Fan Fiction Update

It looks like it's about time to put up another chapter of my ongoing Bone-based fan fiction.

The Chronicles of Fone Bone Oathbreaker

Chapter 4: Birth

In this chapter, the ominous foreshadowings of chapter 3 bear fruit: dark events occur in Atheia and Boneville, hinting at forthcoming bloodshed, and shocking secrets are revealed that stretch continuity with the comic books to the breaking point.

But who cares about that stuff? What's really important is that this chapter at last introduces the cute school teacher! (Don't even get me started on cute school teachers.) I originally threw in this character because I wanted to see if I could paint a relationship similar to the one between Fone Bone and Thorn, but with the genders reversed. However, in chapters 5 through 9, I found myself writing the story for a specific young woman who had been giving enthusiastic critiques to each new chapter, and as a result, this character came darn close to taking over the story. But I'm comfortable with that, as I found her an important role in the climax and conclusion.

I had to kick around a bit for a good teaser quote. Everything in this chapter is either too revealing or too badly written to be an appropriate teaser, but after some editing, I think this might work:

A shape emerged from the darkness. The void had condensed into a moving body and gathered around itself a swarming cloud. It was like a tornado seen from a distance, but one that was human in form. It had four massive limbs that tapered at the ends like claws. Its torso was thick like a pillar, and topping that pillar like a sinister capital was a gigantic Dreaming Eye gaping like a mouth. The Dreaming, appearing as cords and streamers of light, fell into the Eye in a swirling torrent like a whirlpool threatening to swallow the universe. [more...]

(Contains coarse language and sequences that may disturb sensitive readers. I promise.)

Fan Fiction Update

For those of you following my Bone-based fan fiction novel, chapter 3 is now posted.

The Chronicles of Fone Bone Oathbreaker

Chapter 3: The Courtship of Thorn Harvestar

If you've been waiting for the sexy parts, they're in here. This is the gooey chapter, but after this come six chapters that are gooey in a different sort of way. Originally, chapter 3 came with a warning at the beginning. I've removed it from this edition, but I'll reprint it here:

In the afterword to his famous play, Der Besuch Der Alten Dame, Friedrich Dürrenmatt explains the slapstick humor in an awkward seduction scene by saying he wanted to spare the audience the embarrassment felt by the characters. I, however, wish to spare neither audience nor characters, so I must apologize for this chapter ahead of time. Bear with me, dear readers, and we can get through this and on to the blood-and-guts parts.

Admittedly, I still think that's funny. Anyway, here's your tantalizing excerpt:

As Thorn’s duties--and Fone Bone’s own--grew numerous and wearisome, the pair saw less of each other in private. As Bone’s private life languished, his public life became more difficult. Bone had the task of upbraiding the Veni-yan general for the embarrassing affair with the assassin Erasmus. Since that time, Thorn traveled everywhere with a hand-selected Veni-yan guard, and an inquiry was underway to root out sedition in the military--and Fone Bone headed the inquiry. He discovered that, while loyalty to Tarsil himself was forgotten, bigotry against dragons and other non-humans ran deep. As Bone monitored the gossip among the soldiers and aristocrats, he heard more and more disturbing rumors and whispered accusations about himself... [more...]

Comics Review: Bone 7: Ghost Circles

After the apocalypse, attractive young women take off most of their clothes (but I thought they were supposed to ride Harleys, too).

Ghost Circles, written and illustrated by Jeff Smith. Color by Steve Hamaker. Bone, volume 7. Scholastic (New York): 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-439-70634-6. ISBN-10: 0-439-70634-3. $9.99. 150 pages. Full color.

Ghost Circles is the seventh of nine volumes of Bone, the comic book epic about a little cartoon character who falls in love with a woman and helps her save the universe. This volume begins the third trilogy, Harvest, in which the atmosphere changes drastically and the humor gives way to drama as the story rushes to its climax.

The book opens where Old Man's Cave left off: the rat creatures and their human allies begin the assault on the Northern Valley's only stronghold while Fone Bone and his companions rescue Thorn from the Hooded One's sacrifice. The interruption of the sacrifice causes a volcano in the Eastern Mountains to explode, laying waste the Valley and unleashing invisible pockets of the Dreaming known as Ghost Circles, which turn anyone who unwittingly enters them into an undead nightmare being. With the magical powers of her birthright at last manifesting themselves, Thorn must lead Fone Bone and the others through this wrecked landscape to find the holy city of Atheia, where they can mount a final defense against the armies of the Lord of the Locusts.

