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utilitymonstergirlWhen I went to see my family for Thanksgiving I was reunited with my omnibus copy of Jeff Smith's masterpiece Bone. I'd read it all previously, but it was great to return to it with much more experience in art and life, and I devoured it all over again during my two-day trip. In no particular order, here are some comments and observations:
-I love the efficiency of storytelling: the first page lays out the three Bones’ personalities and predicament, and by the end of book 1 we’ve seen Kingdok, the Hooded One, and Thorn’s recurring dreams.
-The publication structure feels a lot like the common format for manga: chapters were published as individual issues, then collected into nine volumes, then bundled into an omnibus. I wonder if that was a deliberate influence or just convergent evolution.
-Jesus Christ, this ran for thirteen years, spanning huge changes in the art and business of comics and publishing writ large. Kudos to Jeff Smith for sticking with it and wrapping it up in a satisfying way.
-Ted the Bug absolutely has the voice of Coach Z.
-The distance models for the characters are thoroughly charming and distinctive. I need to do some composition/rendering studies of these panels, goddamn.
-I like how the genre and style mashups keep stretching further back in time, from the modern civilization of the Bones to the valley's pre-electric pastoralism to Atheia's ancient fantasy. There's a great sense of the world's layers both peeling back and intermingling, before colliding spectacularly. (The return of Smiley's campaign balloon is extremely funny in a way that doesn't undercut the horror, but instead builds up the sense of everything being out of place and wrong.)
-Bone is a fascinating case study in building up a Nonsense Limit - the valley's humans aren't shocked by the existence of the Bones, the Bones aren't shocked by talking animals, and the valley's disbelief in dragons feels like an outlier until we learn that the dragons want to stay hidden. This nicely sets up the reveals of how dragons interact with the world's politics and religion, and along the way we've got things like "snow falls in one thick layer at once" to ease the transition into more structured fantasy.
-I love the efficiency of storytelling: the first page lays out the three Bones’ personalities and predicament, and by the end of book 1 we’ve seen Kingdok, the Hooded One, and Thorn’s recurring dreams.
-The publication structure feels a lot like the common format for manga: chapters were published as individual issues, then collected into nine volumes, then bundled into an omnibus. I wonder if that was a deliberate influence or just convergent evolution.
-Jesus Christ, this ran for thirteen years, spanning huge changes in the art and business of comics and publishing writ large. Kudos to Jeff Smith for sticking with it and wrapping it up in a satisfying way.
-Ted the Bug absolutely has the voice of Coach Z.
-The distance models for the characters are thoroughly charming and distinctive. I need to do some composition/rendering studies of these panels, goddamn.
-I like how the genre and style mashups keep stretching further back in time, from the modern civilization of the Bones to the valley's pre-electric pastoralism to Atheia's ancient fantasy. There's a great sense of the world's layers both peeling back and intermingling, before colliding spectacularly. (The return of Smiley's campaign balloon is extremely funny in a way that doesn't undercut the horror, but instead builds up the sense of everything being out of place and wrong.)
-Bone is a fascinating case study in building up a Nonsense Limit - the valley's humans aren't shocked by the existence of the Bones, the Bones aren't shocked by talking animals, and the valley's disbelief in dragons feels like an outlier until we learn that the dragons want to stay hidden. This nicely sets up the reveals of how dragons interact with the world's politics and religion, and along the way we've got things like "snow falls in one thick layer at once" to ease the transition into more structured fantasy.
-Kingdok is so fucking shaped, and I love how it’s never explained what his taxonomic relation is to the other rat creatures.
-I love Roque Ja as an exploration of "what if a key geopolitical actor had the personality of a surly, asocial cat?" Also, I'm not sure if this smug macro mountain lion with visible testicles is a detectable part of why I'm the person I am today, but I can't rule it out, y'know?
-Years ago I was annoyed at how much of the story's middle was taken up by characters getting lost and making bad decisions, but now I understand that it's a war story and that's the point. Once the war breaks out, this has to be a story of communication failures, forced and unforced errors, infighting, power grabs, shaky coalitions, insubordination, and random coincidences for better and for worse. Sure, Rose handily wins Atheia's power struggle when Tarsil acts like a chest-thumping idiot and dies, but Lucius dies too for tackling Briar at exactly the wrong moment. So it goes.
-I would die for Bartleby.
-I love Roque Ja as an exploration of "what if a key geopolitical actor had the personality of a surly, asocial cat?" Also, I'm not sure if this smug macro mountain lion with visible testicles is a detectable part of why I'm the person I am today, but I can't rule it out, y'know?
-Years ago I was annoyed at how much of the story's middle was taken up by characters getting lost and making bad decisions, but now I understand that it's a war story and that's the point. Once the war breaks out, this has to be a story of communication failures, forced and unforced errors, infighting, power grabs, shaky coalitions, insubordination, and random coincidences for better and for worse. Sure, Rose handily wins Atheia's power struggle when Tarsil acts like a chest-thumping idiot and dies, but Lucius dies too for tackling Briar at exactly the wrong moment. So it goes.
-I would die for Bartleby.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-20 08:42 am (UTC)One thing that’s stayed with me from the blurring of cartoon toward epic fantasy: the running Moby Dick gag, and the way it keeps ramping up until it’d be forced to become a major military weapon if it wasn’t gracefully put down.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-20 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-20 09:00 pm (UTC)