Bone: Out from Boneville

There’s a line of thinking out there that has it that the best children’s literature is capable of being read on different levels, meaning many adult levels beyond the ken of most kids. You hear this a lot when talking about books like The Lord of the Rings, where it’s a story you can enjoy when you’re seven or eight years old (which is when I read it), but which has all kinds of deeper resonance and layers of meaning.

The Lord of the Rings was apparently one of the inspirations for Jeff Smith’s Bone comic, and it has that same generational range to it. On the one hand the blobby inhabitants of Boneville are cute, Smurf-like creatures that might as well be hobbits. You don’t think they’re going to do anything remarkable or have any epic adventures. But then the three Bone cousins – Fone (the hero), Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone, and Smiley – wind up in a fantasy valley where most of the inhabitants are human but there are also magical creatures like the scary Rat Creatures and a friendly Great Red Dragon. It seems like something really important is afoot, from social breakdown to the fate of Phoney’s soul and some final struggle between the forces of good and evil. There’s also not just love in the air, as Fone falls helplessly (and understandably) for the beautiful Thorn, but more carnal stirrings as well. Our first glimpse of Thorn, after all, has her dropping her trousers to bathe her legs in a stream, and later when she and Fone wash up together there will be a sly comment from her about him needing to be a bit more careful with the soap. As it turns out, he’s eaten the soap. But we know what was meant, and we’re even given a blank panel to imagine it.

The edition I was reading is a colorized version put out by Scholastic ten years after the original comic, which was published in black-and-white, started up. I’m assuming Smith approved of the change and I thought the colours looked good, even if I had a nagging feeling it all might have worked better in black-and-white. The more sinister elements might have been more threatening, for one thing. The Rat Creatures here have Christmas-tree balls as eyes, and there are pom-poms at the end of the Red Dragon’s ears that look even sillier. Also, the snow-white Bone cousins appear even more other-worldly against a full-colour background, which I’m not sure was the intended effect.

Smith does a great job modeling the Bones’ plastic (bone-less) faces and bodies into expressive forms though, and they remain the more “human” characters we can relate to (Thorn and Gran’ma Ben seem like the weirdos). The only visual I really didn’t like was the way Fone’s head takes on the shape of the pie Phoney shoves into his mouth. That just didn’t work for me even as a gag.

It’s a classic tale, full of archetypal characters and situations, some of which get a gentle modern gloss. I do think I’d have enjoyed it a lot more as a kid, but even now I found it entertaining enough, if not something I’ll ever return to or for that matter even continue on with.

Graphicalex