Comic Sutra, Feb. 2007

The third meeting of our comic book reading club, Comic Sutra will meet on the evening of Tuesday, February 20th, 2007. Our reading for this meeting will be the the graphic novel Bone by Jeff Smith (writer and artist).

The Amazon link for the book is given below:

Bone: One Volume Edition (Paperback)

Please note that this is the one-volume collection of all the Bone trade paperbacks. It is a 1300 pages long, but a surprisingly fast and enjoyable read. An Amazon review follows:

Mere months after publishing the final installment of the long-running fantasy saga Bone, Smith collects all 13 years' worth of it in a single, massive volume. As many comics fans know, the series chronicles the adventures of the Bone cousins--plucky Fone Bone, scheming Phony Bone, and easygoing Smiley Bone-- who leave their home of Boneville and are swept up in a Tolkienesque epic of royalty, dragons, and unspeakable evil forces out to conquer humankind. The compilation makes it evident how fully formed Smith's vision was from the very beginning--although the early chapters emphasized comedy, as do the final pages, the tale quickly found its dramatic bearings. His remarkably accomplished drawing style, in the manner of such comics masters as Walt Kelly and Carl Barks, was fully formed from the start, too. Libraries that have missed out on individual Bone series titles should seize this opportunity to make up for the fact, and those who have collected the series all along will do well to acquire the collected edition to supplement or supplant those doubtless well-worn volumes. But be prepared for overdues: even the most voracious readers will be hard-pressed to get through this hefty, phone book-like tome before they're supposed to return it.