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.