Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume

Jeff Smith's Bone series, I can honestly say, is one of those occasions where a comic book series grows out of itself into actual literature (and not to bring up the question of what does the "genre" literature actually consist of, I hope you understand my meaning). It is a grand, sweeping, epic story interspersed with humour, tragedy and love. I have heard it compared in some ways to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and I can see that comparison. It is a story of good versus evil, where the side of good can only hope to overcome the perils of evil, and yet they find a way. I'd love to be able to recount the entire adventure, but that would take too long.; the series consisted of 51 issues, and the One Volume Edition collects all show more 1,332 pages of the entire story in one huge tome.

The artwork is beautiful, all rendered in black and white line drawings. It has a cartoony feel to it, but it fits the feel and pace of the story. The dialogue is well written, the characters are fleshed out and believable and the flow of the narrative is perfect. I really can't recommend this more. show less

Though “Bone” follows many of the standard fantasy-adventure tropes, it is a wonderful rush of storytelling thanks to likable characters and an interesting world.

If you’re looking for someone to reinvent the fantasy wheel you won’t find it here. Everything from mysterious pasts to sacred swords is present in “Bone.” What saves it is how these different elements are brought together over time and how the characters react to them. The stories start off small and balloon slowly into an epic world-saving adventure. Along the way the historied world blooms before you and becomes rich and interesting. The wording-build here is great and the magic system that is used is a novel twist on things we have seen before. The good writing show more also helps to make the clichés feels appropriate to the story and bring the characters to life.

The characters are simple and sometimes one note. However all of them are interesting or likable and even the villains are fun to follow. Some of the characters grow and change tremendously throughout the series while others stay fairly shallow. Usually these plainer characters would annoy me but they manage to balance things out. Still, the growth we see in some of the characters is staggering. Tonally these simpler characters are used often for comedic purposes. While this is a story about saving the world the shift between serious, life-threatening, and cow-racing is expertly handled. The story and art work together to make you laugh when needed, cheer the characters on when the peril is high, and cry when the somber events transpire.

The art in this story is fantastic as well. The art is aimed at a wide audience with its inviting and cartoony nature. Though it is simple and can even be slapstick. Deception is the key to the masterful artwork on display. What the artist manages to express with a few lines is immense. Almost all of the panels are interesting and engaging. The art alone is a good study in how simple and cartoony does not mean poor quality or uninteresting. The designs for many of the creatures are worth studying and how expressive the art is with minimal line work should be studied by any young graphic novelist. The action is passable but not much else. It lands on the side of cartoony. Even though there are epic battles very little is ever shown of these supposedly titanic clashes. Most likely it dials back the intensity as this graphic novel is accessible to small children and grown-ups alike.

This graphic novels does fault a bit in pacing. It is very slow to start and is slow to build up momentum. If you do not have the complete edition you will spend a lot of time wondering where the plot comes in. I recommend getting the collected edition if you’re going to read it to aid in your understanding.

“Bone” is for anyone interested in fantasy. It takes the usual and blends it so well with its own themes and ideas that it is a good study on how to safely construct a fun adventure fantasy. This graphic novel is also a joy to read as the comedy and characters will keep many wanting more when there are no more pages to flip. show less

Bone is, in a word, EPIC. The art is sweet and somewhat cartoon-y, and lacks the grit and grime that seem to mark most modern day adult comics, so you may be tempted to dismiss it as just another kiddie comic.

Don't.

The scan and scope of Bone, the use of archetypes of good and evil while still developing unique, sympathetic characters, the use of fantasy to comment on our world, and the consistent quality of both the writing and art, are enough to ensure that this comic endures. Plus, there's the simple fact that it's GOOD; that it's funny and thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, all at the same time.

I think we comic readers are constantly calling out for works that can elevate comics from entertainment to art, that are strong show more enough to stand the test of time. Bone is one such comic. I can only hope that in the future, comic readers and literature lovers alike will have a copy of this on their shelves (perhaps next to Maus and Sandman?) show less

Bone has it all: dragons, humans, cute round bone brothers, stupid stupid rat creatures, quiche, bartelby, small mammals escaping from becoming quiche, more stupid rat creatures, interracial wars, princesses... But what Bone excels at is making each an every deliciously enjoyable character and adventure work in a magnificent plot. Bone is funny, it's engrossing, it's exciting. At times it is all about action, and at others, it is about growing up.
The first person I lent Bone to, a scientist, read it in one day. All 1300 pages of it. The second person told me, "I am such a slow reader. I read it in a week." I begged and begged for a certain someone to read it, she resisted for 2 years, and when she finally did, she read it in less than a show more week. For all three of these people, Bone was the first graphic novel/story they have read. show less

Jeff Smith's Bone illustrates the compelling power of contrast and contradiction. Bone is part all-ages fantasy epic, part character piece, and part social commentary. The Bones are a dysfunctional family unit comprised of three cousins with conflicting personality types that are exiled from their urban capitalist society. Through their sometimes comical, sometimes somber, and always epic adventures in a medieval feudal land, the Bones learn the value of family, community, and charity.
There is a child-like innocence that permeates the material and is conveyed through Jeff Smith's heavy line-work and visual character design. The fantastical characters and monsters in Bone are visually reminiscent of the American Saturday Morning Cartoon show more series of the 1980's, while the environments are mundane and steeped in realism. Despite the seeming conflicting styles, Jeff Smith uses the backdrops to create a sense of place and time, while maintaining an emphasis on the aspects of the book that really shine, the characters themselves. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/324511.html

This is 13 years' worth of Jeff Smith's epic masterpiece, Bone, all between the same set of covers in 1300 pages. It really is excellent. I had read the first ten or so back in 1996, when they were reaching Belfast monthly, thanks to the recommendations of Malachy Coney (then as now the source of all wisdom on comics in Northern Ireland).

