Thoughts on Bone

I ended up just going to the library and reading Bone. So I read it, but I don’t have it here with me as I type this. Still, based on my memories here are some things that struck me:

The art style is perhaps most reminiscent of Bill Watterson’s work on Calvin and Hobbes. That’s about as high a compliment as I can pay a cartoony comic like this one. Calvin and Hobbes was remarkable and notable among newspaper strips for varying wildly in style as the story demanded it, so that a film noir parody was inked like 100 bullets and a soap opera bit looked like a 50’s archie comic. Bone isn’t quite as varied, but Jeff Smith still does a tremendous job of injecting bits of complexity and charming visual references into the work. Grandma, for instance, is done in the style of popeye, and there are many scene where fantasy settings are rendered in glorious high detail- all without compromising the cartoony nature of the characters.

Fone himself is an interesting exercise in the universalizing nature of the smiley face that McCloud touches on in his books. The more simplified a figure, the easier it is for anyone to project themselves onto him. So while secondary characters like Smiley and Phoney have distinguishing traits to catch the eye, and Rose and Grandma actually are drawn like people, Fone is as simplified as a character can be. Its an effective tactic for making an instantly identifiable protagonist, and his broad, easy to grasp personality ensures that we never once doubt who we should be rooting for.

I’m a sucker for stories that appeal to everyone, adults and children, seamlessly and on all levels. That is, some works like Shrek tell one story for the kids, but inject it full of so many knowing references that adults have something to laugh at too. This is an occasionally effective tactic, but IMO not nearly as admirable as stories which are simply so universal and well told that it is impossible not to appreciate them, whatever your age. Examples include the Incredibles, the currently airing Avatar the last Airbender and the early 90’s Batman the Animated Series, and without a doubt, Bone. The humor makes me laugh, not because of wink-wink-nudge-nudge vulgarity, but because its simply genuinely funny, and the adventure excites without gore. Its not even that the story is wildly original (though a few sections, like the coming of winter, are tremendously imaginative),. Bone is living proof that it is still possible to tell a simple, timeless story very well and have it be enjoyable and appealing.

I thought Making Comics was really interesting- McCloud makes tremendous use of working in the medium he is exploring. When trying to explain a phenomenon he can simply show us rather than tell us, and perhaps even more here than elsewhere this is invaluable. He’s also grown quite a bit as an artist since his first book, and it makes the book much more effective than panels meant to look pretty actually do.