I expect that was gibberish to anyone who hasn't been reading these comics, and someone's probably TO'd that I described so much that happens so late in the story, but that's what you get for reading the plot synopsis for the seventh volume in a series, so there.

Probably not the most practical outfit to wear while trudging through a volcanic ash field in late Fall.

The tone of Bone changes markedly in this volume; previously, the transformation of the series from episodic humorous antics to full-scale epic was a gradual and imperceptible one, but when the mountain blows up, there's a clear break: the idyllic forest environments are gone, replaced with endless wreckage, a precursor to the urban environment that will occupy the final two volumes. And although the sense of humor isn't entirely dead, there isn't a lot to laugh at in Ghost Circles, either. The story is driven instead by well-placed action sequences and a lot of character development. Bone's relationship with Thorn, which is the heart of the series, also grows deeper and more ambiguous.

I think Bone just wants to hold hands.

Of all the volumes of Bone, which was originally published in black-and-white, Ghost Circles is probably the one that most demands color. A large number of the panels feature empty black backgrounds, in front of which the characters march through an ash-covered, rocky landscape. Steve Hamaker's coloring adds a great deal to the mood and helps to make the barren land more interesting. Over the course of this series, the quality of Hamaker's color has gone from that of a beginner to that of a master: whereas formerly the color sometimes called distracting attention to itself, in Ghost Circles Hamaker employs lighting effects and shading with great subtlety. See how effectively he uses light in this panel:

Don't just stand there. Do something awesome!

In this volume, the Bone cosmology gets more development, for while trekking through the valley and punching their way through carnivorous rat creatures, Bone and the gang have time to discuss religious matters. The mythology of Bone is (very loosely) based on the Australian Dreamtime by way of Jungian psychology with a little added flourish from India: it involves a mystical otherworld called the Dreaming, in which dwells the Lord of the Locusts, who is trying to break into the physical world by possessing a mortal. The three Bone cousins, who come from a modern society, react to the talk about the Dreaming in different ways: Smiley Bone, apparently credulous, accepts it whole-heartedly while Phoney Bone, a materialist, rejects all of it even when he is hard-pressed to explain what's going on. Fone Bone, the moderate, tries to please everybody and ends up pleasing nobody.

When confronted with magical occurrences he is unable to explain, Fone Bone is a ready believer in the Dreaming and all that goes with it, but when things calm down, he is usually found trying to give naturalistic explanations. Smiley Bone points this out:

FONE BONE: I'm afraid Phoney's right, all this Dreaming stuff is hooey.

SMILEY: You didn't think it was hooey when we were up on the ridge and we thought Thorn had been KILLED.

FONE BONE: What are you talking about?

SMILEY: We didn't know where Thorn was... You closed your eyes and you could tell--without even SEEING HER--that she was ALIVE!

FONE BONE: What? I don't remember that! [p. 56]

Fone Bone's attempts to compromise between the Valley-dwellers' belief and his own disbelief evoked outrage on a previous occasion: in volume 5, Rock Jaw, Bone gets in an argument with an irate beaver who calls the Dreaming "hum-hum":

FONE BONE: Well, actually, where WE come from there IS no HUM-HUM so--

BEAVER: That's not TRUE! It's everywhere! It's STRONGER in some places, but it's EVERYWHERE! [p. 87]

In these sequences, Smith captures in a humorous way the frustrations of trying to find a compromise between incompatible belief systems without coming out and saying that one belief system or another must be wrong. Today, probably the most pernicious form of such compromising philosophy is called pluralism. Pluralism holds all religions, or at least all world religions, to be fundamentally true even though they are in blatant disagreement with each other. The pluralist achieves this religious compromise by misunderstanding and misinterpreting religions, usually by ignoring their doctrinal precepts and focusing on a watered-down version of their moral teachings.

