I’m not a fan of fantasy, really; my interest in the genre begins and ends with The Lord Of The Rings, which I only finished after seeing the first movie and wondering what happened next.1 So, while I’d often heard that Jeff Smith’s Bone was good and that I should check it out, it only got the most cursory of glances from me when it was on the shelf or in back issue bins. I’d actually purchased the first trade, Out Of Boneville, and ended up selling it on eBay after reading the first few pages and making a judgment call that while it obviously was well-drawn, it wasn’t my sort of thing - I liked Carl Barks and Don Rosa just fine and that was the alpha and omega of the “funny/cute animals doing adventures” world for me.
However, I recently picked up the one-volume Bone for two reasons: it was a terrific bargain at $40 for over a thousand pages of material2 and I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and support some quality comics - if I didn’t like it, I knew somebody else would go “Hey, Bone!” and take it off my hands (probably Doug.)
Last night I finished this mammoth tome and I have this to say: I was a great huge whopping ass for dismissing this. Once you get past the cuteness and humor of the first twenty percent of this book, the real meat of the story starts to show up and you get a fully-realized picture of a fantasy world that’s in upheaval thanks to the appearance of the three characters sharing the titular last name.
In some ways, I’m glad that I didn’t pick this up in the monthly format as this feels like a proper epic that organically blends together - sequential breaks don’t jar the reader outside of the chapter changes, which are noted and named and there’s no heavy exposition of past events. I suppose that the “regular” readers were kept abreast of things with a “Story So Far” page or the like in the original comics because with so many characters who have speaking parts, it could get confusing. Speaking of characters, Alex De Campi recently said that story and plot get confused by most writers - plot is what happens, story is what this means to the characters. Bone is plotted with great foresight, but the story is the real gem here. There’s flashbacks and dream sequences that are mirrored through the story to provide the reader with glimpses at later revelations that are essential and the characters grow and evolve through the events.
It’s not just the writing that deserves praise here, either - Jeff Smith’s cartooning is a wonderful merging of Walt Kelly and the “realistic” style of Terry Moore3 and the like. His comic timing is perfect and the characters never make a pratfall or say anything that’s out of character while his dramatic and action sequences keep the reader engaged and even enthralled. One sequence in particular stands out in my mind where Gran’ma Ben is getting tossed around by Kingdok and I, quite literally moaned for her as Smith showed a single panel from this brutal scene in the same spot on each page, taking the reader from one narrative line and reminding them that just outside there was peril.
I can’t praise this work enough - craft and ambition meet each other perfectly and the reader is satisfied with a few very small exceptions. With the Scholastic rerelease of the work in color, I hope that this will get more kids interested in comics as this is a perfect all-ages work that any parent can feel good about letting their children read in this hyper-sensitive media culture we’re in now.
This is Good Comics.
1Reading the books, I was always stalled at about ¼ of the way through The Two Towers. Tolkien never met a character he couldn’t overintroduce or a setting he didn’t make me want to burn to the ground to ensure that others never had to put up with five-page descriptions of the local fauna.
2The only deal I can think of that comes close is Alex Robinson’s single-book Box Office Poison, which is 20-something issues for $30.
3Deep inside of me, there’s a rant building about how Moore has betrayed his audience for the sake of making sure that they know how fucking clever he is while, in fact, he’s making up Strangers In Paradise as he goes along. There’s a distinct shark bukkake moment in Volume 3 with the plane crash issue - he’ll never top that and everything since then has been disingenuous at best to his readers.
