EPIC

Wow.

Where do I start?

Bone is epic -- in every sense of the word. I'm a little ashamed that it has taken me so long to get around to reading it. After all, I've owned the stupid rat creature toy since I was ten or eleven. I remember looking at the back of the packaging and being disappointed that the other figures in the lines, with the exception of the menacing deluxe Kingdok that I could never find in stores, were so... cartoony. At that time in my life, I was happy to accept cartoons, and I was thrilled to discover high fantasy, but I couldn't accept a merging of the two. Years later, as my tastes evolved and diversified, the massive tome found itself on my short list of books to read. When it was assigned, and I was eager to dive in, but waited until break to do so. Unfortunately, reading Jeff Smith's follow-up, RASL, put a big damper on my excitement. I wondered if Bone would similarly have an awkward beginning, an unstable meld of genres, or iffy anatomy.

Thankfully, I was wrong. From the first issue, Bone displays a sense of consistency and confidence. Of course the artwork matures with time, but the storytelling strength is apparent immediately. Really, the amount of excellent choices that seem effortless is just astounding. Similarly to Scott McCloud's Zot!, each of the Bone brothers is relatively one note, creating an instant relatability but not denying the option for character growth. The Bones are drawn relatively sexless, but still male, allowing boys to connect and girls to find them adorable. Rose is a strong female character, keeping girls even more engaged. Fone Bone, while very much a hero on his own right, is not the story's "chosen" figure, keeping him relatable to the reader even as the mythic parts of the script build up. The world's mythology is well constructed, but avoids being either explicitly Judeo-Christian or pagan, focusing instead on a cultural blend of dragons, one of the most omni-present of legendary beasts. The villainous rat creatures are humanized by way of the two stupid, stupid members of their species, and Barnaby, but Smith postpones much of the inherent sentimentality to insure that the race is still downright scary when he needs them to be. Bearing in mind that Smith has been drawing tales of these little white creatures since childhood, it is truly estimable how well he constructed Bone's basic elements.

Speaking of childhood, Bone is pretty impeccably suited for readers of any age. Bearing in mind that Bone was first published over the course of a decade, the narrative content grew and changed with the reader. While the first three volumes contain almost nothing questionable (beyond Smiley's cigar-chompin' and Phoney's sexual innuendo, both removed from a version published in Disney Adventures), later volumes carry heavy emotional weight. Beloved characters die or are placed in threatening situations. Several scenes are straight out horrific: Briar's appearances, especially when her bisection is revealed; the head guard's dragon-scarred visage; and Rose's final confrontation with Kingdok, where the mad rat king boasts of eating her mother as she still lived and begs to be killed. This material is dark, and the consequences dire. Smith's masterful pacing and build up prepares readers to face this, and his rarely-absent humor alleviates the mood without seeming out of place. And, while I'm not sure how much this device resulted from intention or from a delayed publishing schedule, each and every issue offers a recap of what came before, expertly hidden in dialogue during the opening pages, keeping kids on track and reminded of what they're reading. With a volume so intimidatingly large as Bone, such a helping hand keeps discouraged readers reading on.

While it may not be apparent, it's commendable just how little Smith plays around with form here. With his great love of cartooning and classic comic strips, Smith's panel layouts tend to be very standard, and his angles didn't vary greatly. He made great use of silent panels, as well as panels that involved only slight changes from the previous panel, creating nuance and subtlety in a medium not necessarily known for either. The single bit of tinkering Smith did with comics form that comes to mind is the dialogue balloons of the Hooded One. Instead of having a standard tail that ends approximately halfway between the balloon and the speaker's mouth, the Hooded One's balloon tails slink down and into the hood, constantly teasing at her true identity and adding an air of creepiness to her appearances. In most cases, Smith had no need to mess around with format; his goal, as stated, was to create a comic book epic on par with the Odyssey or Moby Dick, not to reinvent the wheel. He absolutely succeeded.

As for John Canemaker's article about Bone's impending film adaptation? Well, I can confidently say that I'm not interested in the least, but I won't condemn the project. Comics have a fraught history of film adaptation, and discussions of such invariably end up insulting me a bit. I was shocked and saddended to see Jeff Smith say "comics are storyboard." How can such a living legend discredit his medium like that? For the same reasons that I very rarely use the term "graphic novel," I cringe whenever I hear comic books compared to storyboards, or treated like a facet of film development instead of a medium of its own. In my mind, Bone's greatest triumph is crucially linked to its medium. Jeff Smith set out to create a comic epic, not a pitch for a film. Lord of the Rings got lucky with its film adaptations, but there is a reason that Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick hasn't been eclipsed by a definitive film version. The point of reading it is reading it. On top of my stubborness, the news that Smith is not involved in the writing process and that the art will be computer generated as opposed to a style that might capture some of Smith's talent sours the idea even further. Seeing a film version can't ruin my idea of Bone, but I might elect not to taint it at all if and when the film ever debuts.

