I decided that what had gotten me first following comics. It was Jeff Smith's Bone. While some of
my peers got into X-Men and Batman comics first because of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I do enjoy). I was more of a Disney fan. I grew up in a time where there were Disney cartoons that were syndicated on the local WSBK 38 television station. Next to the digest size Archie comics at the supermarket checkouts were these little Disney magazines called "Disney Adventures." In 1997, Disney Adventures was doing something that stood out to me. I found an old Disney Adventures from December 1997 (the cover story was an interview where Robin Williams was promoting Flubber). In there with the likes of Timon & Pumbaa and Recess was a passage from a comic that didn't seem in any way connected to Disney. Looking through the masthead tonight, I'm realizing how Bone got in there. Bone is primarily for DC's Dark Horse imprint, and at the time, Heidi MacDonald was the editor at Dark Horse and the Disney Adventures comics section.
The Bone features in Disney Adventures abruptly ended, and I didn't begin to catch up with the series until I was graduating from college. About 10 years after Bone was featured in Disney Adventures, the Graphix imprint at Scholastic started releasing volumes of the complete series. It took time for Graphix to release all 9 volumes, and I was tempted to buy the Dark Horse paperback collection. The problem with the Dark Horse book that I found was that it was in black & white. Remembering how beautiful Bone looked in color, I held out for Graphix.
This post is just promoting the first volume, so I won't reveal too much. Titled "Out From Boneville", we're introduced to three Bone creatures named Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone. They're being run out of Boneville for reasons that we don't know, and get caught up in a swarm of locusts. Losing track of his cousins, Fone Bone finds shelter in a forest. He camps there fora few seasons, befriending the local animals and trying to avoid Kingdok's rat creatures. He learns from these little animals of a kind young woman (Thorn) who lives in a cottage with her grandmother. Thorn takes him in so that he has a place to stay while looking for his cousins. The gritty farmwork that Gran'ma Ben leads Thorn and eventually two bones through isn't for everyone. Towards the end, we find out that Thorn has some mystical gifts, but that is at the hectic climax of the first volume.
I love the Bone books, and I think that many will too. It's sort of like if you combined the Redwall novels, the Tolkien books, and the comic medium. Maybe some of the Legend of Zelda series. Over the course of the story, you see the see the art style get a little less rounded as the stories intensify. There's even a fun little story about two rat creature partners who are trying to catch the (small mammals), and one insists on putting Fone Bone in a sophisticated little quiche. I used to work at a supermarket with some fellow comic fans, and on the weekends, a variety of quiches were in the prepared foods hot bar. Parodying an old Disney song, I would sing:
"Let's all eat with the rat creatures eat.
Quiche.
Quiche. Quiche.
Quiche. Quiche."
You can check out the accompanying "Excuse Me While I Gush" video by clicking here. I'm going to continue with the Bone segments before getting into the superhero books. I got into the X-Books during the Morrison era (thanks to Bryan Singer's first X-Men film), and will lead into the stories with some Generation X, and a big crossover event.
