Quarter Bin 105 "Bone"

Bone #20, 22 (Cartoon, Image)
from October 1995, February 1996

I'm an avowed fan of Jeff Smith's Bone (and Jeff Smith in general), so I read the complete Bone saga some time ago, finally, in the handy One Volume Edition.  I have a friend to thank for turning me on to Bone in the first place, because otherwise such a comic would never have been on my radar, but I started reading around the time Smith ceded publishing to Image, for a time.  These issues actually catch the series in transition, and that's pretty fascinating in and of itself.  Smith finds himself justifying the business decision in the letters column.  History shows he later brought Bone back to its self-publishing roots at Cartoon Books, and later still reprint rights at Scholastic, where it found a whole new audience.

I stopped reading Bone regularly well before the end of the series, so reading the One Volume Edition was a way for me to find out just how much the story evolved, over time, how it became truly epic fantasy.  That's still developing in these issues, but in hindsight it's already apparent, although there's still plenty of the Bone cousins being the Bone cousins, more Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring than his Return of the King, in terms of the hobbits. 

This is a series always worth revisiting.