How we use the soil beneath our feet says a lot about humankind. Humans have toiled the land for our sustenance. This fact makes the future bleak, as this skillset is slowly disappearing and fewer and fewer farmers exist. Industrialization has made this profession an option but it’s still a necessity for our future.

Unfortunately what happens is that the world tilts to big corporations and the world of farming has gone this way as well. Family-based farmers are slowly becoming a thing of the past. The tradition goes back further than most people would even know. In Ginseng Roots #5, Craig Thompson gives readers another lesson in history. It’s one that shows how early Americans ate off the land.

We find the Thompson siblings visiting their neighbor, Bear, who also owns a Ginseng farm, as we soon find out it has been with his family for a very long time, going back to when the French first came to America and started to trade with the Native Americans. As Thompson eventually tells the reader of the Beaver Wars, where the French, Dutch and indigenous peoples fought each other to reap profits off of the natural resources that the land yielded and how it lead to the Treaty Du Chen which divided the state of Wisconsin amongst the tribes and designated plots of land for white settlement. We also find out how the Great Depression and the age of industrialization where the introduction of chemicals into soil gave a crushing blow to what were Ginseng empires all throughout Wisconsin, as the rule of Chairman Mao, changed China’s trade agreement in 1950 from agricultural to industrial, making the need for Ginseng from America almost obsolete. It was not until 1970, where the American Ginseng industry got revived, but one dependent on the chemicals that the big corporations mass-produced. By the issue’s end, Thompson introduces us to his other love after comics, guns, one which allowed him to find himself.

Overall, Ginseng Roots #5 is a mesmerizing issue that is a pure master class. The story by Thompson is genuine. The art by Thompson is breathtaking. Altogether, Thompson gives the reader, a class in geopolitics.

Story: Craig Thompson Art: Craig Thompson
Story: 9.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 9.0 Recommendation: Buy

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Purchase: Uncivilized Books – Zeus Comics