Common Roots

Martin Dolan explores labor, trade, and shared humanity in Craig Thompson’s “Ginseng Roots.”

By Martin DolanOctober 12, 2025

• Comics

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

FROM THE TIME he was a preteen, growing up in a poor, fundamentalist Christian household, Craig Thompson spent his summers working shifts of eight-plus hours a day in the ginseng industry. Marathon, Wisconsin—the seemingly flyover town where Thompson’s parents settled to build a congregation and a family—is also the ginseng capital of the United States. During the span of Thompson’s 1980s childhood, increased trade with China and a booming domestic “wellness” industry drove the price of American ginseng sky-high, peaking at $62 per pound. Suddenly, there were millions of dollars (much of it foreign) moving through sleepy Marathon. This was so much money that even the Thompsons, poor enough to enlist their own children in menial jobs like weeding and “rock picking,” saw a share of the wealth, alongside waves of migrant Mexican and Hmong workers

This childhood labor, as well as its downstream effects, is the focus of Ginseng Roots (2025), Thompson’s latest epic work of graphic nonfiction. Genre-wise, the book (initially serialized by beloved small press Uncivilized Books in 12 floppy installments before getting the hardcover treatment from Pantheon) is hard to pin down. It’s at once a memoir, a piece of investigative journalism, an economic history, and a globe-trotting ethnography. At the core of the book—literally drawn into almost every page in the form of a comic-strip-eyed cartoon root—is the ginseng. As both a cash crop and a pillar of Eastern medicine, ginseng has had a profound impact on Thompson’s childhood and his adult life. Now, combining his cartooning prowess with a journalist’s eye, he literally draws connections between his seemingly provincial childhood in the ginseng fields of the American Midwest and an international web of trade and culture.

Young Thompson spent most of the money he earned in the ginseng fields on his burgeoning love of (and eventual career in) comic books. But the labor—relentless, if not particularly brutal—drove him out of Wisconsin to a comparatively cushy career in the arts. This flight, both from his family and from their faith, is the subject of Thompson’s best-known book, Blankets (2003). But where Blankets was intensely personal, Ginseng Roots retreads the same subject matter with a more material—and more mature—lens. By turning his attention outward rather than inward, Thompson connects his own personal history with broader insights on labor, trade, and the agriculture industry.

The impetus for Thompson’s rediscovered interest in ginseng is twofold. A close friend who is dying of cancer puts him in contact with her doctor, a practitioner of Eastern medicine, who swears by the healing (and borderline mystical) powers of the root. Simultaneously, a recently developed arthritis-like diagnosis in his drawing hand makes Thompson fear that his days as a cartoonist might be numbered. These occurrences (along with a lingering writer’s block after multiple poorly received books) turn Thompson into an anxious wreck. He recognizes that he’s a workaholic—rather than shedding his agrarian work ethic in middle age, he has simply redirected that zeal into cartooning—but he increasingly frets about the point of all this work. His ultimate solution is to return to his own roots in Wisconsin with a journalist’s eye.

What follows is a book, functionally, about writing the book. Over 12 chapters, we see Thompson’s project expand in scope and complexity. Early chapters feel like a combination of proposal and memoir (with Thompson interviewing his family about ginseng while still struggling over whether the project is even worth pursuing). He and his siblings return home to celebrate their parents’ 50th anniversary, and the angst that characterized Blankets—in which Thompson’s parents’ religious zeal made them analogous to villains—here gives way to a dysfunctional yet genuine love. If not totally resolved, the conflicts in Blankets are now water under the bridge. While in Wisconsin, Thompson questions his parents, his siblings, and eventually (using the occasion of the first-ever Wisconsin Ginseng Festival) the leaders of the local industry about their relationship to the rise and not-quite-fall of Marathon’s ginseng trade.

These colorful characters include Harold (a neighbor who employed Thompson as a child to work his modest ginseng operation), Will Hsu (the Chinese American heir to a major distribution company), and Chua Vang (a Hmong man the same age as Thompson whose family came to the United States—and eventually settled in ginseng country—on refugee status). These interviews are sprawling, incorporating personal histories, tips on best practices for growing ginseng, and opinions on 40 years of nation- and statewide political shifts that never seem to be in the best interests of farmers. A common sentiment echoed by nearly every Wisconsinite Thompson interviews is the impact of the bust on the local economy: after local ginseng hit over $60 per pound in the 1980s, corporate farmland acquisition and increased competition from (lesser-quality) Canadian ginseng made the whole Marathon ecosystem crumble. Small operations couldn’t keep up after multiple years of bad crop yields and dropping wholesale prices. Many were forced to sell their land and machinery to corporate competitors.