For example, pluralist philosopher John Hick, in his book The Fifth Dimension, defines pluralism as "the name that has been given to the idea that the great world religions are different human responses to the same ultimate transcendent reality" (p. 77). After praising all religions in this fashion, he turns around and attacks Christianity:

However, when the Christian myth [of the Incarnation] is taken literally its central theme develops some dangerous implications. For if Jesus was literally God, in the sense of being the second Person of the Godhead living a human life, it follows that Christianity alone among the world religions was founded by God in person, and is thus God's own religion, uniquely superior to all others. [p. 237]

He's right, of course, but as a pluralist he cannot tolerate such exclusivism. He goes on to speculate gleefully that the doctrine of the Incarnation will be dead in about fifty years' time. So in Hick's pluralistic view, Christianity is great--as long as it isn't Christianity. To accord with Hick's pluralism, Christianity and all other religions must lose their central tenets and die, yet Hick presents pluralism as generous and all-encompassing because it supposedly respects all religions.

Hick, like most pluralists, utterly distorts the religions he discusses. As he openly admits, his only real interest in religions is in their "basic ethical teachings" (p. 227, emphasis in original). Hick sweeps away all the ideas of the religions he examines and leaves only the morals that he considers basic, and you damn well better believe that a pluralist will never consider any uncomfortable or inconvenient ethical teachings to be part of the basics. Hick is not really as interested in, or as respectful of, religions as he claims to be. To him, they are merely props or excuses for his own religious system.

Religious pluralism, in tune with the faddish religion of Tolerance for All, is an invitation to intellectual laxness. The great error of pluralism is an utter lack of self-awareness. Pluralists set up their own beliefs as the ultimate truth and as the real meaning behind all religions. In other words, pluralists teach pluralism as dogma--but they do not recognize it as dogma. Indeed, they go so far as to attack and criticize other religions for presenting their teachings dogmatically. The Christian, on the other hand, is self-aware: he knows that he considers all other belief systems, to a greater or lesser degree, to be false. The pluralist considers all other belief systems to be false, but claims at the same time that he holds all belief systems to be true. I daresay there is no system of religious thought more dogmatic, more exclusivistic, or more triumphalist than pluralism, yet the pluralist wastes his time attacking dogmatism, exclusivism, and triumphalsm. That is why a Christian trying to communicate with a pluralist can experience as much frustration as a beaver trying to communicate with Fone Bone: the pluralist wants to have his cake and eat it too, to champion religion in the same breath he is attacking it, and to compromise with everyone while at the same time trumpeting his own beliefs as the ultimate truth at last discovered by his overwhelming intellectual prowess.

Besides its logical inconsistency, pluralism's other tragic error is in failing to recognize that "basic ethical principles" do not exist in a vacuum, but stem from the underlying theological precepts of the religions that teach them. Christianity does not teach Christians to do as they would be done by because it's nice and sentimental to do so, but because humans have inherent dignity and because God is loving and Christians must imitate him in preparation to live with him for eternity. Buddhism does not teach that Buddhists should do as they would be done by because it's nice and sentimental to do so, but because they want to be enlightened and enter Nirvana. People's behaviors are built on a bedrock of beliefs and ideas: the man who believes humans are created in God's image will struggle to treat them as though they are created in God's image, but the man who believes humans are mere animals will treat them as though they are mere animals, or if he doesn't, his intellectual descendants will. As G. K. Chesterton argues in Heretics, it is impossible to build a system of ethics on mere sentiment. Pluralism empties religions of their theology in an attempt to leave their ethics naked, but in the end, the ethics too will be lost.

Any attempt to compromise two irreconcilable worldviews will result in such unforeseen loss. Because pluralism is not a coherent philosophy and never can be, the ethics it champions are based on nothing but sentiment; as a result, they must necessarily shift when sentiments shift; they can never transcend immediate circumstances or the whims of the age. They cannot stand throughout time and challenge us to do more or believe more than most of us were willing to do or believe already. They cannot inspire us to be better people. Something like this is evident in Ghost Circles, in which the central dogmatic believer in the Dreaming, Gran'ma Ben, has a defined goal toward which she works: she wishes to defeat the Lord of the Locusts and save the Valley. But Fone Bone, who wants to have it both ways, finally exclaims in a difficult moment, "Who cares about the stupid WAR? We're just trying to SURVIVE!" (p. 110). Without definite beliefs, a man can have no definite ethics.

Content Advisory: Contains mild action violence.

