Bone

I finally finished reading all 1,300+ pages of Bone: The One Volume Edition which collects all 55 issues of Jeff Smith's independent comic Bone. It took a while to get through after numerous attempts to read it over the last 2 years. 55 issues is a lot of anything. Overall, Bone is good but falls short of being great.

I got a very Lord of the Rings feel from the book - at its root, there's a quest involved and a power they must stop. At the end of the LoTR movies, I felt like saying, "Huh." The quest in the movies didn't seem to be an impossible task with consequences, it just took a while to do. Bone is quite entertaining along the way, though. I was surprised by how funny the book is - quite a few pages and panels had me laughing, but the tone gets more serious as it goes on.

The story revolves around three Bone cousins who get run out of their home, Boneville. They end up in the Valley and entangled in a plot involving dragons, a princess, an ancient cult and a bad dude named the Lord of the Locusts that's trying to come back to destroy everything. All of Smith's characters are lovable, from the Bone cousins, Thorn, Lucius to minor characters like Ted the Bug. Yes, a small talking bug.

It's available as the black and white One Volume edition for about $40 (or cheaper used on Amazon) and it's also being reprinted in color as a children's book series, if you want to see some more shading and background elements. I guess I was expecting a little more out of Bone, but it's far from being disappointing. Entertaining and quite funny is more than you get out of most books these days.