The Bones are three cousins from Boneville, expelled by their angry fellow townspeople for offences which are only gradually revealed. Boneville sounds fairly normal; it has fast food, a mayor, Moby Dick and even a hazardous waste landfill site. The Bones end up in the pre-technological world of the Valley, under the care of Grandma Ben, who has superhuman strength, show more and her granddaughter Thorn Evenstar, and watched over by a friendly though mysterious dragon. The story develops, deepens and darkens. It's what Cerebus the Aardvark could have been if Dave Sim hadn't decided to stick his head up his own posterior.

There are lots of slapstick incidents. There's that glorious moment early on when Fone Bone, pursued by two horrible rat creatures (which turn out to have a fixation with quiche), leaps across a small waterfall and clings to a branch on the other side. He taunts his pursuers, "Those rat creatures would have to be pretty stupid to follow me onto this frail little branch!" And so the catch-phrase, "Stupid, stupid rat creatures!" was born.

A little later, as he and Grandma Ben are making their way to the inn at Barrelhaven, Fone Bone comments that it all looks so quiet and peaceful. "Shhh!" orders Grandma Ben. "We're not out of the woods yet." Fone Bone looks around at the dark trees surrounding them, and then in the next frame mutters to himself, "Can't argue with that."

But the story starts to get darker; Thorn begins to realise her true nature, and her supernatural enemies become more active. Fone Bone's avaricious and venal cousin Phoney Bone develops a well-hidden caring side. The pace slackens only once, when one section of the story climaxes with what I can only call a V'ger moment. There's much much more, and I've only really scratched the surface here. Go out and buy it. (Or borrow it.) show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It was through CCLaP critic Oriana Leckert's write-up for her Jugs & Capes essay series last year (book version finally coming next week!) that first brought Jeff Smith's epic comic Bone to my attention, plus of course the fevered recommendations I'd sometimes hear from the edges of the comics-loving crowd around me; so when the Chicago Public Library recently acquired a copy of the full 1,500-page omnibus edition, I thought it was finally time for me to sit down and check it out myself. And oh, am I glad I did, for all the passionate fanboy show more things you hear about it is true; done by a guy who grew up with dual obsessions for Walt Kelly's Pogo and JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it's a massive saga that combines both, the tale of three silly cartoon characters from "the next universe over" who stumble one day into the middle of a realistically drawn fantasy epic among the neighbors they never knew they had. So as such, then, there are a whole number of things going on here to admire, that don't sound like they'd go together in one book but somehow do -- the surrealistic expressive perfection of such 1930s cartoons as Krazy Kat and early Disney, the sweeping landscapes of representational drawing, a contemporary sensibility when it comes to dramatic highlights, all married to a story complex enough for a 1,500 page narrative -- and while I'm not a particularly obsessive fan of either Pogo or Lord of the Rings, I sure found myself becoming one of Smith's attempt to bring them together, a project that can be equally loved in a subtle, knowing way by adults (think of the difference between watching Chuck Jones at ten versus thirty) and in a straightforward, surface-level way by the actual ten-year-olds. (And indeed, in what has come as a shock to the indie-zinester creator, one of Bone's largest audiences has turned out to be actual kids, so much so that Scholastic recently paid a hefty sum for the reprint rights, and are spending the next decade re-publishing the entire run now in full color and marketed directly to pre-teens.)

So then flush with heady excitement over this new find, I also pulled up on Netflix a documentary that's been made about Smith and the Bone phenomenon, 2009's The Cartoonist; although I'm happy to report that it turns out to be about a lot more than just that, in reality a great overlook at the entire indie-comics explosion that happened in the 1990s, everything from confessional art-school kids to a new superhero publisher, all the way to such hard-to-classify projects as Bone or Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. It turns out that Smith was part of a little clique of self-publishing cartoonists back then, who banded together in various smart ways in order to help each other stay afloat -- sharing expenses at conventions, promoting each other's work -- making this not just a narrow film about the comic itself and how it came about (although there's plenty of that too, including the revelation that Smith has been casually doodling the "Bone" characters since literally a child, and that in high school and college he really did put them through a series of adventures in their own world that are only briefly referenced in this newest epic), but also a bigger documentary about the DIY spirit, the changing face of small business, the trials and tribulations of self-publishing, and a lot more. Granted, the production values are not high -- it features lots of talking head shots, lots of personal offices being used as set backgrounds, and all the other things one associates with cheap quickie docs found in many DVD extras -- but the content more than makes up for it, especially when coming right on the heels of reading the book for the first time like I did. Both come very strongly recommended. show less