The Sci Fi Catholic's Rating for Bone 7: Ghost Circles:

Myth Level: High (heroes on a quest)

Quality: High (Jeff Smith's art and storytelling remain unimpeachable, and Hamaker's color has reached new levels of awesomeness)

Ethics/Religion: High (some interesting themes in preparation for the final volumes)

Fan Fiction Update

I was originally planning to update every two weeks, but since the hits have slowed down, and since the first chapter is only a small taste, I've decided to put up Chapter 2 of my Bone-based fan fiction novel a little ahead of schedule.

The Chronicles of Fone Bone Oathbreaker

Chapter 2, "Back to Boneville"

This chapter is much more substantial than the previous one, which was merely a teaser. Now the story is underway: Phoney and Smiley return to their old tricks in Boneville while Thorn and Fone Bone learn that ruling a fairy tale kingdom isn't all it's cracked up to be.

This chapter begins introducing the numerous original characters who will fill out the story. Probably the one of which I'm most fond is the barber Floyd Bone, who first makes his appearance in chapter 2:

Floyd Bone XI, the tenth successor to the original Floyd Bone, was one of the few male bones with hair on his head. His hair billowed out in luxurious, tight strawberry curls, so from a distance he was frequently mistaken for a girl. Floyd was tall and thin, almost as tall as Smiley, and his face had unusual deep hollows at the cheeks. His nose was strangely small and his eyes oddly bright, and the nasty rumor around town was that one of the Floyds in that venerable line had produced these traits by a tryst with a human wench from Portsmouth, though Floyd XI denied it and even insisted he had a pedigree. When he wore his leather apron and held scissors and razors in his big hands, Floyd looked like some strange, primeval god of ritual hair removal. [more...]

Fan Fiction...*sigh*...Again

After conferring with my priest and being told that fan fiction is not morally problematic if it is noncommercial, and after reading an article by a lawyer indicating that fan fiction is not legally problematic if it is noncommercial, I have decided, against my better judgment, to restore my Bone fan fiction to the Internet. You are all invited to read and review--nay, skewer--this work. I produced it in my younger days (that is, about three years ago) and am embarrassed by some of its contents, though other parts I'm still pleased with. Then again, I'm kind of embarrassed by the whole thing since it is, you know, fan fiction.

It is a full length novel, and so I will be producing it in serial fashion, with a new chapter about every two weeks. It assumes reader knowledge of the entirety of Bone.

Because I rate other people's content on this blog, it is only fair I should rate my own, so be warned: this work contains coarse language, excessively ornamented prose, graphic violence, sexual angst, a kissing scene, copious quantities of certain bodily fluids, lurid blood-rites, gratuitous biblical references, cute school-teachers (don't even get me started on cute school-teachers), blood-sucking monsters, large-caliber firearms, cliched dialogue, literary allusions, hunky men with German accents, preachy parts, and exactly one ill-timed, inappropriate, and ultimately ineffective joke on the genre of slash fan fiction. Otherwise, the whole thing really isn't very good.

(Someone here once suggested I write bodice-rippers; well, consider this a PG-rated bodice-ripper.)

A derivative work this bloated and audacious deserves an equally derivative, bloated, and audacious title, so here it is, with the link to FanFiction.net where this monster is posted:

The Chronicles of Fone Bone Oathbreaker:
Being an Account of the Second Bonewar,
the Rise of the New Locust,
and the Fall of the House of Harvestar

Bone Slated to Become a Movie (or Three?)

Last night, I was talking to Lucky the Goldfish and she was going on and on about true feelings or something (I wasn't really listening), when I decided to turn the conversation to something interesting, like comic books. I was just getting warmed up on an impromptu lecture on the subject when Lucky interrupted and asked, "How come you haven't blogged on the movie adaptation of Bone?"

I said, "What movie adaptation?"

Lucky rolled her little eyes, flopped onto the keyboard, and flailed around until she had hit the right buttons to bring up this news article at Rotten Tomatoes:

The comic book adventures of Jeff Smith's popular Bone brothers may have ended in 2004, but if all goes according to plan, they'll soon be making the transition to the big screen.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has picked up the screen rights to Smith's creations; though the studio hasn't decided whether to go the live-action or animated route, a production crew -- including Dan Lin and Jon Silk -- has been assembled. [more...]

This is good news to me, of course, as I am an enormous fan of Bone. It was inevitable that someone would try to adapt it for screen eventually, but I admit I had hoped it would be Disney, which shows signs of rebuilding its 2D animation department.

