Blankets, by Craig Thompson

This book is an excellent example of what Scott McCloud talks about in regards to caricature in comics. Certainly the simplified portrayal of the protagonist does help me to empathize with him, and fall into his experiences as he describes them, but I think that there's more going on in Blankets than just that. By keeping his drawings stylized, Thompson allows himself the freedom to move seamlessly back and forth between reality, fantasy, and somewhere in between. Rather than trying to pretend that he's reflecting the world and events as they really happened, his drawings are depicting his memories as he perceives them. The very world around his characters changes to reflect Craig's emotional state. Sometimes it's an obvious symbolic representation, as when Raina's car is shown literally driving off the edge of the world, but sometimes it's more subtle. Simply the weight of the line used or the emphasis of the shadows can alter our perception of the story.

The warping effect of memory is even brought up during the last chapter of the book, in the story about the cave that Craig and Phil found as children - which of course is also alluding to Socrates' Allegory of the Cave, that Thompson brought up earlier. And all of these visual and literary devices emphasize the larger overall themes of the book, about how our experiences shape us, and how our memory of a thing can be more powerful or meaningful than the thing itself. While it's natural to categorize any given panel in Blankets as either depicting reality, or depicting a surreal dream-state, the whole point is that there is no real distinction. Every drawing is showing the moment as he remembers it.