#6




Bone
by Jeff Smith

originally published in: Bone #1-55 (1991-2004)

Nominated by: Crimebuster, Slam_Bradley, coke & comics, Arthur Gordon Scratch, and @mrp (voting for Bone #1-55 and Rose #1-3)

mrp says:

"For years I resisted the idea of reading Bone. In my arrogance I thought it was too cartoony for me, but Charles Vess doing the art got me to pick up the Rose mini and when I read that I was intrigued by the world Jeff Smith was creating, but I still avoided Bone itself. I tried the first volume, Out from Boneville form the library, but I didn't get very far. Then, around abouts 2013 I was at a local con and the organizers asked me to be a participant in a game show panel featuring a comic book version of the $25K Pyramid. I won, answering every question correctly except for the one category based on Bone, and I took a lot of heat from folks who knew of my support for indy books because I had never read Bone. How could I have not read it?
It was enough to get me to give it a go again and the next weekend I saw the all-in-one edition at a Half Priced Books and picked it up. Once I cracked it and started reading I was getting more into it. It still started a little slow, but by the time I got into what would have been the second trade, I was hooked and couldn't put it down. I finished the massive volume in a couple of days, and when I was done, I put it down for a day then picked it up and read it all again. I couldn't get enough. I had been an idiot. What I, in my hubris had dismissed as cartoony was brilliant storytelling, a genius in simplicity that let the characters and emotional weight of the tale carry the narrative and sweep the reader through it all. It is simply, one of the best adventure stories I have ever read, but it is also so much more than an adventure story. It works on so many levels and the layers are so subtly crafted there's always more to dig into and find. It excels in all the things a great fantasy work does-epic adventure, heroes you can root for, fascinating world-building etc. It has all the elements of a great drama, and it is a visual narrative that is both effective and breathtaking. The panels and pages are masterworks of carrying the reader through the story, but there are panels that just make you stop and soak in the beauty of it. I don't think I have ever been more wrong about a comic than I was with my initial assessment of Bone, dismissing it without giving it a chance. I regret taking so long to experience, but I am glad I did, and I look forward to diving into it again several more times in my lifetime. For those who haven't read Rose, it is a prequel to the Bone Saga featuring one of the characters in the Bone saga in her youth. It stands up well on its own, as does Bone itself, but the Rose storyline adds a lot of depth to the world and backmatter to the story Smith is telling in Bone itself."