Hollywood Reporter has the best article on the subject, but the information is scanty as yet. According to author/illustrator Jeff Smith's blog, Boneville.com, about all that has happened so far is a phone conversation between himself and Warner Bros. Smith is slated to be executive producer. This is the second attempt at a movie of Bone. The first deal was with Nickelodeon, but that fell through, according to Smith, mainly because Nickelodeon wanted to insert pop songs.

Fans are of course speculating about how the film will be made. Most, including me, will want it to be done with 2D animation, and Smith indicates that he would prefer a traditional cartoon himself. Live action and CGI have been mentioned as well. I have grown to dislike CGI over the last few years and feel it would take away much of what makes Bone special. As for a live action movie, I once thought it was a good idea, but the next morning, after I had sobered up, I realized it would be a huge mistake: watching a tender moment between a computer-generated Fone Bone and a live actress playing Thorn would be painful. It's even painful to think about. Besides that, none of the women in Hollywood who look the part of Thorn can act worth a darn.

I guarantee the film adaptation will be quite bad, no matter how skilled its cast and crew, unless it is extended over two or three movies. It would be impossible to stuff Smith's epic into one film: even if dispensable subplots like the Great Cow Race were deleted (a move that would anger the fans), the comic still has too much material to fit into two hours. A two-hour epic is inevitably rushed and under-developed.

Fans of the comic are already clamoring for a 2D film and expressing distaste for CGI, and I hope Warner Bros. listens. Given the increasing mainstreaming of anime fandom, the success of The Simpsons Movie, and the general displeasure with computer-generated animation, I suspect America may at last be ripe for the production of a well-made 2D cartoon marketed to adults. Bone is an ideal title for such a project. I'm inclined to think they should make it after the fashion Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Rings movies, remaining reasonably faithful to the source material while amping up the grittier and darker elements. In Bone, they could probably place emphasis on the violence, the angsty parts, and the Freudian symbolism without driving away the family crowd, though I confess I look forward to the hubbub some of my fellow Christians will make if the infamous "bathing scene" makes it to film; that will give me at least a week's worth of enjoyable posts to write.

Totally Random Stuff that Has No Place on This Blog

I haven't mentioned it, but I'm actually in the field and will be until next Thursday. But that doesn't mean I have nothing to talk about. No way.

This may embarrass all of you, but I'm able to see what it is that brings readers to this site. Frequently, they get here from Google searches. Searches for "scificatholic," "sci-fi catholic," and "sci fi catholic" often bring readers here (um, hello, the blog is actually http://www.scificatholic.com/, so you don't really need to search, do you?). I have found people also arrive by doing image searches for Bone comic book covers, which I find bemusing, since I'm pretty sure I haven't displayed any (I like to be more casual and subtle when I violate copyrights). Naturally, people also get here by looking for reviews, especially Christian reviews, of certain books or movies. Al Capone Does My Shirts is popular, though the big essay on Bone remains the number one draw.

But once, just once, someone got to this blog by searching for "naked men pictures." Believe me, I'm as confused as you are (but not nearly as confused as that guy). Even if a search for "naked men pictures" brings up a link to The Sci Fi Catholic, which is weird enough, why would anyone click on it? I picture some dude on his computer, muttering to himself, "Man, I gotta see me some o' them naked men pictures! Oh hey look, Catholic book reviews...well, I guess I can do that instead." This may be the first time in the history of the human race that religion has distracted from sex rather than the other way around.

Though I don't know why any past searches for "naked men pictures" would bring up this blog, I am, as you can tell from this post, determined that any future searches for "naked men pictures" will bring up this blog. Naked men pictures. I mean seriously, naked men pictures.

P.S. You will notice that the image at the top of this post does not fall into the category of naked men pictures. The man in the image is fully clothed, so don't write in with complaints. There are no naked men pictures on this site, except maybe for the image adorning my discussion of Thomas Moore's "The Loves of the Angels," which is still my favorite poem, but that doesn't count because that's serious art, so it too fails to qualify for the "naked men pictures" category. Besides, those are clearly naked angels.

(And in case you're wondering, that's actually me, that's actually my bookcase, and that's actually my custom-made Indiana Jones jacket.)

Bow, Mortals...

