Terrific news over on the Boneville blog – the enormous (1300 odd pages) Bone One Volume Edition is returning from out-of-print limbo this autumn. Jeff Smith’s masterpiece crops up on many critics’ lists of top graphic novels, while Time magazine selected it as one of their ten greatest graphic novels of all time. The Fantagraphics crew of the excellent The Comics Journal (TCJ as we usually refer to it – check out our continuing bonzer deal on TCJ subscriptions) named it as Book of the Year when it came out – and the TCJ folks know (and love) good comics work when they read it.
According to the blog some 50, 000 copies of the One Volume Edition were sold before it went out of print, which is a huge number, especially for an independent graphic novel. It certainly makes us happy here to see it coming back into print since a number of the FPI crew reckon it one of the best graphic novels around too – we’re as happy as (dare I say it) a dog with a new Bone (sorry). The new colour versions of Bone from Scholastic continue this summer with paperback and hardback colour editions of the fourth volume, Dragonslayer.
Don’t just take my word for it, see what top British SF author James Lovegrove had to say about it when he picked it as one of his top ten favourite graphic novels:
“Bone is in many ways traditional fantasy. It has all the staples: a magical kingdom, an imperilling evil, an orphaned princess who does not know the truth of her origins, and even dragons. But the three central characters, the Bone cousins, are weird, cartoony, Schmoo-like creatures, visually at odds with the naturalistically depicted world around them – a conceit that could only be pulled off in comics – and are rounded, conflicted individuals who manage to become heroes almost in spite of themselves. Writer/artist Jeff Smith has composed a 1,000-page epic which succeeds in breathing new life into old tropes.”
Wed, Jun 28, 2006
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