52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
19: Bone, Volume 1: Out from Boneville.
My friend Jeff, from Columbus, Ohio, has long praised this series. He’s a comic book aficionado, and unabashed in his love for the form, and I think at least an acquaintance of the author. He often indicated (if I recall correctly) that Bone was harmless and, I inferred, a good introduction to the form for kids. Recently at an event, I saw a young boy just a little older than Abe reading one of these. I know Abe is fascinated by comic strips, and we’re reading The Hobbit, so I checked this out to see — could we read it together?
Bone may or may not be harmless. I’m not entirely sure. It has good elements — it’s not superhero-based or explicitly sexual or violent. It’s a lot of fun, and mostly innocent. Smith is obviously in love with a broad spectrum of the history of his form. Pogo, L’il Abner, ElfQuest, Scrooge McDuck, Krazy Kat, Cerebus — all are referenced strongly enough for even a novice like me to notice, and this is just the first volume. His pen is expressive without being overly busy.
The other influence, and the one that worries me, is the strong Frank Cho/Liberty Meadows thread: cute animals innocently and not-so-innocently in love with realistic beautiful women. It strings back to Tex Avery, and it’s so inextricably linked to the very DNA of comic books that I wonder if I’ll ever feel comfortable reading anything but Calvin and Hobbes to Abe. Bone is very tame, don’t get me wrong, but the suggestion is strongly there. Part of me figures that Abe will get to this stuff eventually, and it’s probably better if he navigates it with me first, so that he feels comfortable talking to me about it when he ventures into it on his own. But the other part of me rails against the insidiousness of it all — that this is the gateway into orientations to the whole subject that are so destructive for young boys: subverted longing, hidden away.
The other issue is that the monsters are very scary, and the king of the monsters is a very Dementor-like spectre and an obvious proxy for the Death archetype. Since this is a visual medium, I want to be careful with my children.
I like this Bone, but I have decades of experience from which to interpret it. I may save it for a few years before I read it with Abe.
Thanks for that third paragraph, Josh! I honestly wish I hadn’t read Liberty Meadows as a child. Sure, it wasn’t as influential as TV suggestiveness, but Cho’s sensual women still stuck in my young mind. I don’t really have any advice on which route you could take with Abe, I just appreciate you bringing this up as a valid issue. Sensuality is not to be taken lightly!
mikey. April 1st. 2010. 11:31 am.
Thanks, Mikey. I put it this way on another site, discussing this with a friend:
“It’s not the anthropomorphism. Or, it’s partly that. It’s that kids project themselves onto ‘universally identifiable characters’ like Fone Bone (I mean, he’s almost literally a blank slate). And then they’re the ones in the transaction where they see a flash of thigh and fall in ‘love.’ There’s power in the body, and Smith creates the perfect proxy to invite kids into that particular perception of/relationship with the body. And I’m never terribly comfortable with that aspect of comics.”
jnonfiction. April 1st. 2010. 11:47 am.