...before the glory of my Fone Bone Jack o'Lantern!

Book Review: The Art of Bone

Comic fans will need something to keep the drool off the pages.

The Art of Bone. Artwork by Jeff Smith et al, introduction by Lucy Shelton Caswell, and design by Cary Grazzini. Edited by Diana Schutz and Devae Marshall. Dark Horse (Milwaukie, OR): 2007. $39.95. 200 pages. ISBN-10: 1-59307-441-7, ISBN-13: 978-1-59307-441-8.

This is book is worth every cent of the cover price. It is gigantic (a foot tall) with gorgeous, enormous, full-color illustration throughout, and it costs no more than some hardback novels. And it contains not only much artwork that diehard Bone fans already know, but much that they almost certainly don't.

The history of the publication of Bone is complicated, to say the least. Self-published for a while, then published under Image, then self-published again with special short stories released in Disney Adventures Magazine and Wizard Presents, the three Complete Bone Adventures collections followed by the nine-volume series followed by two editions of the One Volume Edition followed by the Scholastic full-color versions and another One Volume Edition, not to mention greeting cards, guest art, T-shirts, Thorn strips from Smith's college days, rough drafts, comics from Smith's childhood, and a set of phone cards(!)--with all of that, I promise you you have not seen every picture in this book before.

And did I mention that the illustrations are gigantic? It makes me deeply regret the minuscule size of the Scholastic editions. Ah well, perhaps some giant-sized editions like they have in Norway will appear in a few years.

The volume opens with Mark Crilley's map of the Valley on the inside of the hard cover. It then continues with bold, black pages adding successive bits of text like the opening credits of a movie, each text presented opposite a giant image of one of the Bone cousins, until you arrive at last at a two-page spread of the enormous, glorious Bone logo. Following that, Lucy Shelton Caswell gives a brief but informative introduction (which includes an inset of one of my favorite images from the comic), followed by Diana Schutz's preface. After that, we're hip-deep in wonderful artwork, beginning with a lush presentation of the cover of Bone #37 framed by the line that first introduced us to Bone's mythological universe and hinted that this was to be more than a comic about cute talking animals: "Dreams are windows to the Spirit World...a world from which everyone comes and to which everyone must one day return." Awesome!

The book contains lots of big pictures of cover art, both from the original Cartoon Books publications and from some of the Image reprints, including one of my all-time favorite pictures, the Image cover to Bone #2, which shows Thorn and Bone's first meeting. The short story "May the Force Be with You," originally published in Disney Adventures Magazine and not to be found in the final compilation of the comic, appears here, as does the Thorn strip on which it's based. It involves, among other oddities, a scene in which Fone Bone, without losing his signature deadpan, gets swallowed by a giant eagle. The book also has some photographs of Hocking Hills State Park, Ohio, which Smith used for Bone's lush forest setting, and Kathmandu, which he uses for its exotic urban conclusion.

I think my new favorite image of Bone's two protagonists is the picture from a pair of phone cards released with the second anniversary issue of Combo Magazine. The picture features a grinning Thorn giving Fone Bone a hug. A phone card featuring a character named Fone seems quite appropriate.

Along with the numerous images are a number of captions and short paragraphs (presumably written by Diana Schutz) describing various aspects of the Bone saga. Regular readers here will already know of some of them: she identifies the "Dreaming," Bone's spirit world, with the Australian Dreamtime and notes that the characters Rose and Briar are a reference to "Sleeping Beauty." She reveals, as I had long suspected, that Smith's wife was the major inspiration for Thorn and discusses Smith's use of light and shadow and "camera" placement, the sort of things that many readers might not pick up. And even though Bone is a complex work featuring humor, adventure, a large cast of characters, an epic story arc, and a mythic backdrop, she writes, "The relationship between Thorn and Fone Bone is the axis on which the entire Bone epic turns, beginning as an innocent, though incendiary, crush and blossoming into a wholly trusting partnership" (p. 40). The Sci Fi Catholic certainly agrees.

The last half of the book discusses important plot points including the climax and conclusion. For that reason, though it may potentially entice new readers, The Art of Bone is best for those already familiar with Bone. For those afflicted with the same disease as myself, known as terminal Bone addiction, it is a must-have.

Up and Coming

I'm in the field now (things slow down here in the summer!) so I don't have a lot to tell you. I will, however, tell you some of what we have up and coming.

