journey back home or some of it will be. His brother, who’s a character in the comic, also draws a couple pager about how he picked too much ginseng when rooting.

It’s a very nice comic; very nice reading experience.