The Jeff Smith/Bone Appreciation Thread

Bone. I have no idea about RASL.

on the PBS News Hour with Lehrer tonight:
Jeffrey Brown profiles the work of cartoonist and graphic novelist Jeff
Smith, best known for his "Bone" comics series.
Set yer tivos.

Online tomorrow here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/insider/

For anyone in the general region of Columbus, OH - the Wexner Center has been exhibiting Jeff Smith original art this summer, till August 3rd - http://www.wexarts.org/ex/index.php?eventid=2371

(A little bit of video of Smith there too - doesn't look at all how I pictured him!)

My sister bought the 1,300 page edition for my son 2 Christmases ago. He wasn't doing very good with reading at the time, so I read it to him for a few hundred pages. I gave all the characters their own little voices and everything. We loved it, but eventually his attention wandered. He dusted it off again a few months ago and blazed through it by himself over the course of a couple months. We made some trips to the comic store to pick up Rose, Tall Tales, and the novel trilogy, all of which he finished. So thanks Jeff Smith, for getting my kid to read.

So now I'm dragging it to work with me, reading it on the way in on the bus. I get what Tuomas is saying upthread about the storyline not necessarily being in coherence with previous issues, but I'm not letting it bother me too much. The story moves fast enough that I'm happy to just let the little things pass by.

If you have, however, seen/read "Lord Of The Rings", or in fact any epic fantasy at all, don't bother with this. I mean, I'm totally an epic battle FITE kinda guy, but most of the latter "Bone" is just dull dull dull exposition and painfully generic characters/situations.

I hate, hate, hate Lord of the Rings, but I'm two thirds of the way through this and it's still pretty thrilling. Hope I'm not about to get bored.

I got so bored by then end that I've never re-read it. Taking a week to get through it, rather than having to take over a decade, may ameliorate this.

have kinda been wanting to reread this.

the revelation, about halfway through, of why the bad guys are so fixated on phoney bone is one of the all-time never-saw-that-coming unexpected twists in all of comics.

Yeah, that got a big smile out of me.

I don't know if this is sacrilege but I think I prefer the colour version. Only got a few books in then got distracted. Will give it another bash once I've finished DUNGEON - How's Life, you might like that too. Prob not every one of them is kid-friendly though.

I'm always down for good recommendations. What's kid-unfriendly about it? We do our best to steer him clear of content that's overly sexual or exploitative, but that's about it.

Depends on your kid's age really. Probably a bit adult for under-12s. There's some grisliness in some of the stories (monsters getting splattered) and occasional sexiness+boobs (it's written by Frenchmen, so QED). But it's pretty harmless. Closer to Spy vs Spy than Garth Ennis. The storytelling is REALLY good though. The same writer has a much more kid-friendly series, Little Vampire, that's also fun.

This the first one if you feel like trying out: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1561634018

occasional sexiness+boobs (it's written by Frenchmen, so QED)

Ah, but of course. : D

There's some pretty disturbing stuff in some of the Dungeon books; a character is raped in more than one book (and rape is treated quite seriously, unlike the non-sexual violence in the series), and one of Dungeon Monsters stories has a deeply unsettling depiction of the female protagonist being abused. What's weird about Dungeon is that, even though the books are mostly light-hearted, the tone of any story can suddenly change with no warning, from goofy parody to sad and horrific scenes, and then back. That said, I think the main series (Dungeon Zenith) should be okay for older kids.

Good to know!

Yikes! Haven't got that far in the series yet.

Good piece on Dungeon by John Hodgman (!) here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Hodgman-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Just been lent the full colour hardback of RASL by a friend. My anticipation levels are high, but I'm also apprehensive as it's such a big lovely book, I'm terrified of dropping it or damaging it.

Take the time to wait until you can safely read it without terror. Use this time to dramatically reduce your expectations.

i'm about halfway through and so far it's not really hitting the spot like Bone did, sadly.

RASL was lame. I got the nice color hardback and now I'm like, huh. Tesla : indie comix :: Autechre : ILM

Felt like Miles and Annie were way more interesting than any of the "main" characters, especially the hero and the (main) villain, both of whom sucked so, so hard

I liked it! Seem to remember the ending being quite poor though. And the "Previously, on Tesla..." recap, not so much. But it's fun up until the point that it isn't.