First of all, in the distant future, I will write that third and final essay on Bone...after the person who borrowed it gives it back (you know who you are).

Also in the distant, possibly less distant future, is an essay on those Harry Potter novels and what I think is a good way for Christians to view magic in fiction. This one requires some research and reading. You'll note over on the sidebar that I'm in the midst of Hans Christian Andersen, which will serve me when I write this one. I'll probably also give Andersen his own discussion.

To my temporal shame, I actually watched 300 recently. I want to give this a more-than-usual extensive discussion, so I have a few things to look at or up before I present the review, which you can anticipate this weekend. In the meanwhile, check out the review at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is a lot less harsh than I'm going to be. I also discovered the existence of an earlier movie on this subject, The 300 Spartans, though I haven't seen it.

I recently had opportunity to read the comic, The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. I was borrowing it, though, and had to give it back, so if I write it up I will have to do so entirely from memory. For a great Christian discussion of zombie comics, check out this fine post at the SF Gospel on the subject of religion and zombies. Check out this one, too.

Book Review: Bone 6: Old Man's Cave

Our heroes are bone tired, but one of them has a bone to pick. Yet this bone of contention will cut too near the bone!

Bone 6: Old Man's Cave by Jeff Smith. Color by Steve Hamaker. Scholastic (New York): 2007. 118 pages. $9.99. ISBN-13: 978-0-439-70635-3, ISBN-10: 0-439-70635-1.

The interlude of Rock Jaw is over. Rat creatures rampage across the northern Valley, Thorn discovers her magic powers as she leads the villagers to safety, and Fone Bone and Smiley find themselves lost in the forest. Meanwhile, the mysterious and evil Hooded One closes in on Phoney Bone, who is part of his plan to unleash the Lord of the Locusts on the world. Troubled by more mysterious dreams, Gran'ma's dishonesty, and her own confusion, Thorn makes rash decisions that could threaten not only herself and her friends, but the entire world.

This volume is the last of the so-called second Bone trilogy, variously titled Solstice or Phoney Strikes Back. It marks a distinct end of the series's light humor and brings to the fore the grimmer elements that will dominate the final trilogy. That's not to say Old Man's Cave isn't funny (it begins with a hilarious moment involving a grouchy ground hog), but the drama and action have taken center stage.

Steve Hamaker's coloring keeps getting better. His color accents Smith's artwork with numerous subtle shades and highlights. Panels that are lamp or firelit are particularly well done, and some light forest backgrounds have been added to panels that in the original black and white were mostly empty. The color gives Bone a lush look and feel appropriate to the setting and action and complementary to Smith's brushwork. It also highlights the distinct contrast between the humans and the cartoonish bones. In particular, when Bone and Thorn are arguing on pages 76 to 77, note the difference between Bone's blank white body and the carefully shaded cloak Thorn is carrying.

After her absence in the last comic, the return of Thorn is refreshing, and her reunion with Bone is very sweet. Plus, this is the volume where Thorn finally puts on the cool warrior outfit with the war paint that has become iconic of her character. I especially like that she's planning to go on a stealth mission while wearing bright red.


This is the volume that explains many of the story's mysteries; the following three volumes will be devoted to bringing the series through its climax and conclusion. Followers of Bone thus far will be pleased with the fast pace, the many revelations, the increased mythic tone, and the continuation of the quality artwork.

The Sci Fi Catholic's Rating for Bone 6: Old Man's Cave:

Myth Level: High (this volume brings in the Bone cosmogony)

Quality: High (good art and good storytelling combined)

Ethics Religion: High (nothing objectionable, a few good messages about trust, etc.)

Video Game Review: Bone 1 and 2

See the official website here.

The packing is well underway and I have three days to complete it, so I'm going to give you a post today. We haven't done a video game review yet, and according to my stats, the essays on Bone remain the most popular posts, so I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the video game adaptations. Don't count on a large number of game reviews in the future, at least from me; I'm a woefully inept gamer. I play little, use a laptop with no power, and have no television to which I can connect my nonexistent gaming console, assuming they still hook to televisions like they did in the old days when I played that cool talking spaceship game on a Texas Instrument.