AGGGHHHHH

I have to say that, out of all of the Comic Book League's "Astonishing New York Fantasy" selections, my favorite was the one-page short comic starring James Franco by D.B. Costales. Now, it's not completely original; a similar, less NYU-specific scene unfolded with Margot Kidder in an episode of Family Guy (which I could only find in German, but I'm pretty sure it's even better that way), but it's fun, short, and effective. The art perfectly complements the insanity, and, moreover, it's consistent. I'm not going to insult the work of any student artist, but many of the stories fall short because of inconsistent or messy figure work, panel borders, and lettering. Costales sidesteps these issues by doing everything by hand with a suitably dark pen, taking cares to erase or avoid stray marks.

I found a lot of Taimur Dar and Connie Kim's short parodies to be amusing too, and I like the (uncredited?) "pin-ups" in the back of the volume. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't get a kick out of the opening tale by Andrew Choi and Costales (whose work shows less polish here) thanks to its animal protagonists, but I would have liked to have seen it hand-lettered and a little clearer with its central concept.

All in all, some good fun is present in this "double-sized" spectacular, all for the low, low price of free.

Million Dollar Baby

Detective Comics #27 is monumentally important, but that doesn't mean it has aged well. The cover promises the "amazing and unique" adventures of "The Bat-Man," but there is little unique here, as the caped crusader just kind of follows Commissioner Gordon around as the police track a series of murders. He has all of four lines while in costume, including one where he brushes off the horrific, acid bath death of a criminal like it's no big thing. There have certainly been many narrative changes since 1939, but we've read other material from the era (namely, The Spirit) that really uses the medium to the fullest. Detective Comics really uses the art to illustrate a sparse prose story, allowing the visuals to carry almost none of the story alone. I'm extremely appreciative that this character did catch on and open up the doors to some of the greatest stories ever told, but here I see so little of what has given Batman (no hyphen!) his lasting appeal.

The succinct origin story fares better, if only because it allows the art some room to breathe. The bombastic narration and odd follow-up (nice chemistry set, Bruce) clash with the dark happenings in the story, but that's simply how the medium was used back then. Even now, we have trouble balancing between fun and darkness (see: the nineties). It's interesting that this "origin" doesn't cross into his costumed career until the last panel. It's almost as if the creators wanted to give him a motive but not explain too much, allowing his adventures to seem somewhat timeless and free of constrained continuity. This stands in sharp contrast with Batman: Year One, and it seems almost anachronistic considering how light comics became for decades following the story's publication.

It is the first appearance of the Joker that lights up this trifecta of stories. With the addition of an equally odd antagonist, Batman begins to feel like a distinct and needed character. The ghastly visage of the Joker lends the story all the darkness it needs to counteract the engorged narration. Sure, Batman makes quips about "Leap Year" and there is nary a panel that is without narration or dialogue, but this story finally feels like it would fit better in the comics medium than in a pulp magazine. Of course, we read a Shadow story that might have influenced this character, but influences mean little as long as the final product is good. And what better way to represent the duality at play in these early comics -- the tragic hero in the flamboyant costume, the multiple deaths witnessed by an acrobatic youngster -- than a murderous clown? It's been said that the Joker was originally slated to be killed off after his first appearance. We should all be grateful he got another shot.

Context Rox

R.C. Harvey's examination of "Lorelie Rox" illumines (no pun intended) details of the story that we discussed in class, with the added benefit of some context, but he doesn't break much new ground. It doesn't take an extremely insightful reader to notice what an important role lighting plays in the opening pages of this story, but it helps to know Eisner's impetus for pushing the medium as much as he did. It's hard not to respect the man more for returning from war and still feeling that humor serves an important role in storytelling, for having the drive to present "fables, modern morality dramas [...] the supernatural, the inexplicable [...] science fiction [...] music [...] and poetry," all under one banner. It's not a shame that he left his monumental creation to push the medium in different directions, only that more creators couldn't learn from his work. Even the most progressive writers since Eisner -- Moore, Ellis, Morrison -- don't always maintain the narrative clarity that Eisner kept hold of throughout his experimental works. Maybe they should try a stint in the army.

Love, Hate, and then there's RASL

Jeff Smith had an almost impossible task ahead of him. How does a self-publishing legend, a critical darling, and a beloved all-ages creator begin work on a new project?

