Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures...!

If you can believe it, Jeff Smith started publishing BONE back in 1991. For some modern readers, that history only stretches back to 2005, when Scholastic started reprinting, in color, the original collections for a more general audience, where emerging readers who otherwise would never have known about Phone Bone and his cousins and their adventures in the Valley, since Smith really only had access to regular visitors to comic book shops originally. BONE did develop a considerable following that way, but so much has happened since then.

Scholastic continued printing the original volumes, and finally reached CROWN OF HORNS in 2009 (a virtual eternity for something that already existed, when fans of Harry Potter would become antsy for J.K. Rowling to bridge a gap of only a few years while writing epics that in total length eclipse even the famed ONE VOLUME EDITION of Smith’s opus), and eventually went after the rest of the material, the ROSE companion book illustrated by Charles Vess, and then last year TALL TALES.

Here’s where I should attempt another introduction, because I may be in danger of “burying the lead.” What truly makes TALL TALES special is that it features some actual new material. This would have been huge news I couldn’t possibly have avoided a few years ago. To be precise, maybe 2004, the year Smith concluded the original BONE series, or 2005, when it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that the ride really had ended. BONE was one of the darlings of comics fans for years (you might say, specifically, 1991-2004), a book Smith put out under his Cartoon Books imprint, until its popularity peaked and Image wanted a slice of it (though the series subsequently reverted back to Cartoon), and this was long before TIME called it one of the all-time greatest graphic novels. I must confess to not having been a reader, even when I began to frequent comic book stores, until a friend of mine kept insisting I try it, and even then, I didn’t keep reading it for long (idiot!!!). This was during the period before the full breadth of Smith’s vision truly became apparent, when I might be forgiven in mistaking its appeal to lie mostly in the silly antics of the Bone cousins, who all my experience reminded me of comic strip characters inhabiting a more continuing world than usual. (It reminded me best of CALVIN + HOBBES, and to Bill Watterson, it would have looked almost exactly like POGO.)

Still, as I’ve detailed elsewhere, it can sometimes be difficult for me to be a regular comics reader. Even when I tentatively dipped my toes back into the comics waters in 2004, when I was aware that BONE was coming to an end, I decided to skip it. It wasn’t until the ONE VOLUME EDITION was first published that I began to consider that I might get back into this BONE thing. I was thrilled to see OUT FROM BONEVILLE at a Wal-mart one day, when Scholastic began its efforts. I had remembered vividly when Smith used to talk about plans to make BONE into an animated feature, and this new exposure made me think of that first. It was finally going to happen! But Scholastic didn’t continue very speedily (as if making absolutely sure they weren’t making some gigantic mistake, counting and analyzing all the numbers from the initial sales), and the more Pixar and its ilk broke into the movies and transformed expectations , a BONE animated feature seemed less likely. It seemed to fit the pattern less and less. It would be like asking Mickey Mouse, a respected and admired and versatile star, but still almost completely irrelevant to today’s audiences, to star in a new movie.

I don’t care to admit how long it actually took for me to finally buy and read the complete story, via the ONE VOLUME EDITION, but the more I read it, the more I sat in awe of Smith’s vision. When I started working in bookstores, I was able to track Scholastic’s progress more closely (though I refrained from buying the same material that I already had, even though that initial collection looked lonely), and it quickly faded into a favorite aspect of my everyday experience, with a little thrill every time someone asked to find them.

What ended up happening, of course, was that I ended up buying the companion volumes, ROSE and the somewhat superfluous HANDBOOK, which seemed to be intended for exactly those young readers Scholastic had originally envisioned. At some point, I had bought a copy of STUPID, STUPID RAT TAILS, a Cartoon collection that featured Smith collaborating with or completely ceding control to other creators: Tom Sniegoski and Stan Sakai (who has his own legend to maintain with USAGI YOJIMBO), and when I first heard of TALL TALES, I couldn’t figure out how much of the material was reprinted from RAT TAILS, and how much of it, as promised, was supposed to be new. TALL TALES was originally released in 2010, but I didn’t get it until this year, thanks to an ambiguity that still baffles me. If I’d known exactly what it was, I probably wouldn’t have waited so long.

The first entry in this Comics Reader blog was the annual QB50, a list of my favorite comics from the preceding year. It’s likely I would have found a place for something as exceptional as new BONE if I’d known. The list didn’t entirely suffer from lack of Jeff Smith, though, since I’ve been following his newest project, RASL, which I term as Smith’s adult imagination, versus ideas that had obviously interested him since childhood, in BONE, when creatures who look like bones are actually called Bones, and who otherwise don’t really fit into the rest of even their own world.

When I finally had to guts to push past the confusion and simply buy TALL TALES, I discovered that it did indeed contain substantially new material, with only half reprinted from RAT TAILS, featuring Big Johnson Bone’s adventures in the Valley long before the Bone cousins ever landed there. Sniegoski is Smith’s main collaboration in that half as well as the rest of it, which includes most of the new material. Smiley Bone takes a group of Bone scouts camping, and spins several, well, tall tales for them, and these episodes are written by Sniegoski. The whole book features art by Smith, whether reprinted from RAT TAILS or completely new. Clearly he hasn’t missed a beat since 2004, and no doubt thanks to the fact that he has never been able to leave BONE entirely behind. While none of it is essential material for those who grew enchanted with the original series, it does serve to remind the reader that this is still wildly appealing stuff, that doesn’t really have a clear parallel with other things they may be reading. It’s almost as if, stripped of the fantasy elements, you can still think of BONE as that perfect blend of your childhood memories, when you would never have questioned the rather featureless appearance of the main stars. (Rereading the Big Johnson Bone adventures, it’s almost fair to say that, like Goofy, the Bones are probably most analogous to dogs, even though they have no clear species of their own.)

I would be a tad remiss if I didn’t mention another draw of TALL TALES is the promise is still more new material, which takes on a completely different form. The book concludes with a prose excerpt from QUEST FOR THE SPARK, which itself has now been released. Written by Sniegoski with sporadic illustrations from Smith, it will be the subject of an entirely separate essay in two weeks, so I won’t talk too much about it here. Suffice it to say, but Scholastic eventually decided this BONE thing really did have legs.

BONE has become an integral part of my comics experience, and this serves as the tiniest of introductions to it. Please, by all means, if you haven’t read any of it yourself, like my friend all those years ago, I heartily encourage you to give it a try. You’ll be entering a whole new world.