Yet right when the book’s structure starts to feel formulaic—a subtheme is identified (labor, religion, local history) and then elaborated on with an appropriate talking-head interview—Thompson jets off to Korea for a comics expo, suddenly widening the scope of his research to the international stage. Enlisting his brother as a travel buddy but also a narrative foil (and, for a few memorable pages, a guest artist), Thompson uses the occasion of these “work trips” to Asia to see ginseng grown, sold, and consumed in its Eastern context. He goes to Seoul to meet his Korean publisher, and when he tells the employees there that he wants to write a book about ginseng, they give him a short list of all the East Asian places they need to stop at.

First is the city of Geumsan, a Korean trade hub, with a narrative sculpture garden on a holy summit describing the mythology of the root. In many ways, it’s the Marathon of the East. But there, Thompson is told that the real hub of ginseng in Asia is to the north, across the DMZ, in Kaesong, North Korea. To get as close to North Korea’s hub as possible, Thompson and his brother hire a guide to take them through mainland China’s Jilin province. Near the China–North Korea border, the unlikely group finds lodging in the house of a man named Hou Chen. The cultural difference is awkward at first, until one memorable scene in which they all find an unlikely bond in their provincial childhoods—growing up as the hillbillies of their respective empires.

The effect of this shift is refreshing, suddenly recasting many of the anecdotes and familiar faces from the Wisconsin side of the ginseng industry in a different light. There’s a centuries-long international history of the ginseng trade that Thompson gestures toward in the early chapters of the book—Jesuit botanists on expeditions to East Asia; periodic conflict between Native Americans, French trappers, and early US homesteaders in the 1800s Midwest—though the human element of these anecdotes only begins to feel real to Thompson (and readers) when he encounters vendors in Korea whispering about authentic Wisconsin ginseng that they keep in the back of their stores. And it’s also while traveling through Asia—home to some of the few countries with comics industries rivaling, if not exceeding, that of the United States—that Thompson’s anxieties about including so much Asian subject matter in a book that was supposed to be about his own childhood are both eased and complicated. Drawing sketches on a Korean TV show, he wonders, “Are we exoticizing the location, or is it exoticizing us?” But ultimately, such American concerns as worrying about who “gets” to write about ginseng are secondary to the book’s many strengths.

Because of its more personal and approachable subject matter, Blankets will likely go down as Thompson’s masterpiece. But despite being a very different type of book, Ginseng Roots is equally brilliant. The art is meticulous—a combination of US comix-style character drawing, calligraphy, and a design sense that looks lifted from a botanist’s diagram. It’s in black-and-white, except for splashes of red used sparingly for skin tones and sunsets, blighted roots and blood. To segment the talking-head interviews—always a challenge for nonfiction cartoonists—Thompson adheres to a relatively rigid panel system. Yet he’s also playful, willing to illustrate exaggerated or dramatized frames of his subjects at work and even occasionally abandon the panel grid altogether for the splashy landscapes that bookend many chapters.

The same attention to detail, without any compromise of readability, can be found in Thompson’s research, which is laid out extensively in the book’s endnotes (including where timelines and details were smudged for the sake of telling a good story). But maybe the biggest strength of Ginseng Roots is how, despite its globe-spanning subject matter and multicultural scope, it feels undeniably humanistic, always empathizing with the diverse cast Thompson encounters.

If there’s any criticism to be offered, it’s that, at times, the book feels its most vivid the further it strays from ginseng. (One chapter, a harrowing account of one Wisconsin-based ginseng farmer’s past as a guerrilla combatant in Vietnam War–era Laos, is probably the best of the book.) But that multidimensionality—using nonfiction comics to platform a genuine myriad of perspectives and stories—is ultimately the whole point. Ginseng Roots is a lot of things: a work of journalism; a memoir; a collection of food, medicine, and travel writing. But the takeaway is simple—from Guangdong to Green Bay, there are striking similarities between how and why people work. And even as the overwhelming wave of globalization threatens to gobble up local businesses and erase regional quirks, it’s important to remember that the international economy sprouts from human roots.