A Bone to pick

One of my favorite comic boo—er, graphic novels is Jeff Smith's Bone. I only managed to collect one of the original comics, but I did get my hand on a few of the hardback editions of the collected series. The first two or three are the best, when the Bone cousins are exploring a world into which they accidentally wandered. It's lighthearted, innocent, and optimistic. Then a "serious" story emerges, and it's all downhill from there. I don't mean that in a bad way: simply put, things become dark, and an epic story emerges and unfolds. I think I would have liked it more if Smith hadn't attempted to make an epic out of it, but the plot remains interesting, the art remains gorgeous, and the stupid, stupid rat creatures remain entertaining, so I did finish the whole thing.

My son also likes Bone. I don't have all the hardcover editions, so he hasn't read some of them. I recently bought volumes 3 and 4 (I already had volumes 1, 2, 5, and 9) and I saw to my dismay that the new publisher, Scholastic, has colorized them.

At first, I thought it was awful. Black and white comics don't often take well to colorizing; there's a certain warmth to a well-done comic that turns ugly when you colorize it. By the end of the second comic, I decided the problem was really my attachment to the older versions, and the colorization is excellent.