Throwback Thursday: Fantastical Cartoon Comedy Perfected in Jeff Smith’s Bone

Cartoonist Jeff Smith wrote the Bone series in fits and starts over a period of 13 years, beginning at the dawn of the 1990s and not reaching his ending until 2004. It’s a winding tale about three cartoon character cousins who wander into a high fantasy land, inevitably getting caught up in the world-threatening rise of an ancient evil entity (because this is epic fantasy, and you kind of need one of those). Picture a funnier Lord of the Rings. As a kid, I encountered it in ragged, uncollected back issues at my local library, and I was immediately hooked. Forced to endure a series of the unbearably lengthy waitlistings that every library-dependent bookworm encounters from time to time, it took me ages to consume the expansive tale. As soon as I finally did, I promptly ordered the entire 55-issue run in one giant tome. That book remains on my bedroom shelf and is, to date, the largest volume of anything I have purchased that wasn’t on a college course syllabus.
The epic, Eisner-award-winning story grows organically, beginning with episodic, lighthearted stories about the blobby, cartoonish Bone cousins interacting with human teenager Thorn and her Gran’ma Ben. Eventually, the troupe is forced to flee across the land when Thorn’s royal heritage catches up to her, and her mysterious powers link her to the rising threat of the Lord of the Locusts. Like I said, it’s traditional high fantasy, but with an inspired addition: the fish-out-of-water main characters.
The three cousins begin the series characterized with as broad stokes as the ones with which they are drawn—level-headed everyman Fone Bone; his scheming, greedy cousin Phoney; and the tall, happy-go-lucky cousin Smiley—but by the end, Phoney has proven he has a heart and Smiley has proven he can be serious despite the fact that his is too big. The emotion isn’t subtle, but it is undercut with enough jokes to keep it from being the cloying (something I appreciated as a kid with no patience for sentiment).

 Smith’s sense of humor is one of his greatest strengths, and is as evident in his dynamic art as it is in his dialogue. I can think of no better way to learn techniques like pacing or framing than to absorb them through repeated readings of a scene in which Fone is chased by rat creatures through a local cow race. It certainly helped me: I’m earning my first indie comic script credit this fall, and I owe the magic of the Bone series thanks for spurring my first experiments with the medium.
Jeff Smith’s style fits in with classics like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Chuck Jones’ Loony Tunes, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and Bill Watterson’s fan-favorite Calvin and Hobbes; it’s easy to see all these influences in Bone‘s art. And then there’s the one influence that Smith has brought up by name again and again: Carl Barks, a comic artist known for creating Disney’s Scrooge McDuck and sending him on a series of globe-trotting adventures (and, along the way, directly influencing the Indiana Jones franchise—in fact, the famous boulder sequences from Raiders of the Lost Ark is a direct life from the Scrooge adventure “The Seven Cities of Gold”).

 “I always wanted Uncle Scrooge to go on a longer adventure,” Smith said in a 2009 documentary. “I thought, ‘Man, if you could just get a comic book of that quality, the length of say, War and Peace, or The Odyssey or something, that would be something I would love to read.'” At a total of 1,300 epic pages, Bone certainly qualifies.
Originally presented in evocative black-and-white, the series has since been offered in colorized editions that are controversial among fans, some of whom feel the change diminishes the impact of the original art. I love both editions, and each time I switch between them, I’m surprised at how well each version handles its color scheme. That said, if your billfold is slim, you can rest assured that the massive black and white compendium is just as stunning as the nine-volume colorized collection.
Jeff Smith has gone on to write amazing, but distinctly differing comic stories, most notably RASL, a stark, well-researched sci-fi story about a dimension-hopping art thief, and the ongoing webcomic Tüki, in which a pre-historic human is the first to explore outside Africa. I’ll pick up a copy of everything he puts out, but there’s a special place in my heart for the world’s best all-ages epic fantasy graphic novel.
Are you a Bone-head?