Well, evidently by going for a dark atmosphere over substance and shipping once every three or four months.

Allow me to clarify: I didn't dislike RASL, but I didn't particularly like it either. It's not a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination, but I wouldn't label it excellent unless you're obliged to worship anything Smith puts out. I'm going to start with the bad, since I am a pessimist.

Three over-sized issues in, I don't understand the seemingly-central plot device. The "Drift" has not only been under-explained, but under-depicted. I struggled to make sense of the oblong shape in the sea of black ink that shows up when the titular character makes a trip through the Drift. I'm a firm believer that science-fiction needs to be handled in a variation of two ways: either the story revolves around an excellent science-based idea and plot, or you must explain away the science to focus on the story at hand. RASL doesn't really commit to either. Smith wants to tease us with small hints of the science at hand, including some clunky explanatory scenes in the third issue, but he has yet to do more than add strange element after strange element. On the flip-side, his character plots have remained almost completely intertwined with the sci-fi elements, making it difficult to connect to characters due to gaps in understanding about the way RASL's universe operates. The Native American plot and the art thief angles could be welcome, fresh elements in this sci-fi tale, but Smith hasn't made much of either yet.

Additionally, it can come across that Smith is just trying too hard not to be "the Bone guy." Carrying a "suitable for mature audiences" warning, Smith tries to darken RASL in clunky ways that don't contribute to the narrative, such as the exposed breasts of the prostitute(?) that RASL sleeps with and his strip club visit. I'm not sure that either added to my understanding of RASL, but these sort of elements might work well if not for Smith's inability to sufficiently depart from his Bone art style. While no creator should be forced to write just one type of story, the medium of comics calls for different visual styles to suit different storytelling tones. Writers have free range to work with the most suitable artists, but artists and cartoonists need to be able to adapt to different moods visually. The vagabond that RASL meets in the third issue looks ripped right from the world of Bone, to humorous effect. The eponymous character, however, spends much of his time looking like a "Yu-Gi-Oh" character with the fullest hair a woman could ever hope for. There are also scenes where his anatomy is downright bad (I defy you to explain away RASL's pose and figure on page 17 of the collected volume in any rational manner). Much of the issue stems from inconsistency; the RASL of pages 29 and 53 is not the same wasp-waisted RASL of page 38, let alone the freakishly long-armed RASL of the opening sequence.

Consistency also comes into play when you consider the slow-boil plot. Mainstream comics are in an age of decompressed storytelling, where plots and events drag out over months. This kind of slow pacing might be considered expertly done if the book had a regular shipping schedule, but publishing six issues in two years doesn't qualify the book as possessing such. I have the benefit of reading a collected volume (and I have a sneaking suspicion that the glowing major publication reviewers quoted on the back cover did as well), but I can guarantee that I would have called it quits with this title after the first hiatus. Even this collected volume feels like a Hail Mary to keep interest alive in some form, as it certainly doesn't include a full story arc of any sort.

Now Sour Steve is going to exit the blogosphere for a moment so that Sunny Steve can write a few positive notes.


RASL succeeds in several ways. As a book with an unusually large page size, RASL has the challenge of justifying its unique format. Here, Smith does a good job by allowing for wide, open panel designs. RASL is so sparsely populated by characters that the expansive panel deisgn helps to make the feeling more intentional. The desert of the first few pages wouldn't work as well if it weren't so blindingly white and open, and scenes like pg. 19's explosion benefit from the space alloted.

RASL is billed as a "sci-fi noir," and Smith makes occasional use of the noir aspect to great benefit, laying on heavy inks as on the image from pg. 18 that was swapped for the cover, or the first meeting with the lizard-like assassin pages later. Scenes like the latter also benefit from Smith's restraint with dialogue. The book features little narration, focusing instead on allowing the action to speak for itself. Often very kinetic, the layouts are never difficult to follow. I'm disappointed that this focus seems to disolve as the book goes on (compare the first struggle with the lizard man to the last), but Smith might very well strike a balance in future issues.

At the end of the day, RASL offers something very different, both from Smith's previous output and from the majority of books published each month. Its unhurried pace, intriguing (if inconsistent) visual style, striking use of black and white, and decently fresh science fiction devices, RASL might very well be looked back on fondly. Perhaps I'm just not the target audience, as I didn't grow up with the self-publishing boom and its resulting storytelling styles. The most grevious error, in my mind, is the inability to ship the product in a manner that complements the plot's decompression. This volume didn't offer me enough to want to stick around for the years it might take for the series to payoff, but I certainly think more committed fans will find aspects to enjoy.