The way the incompetent, ugly, fedora AND trenchcoat bad guy keeps calling him "art thief" well into Act 3 is just dumb. A more attentive student of Tezuka would have given the hero a real tragic reason to always order three drinks, not "magic hurts, plus I read the real shit about the Philadelphia Experiment, you don't even KNOW"

Tezuka is a bit of an unfair comparison, in that he's one of a small handful of true masters of the comic book form and Jeff Smith is a guy called Jeff.

But - yeah. A more attentive student of Tezuka might also have made the bad guy a bit more three-dimensional and less "bad".

RASL was really disappointing. Just everything about it was kind of flimsy.

Gets it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqN61E-Xmko

I got the giant collection for my son (a first-grader), and we’ve been slowly making our way thru it (we just finished the first of the three big volumes that make up the story). I’d never read the series before... just heard it was classic, and great for kids.

It’s clearly a cartooning tour-de-force, but I’m not totally sure what to make of it... the story’s impressively detailed, but not really drawing me in, and there’s a lot of talking & exposition. Somehow it all feels kinda prosaic, and idk, “lacking in imagination” for an epic fantasy involving dragons, rat creatures, talking bugs, etc. (And the characters all sort of talk the same?)

But my kid’s really into it, which is what matters... I wasn’t sure if it would hold his attn. Maybe the story will pay off as it develops? The book’s just very slow-paced — which makes it all the more impressive that it maintained a regular readership in comic form, I guess.

The story doesn't pay off in my opinion - if you're not feeling the charm now, then you're not going to feel it any the more when it heads for a copy of Lord of the Rings in the last book.

sadly, i would agree with "doesn't pay off," once you get past RockJaw the story goes Game of Thrones and spirals. Art's great throughout though!

yeah it's a bit of a 'pantser' plot-wise and that came more apparent on my more recent second read-through, which I kinda gave up on half-way through.
But hey, what a ride! Think of it a bit like a soap opera or a Disney Game of Thrones and it who cares about the story arc. I'm in it for the amazing artwork, the humour, the fun little twists and the madcap ideas.
There were a few parts that I actually found quite frightening and would have most likely freaked out on if I were a kid.
Compared to RASL, which was an attempt at a more serious self-contained and shorter story, it's clear JS is better suited to this rambling, epic style

The art is impressive, and it seems remarkably consistent over the 13(?) years of work that the book represents (or so I gather by flipping around).

During the first few years of serialisation, I'd re-read the whole run over and over again. Once it settled in to the wilderness quest, I stopped and have never read the whole series through.

Also it sucks that he went back and re-lettered the whole thing on computer

“Orphaned, salt-of-the-earth adolescent learns that s/he is descended from royalty/power” is a compelling storyline — and while Bone is hardly the first to employ it, it uses it well (and it predates, say, Harry Potter!).

The revelation of why all the bad guys are fixed on Phoney Bone is (as mentioned above) pretty clever. The book’s pretty exciting around this point, too.

The section (apparently) leading up to a siege on the old city gets very dense with the politics and minutiae of the story’s main armed conflict... there’s even a blockade of trade routes and a merchants’ guild (I can’t help but assume The Phantom Menace was an influence, which seems to track with the publication timeframe).

I guess I’m not so into this aspect of the story... reminds me of how every time I tried reading LOTR as a teen, I would get bored and quit halfway through, lol.

(I also should note that my son is reading chunks of the book on his own during the day, and then we’re picking it up together at bedtime; so I’m only reading parts of the story, and getting filled in on what I missed, which obv. doesn’t make for a fair basis to review it.)

My son has now read Bone three times (largely on his own), so I’m fully sold on its gold status as a kid’s book.

aww that's great

Any good suggestions for follow-ups; maybe something similarly detailed & epic? I've Googled around a little, but don't know kids' comics very well (and I mostly know superheroes, which he's only mildly into). Thx

Amulet, maybe?
https://kids.scholastic.com/kids/books/amulet/

Also the Barks books are kinda urgent and key
https://www.fantagraphics.com/series/the-complete-carl-barks-disney-library/

Thanks — Amulet came up in my search, I’ll look into that.

Not quite as epic (only six volumes) but Cleopatra in Space might be up your alley.

I showed the boy these options, and he chose Amulet; we’ll see how he likes Book 1 (I notice, er, that the kids’ father dies in the beginning... *tugs at collar*)

my 2 year old daughter absolutely loves smith's book for the spiegelman/mouly kids books imprint toon. it's called little mouse gets ready. from where i was sitting tonight i could see her face as my wife read it to her and it was really ridiculously delightful. actually pulled out my big bone phonebook to try and judge when it can be deployed. not yet.