I've been wearing your shirt for days.Your socks too. Each day they smell a little less like you.

Blankets is a comic. Or a graphic novel if you want to pretend you don't read comics. It's the largest comic ever published in a single volume. It won three Harvey awards and a couple of Eisners. But so what eh? That's just facts.

This comic is so warm, so tender and heartbreaking I wanted to crawl inside it. From Craigs upbringing in a strictly Christian household with his kid brother, to his eventual escape into adulthood, this book is flawless. It decribes adolescence, the need to belong and  love in painfully honest terms.

Art about first love and growing up is often mawkish and sentimental. It can so easily read like a Hallmark channel movie of the week. Trite. Unreal.

Blankets is so unflinching about the alienation and pain of growing up it avoids those pitfalls. And the flip side, the overpowering feelings you can have for someone when you are young and in love for the first time. How being away from them is torment. And the eventual, inevitable time you drift apart, and move on.

The art here is incredible. Simple lines, rendering the real world of bedrooms, cars and school, then spinning out into almost baroque panels of imagination. Raina is drawn by someone who loved her.And the panels of  snow bound Marquette where Craig goes to stay with Raina and her family are beautiful, as good as anything I have seen.

I hope I haven't made this sound like a downer, because it's not. It's life affirming and very beautiful. If you aren't moved by this comic, you are either an android or dead.