Telltale Games, a small indie company, owns the license to the Bone video game adaptations, and they have produced two games so far, more-or-less covering the contents of Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race. Though I got stuck for a time on one of the puzzles in the second game, an experienced gamer could probably get through the games in about forty-five minutes each.

These are adventure games, done in 3-D. The player plays as the three Bone cousins and, at least in The Great Cow Race, is able to switch back and forth between them. The 3-D rendering is unfortunate but necessary, and the game designers have given Bone an appropriately lush but cartoonish look that captures the atmosphere of the comic reasonably well. The voice acting varies, but is generally good. Fone Bone sounds great, though sometimes I think he could have used a few shots of espresso before entering the recording booth. His geekiness, which in the comic is mitigated by occasional true grit, has in the games become terminal.

The first game, Out from Boneville, is inept in some ways. Although the game does a decent job of winnowing the story down to its important elements, some of the puzzles have nothing to do with that story but act instead as frustrating obstacles. The game has gone through two versions (and I've played both). Originally, it opened with the three Bone cousins, Fone , Phoney, and Smiley Bone, lost in the desert after being run out of Boneville; the new version begins with a lengthy, dull cutscene in which Thorn gives a narration of Bone's cosmogony from the text of Crown of Horns. No doubt the developers felt this was necessary to avoid exposition problems later on, but it is a serious departure from the comic, which only reveals the cosmogony after considerable preparation. The new version of Out from Boneville makes other minor changes, the most important of which are new, better voice actors for Thorn and Gran'ma and a new model for Thorn. The original Thorn's hair kept disappearing into her shoulders when she turned her head, an image was that was both distracting and unsettling.

The greatest frustration with Out from Boneville is the repetitiveness. After a locust swarm separates the Bones, the player has to guide Fone Bone into the Valley and lead him to his first encounter with Thorn, which, though less sexually charged than the same scene in the comic, is quite funny. After this, the player has to go through virtually the same exercise with Phoney Bone. Worst of all, the process of getting the characters to their goal involves two (two!) games of Hide 'n' Seek with the 'Possum kids. The 'Possums are minor characters in the books who spend an inordinate amount of time on center stage in the games, mostly for the purpose of frustrating one or the other of the Bones and, with them, the gamer.

Much of the story is told through dialogue trees, as is typical in adventure games. This points up one of the great troubles of the genre--pacing. Like many adventure games, Out from Boneville is sluggish and consists largely of interactive narration. For that reason, many of the jokes are less funny and snappy than they have a right to be. This is particularly unfortunate because much of the humor and clever dialogue is original to the games and does not appear in the comic books.

Some of my initial objections are probably unavoidable in the transference from comic to game. Many times I complained, "They're just standing there!" There's plenty of talking in the comic, but the characters are usually doing something interesting while they're at it. In the game, they, well, they just stand there, though the designers wisely gave each of the characters a signature gesture. Phoney likes to smack his fist into his palm, and there's a halfhearted attempt at depicting Thorn's oral fixation: her hand moves to her mouth a number of times but never does anything when it gets there. There's an error here, however, and artistically it's a serious one: one of Thorn's signature gestures is to cross her arms. This shuts her off from the other characters and from the player; instead of instantly connecting with Bone as she does in the comic, Thorn in the video game appears to barely tolerate him.

The Great Cow Race is infinitely better. The puzzles are smarter, the dialogue funnier, and the plot bigger. Especially nice, the player has freedom to switch back and forth between the three Bones at will, so if he's stuck, he can simply go do another puzzle elsewhere. Sometimes this produces weird results, however; when I played, I got through a number of puzzles with Phoney and then Fone Bone walked into the bar and complained that Thorn was hanging out with some other guy. I exclaimed, "She is?!?" As I played it, Thorn's snubbing Bone for Tom didn't take place until much later.

Some of The Great Cow Race's puzzles are clever and original. In particular, you have to walk around and find imagery to help Fone Bone write Thorn a love poem. You can mix and match the images, and then Ted the Bug will give a comment on the poem. I particularly liked, "Your teeth are as white as Moby-Dick...." When it comes, the actual Cow Race is brilliant; it's fast-paced and makes a satisfying climax for the game.

Some of the dialogue expands on comments from the comic. In the comic book, Fone Bone says sarcastically to Phoney, "I wouldn't trust you to hold an ice cream cone!" In the video game, you can elaborate that by having Phoney exclaim, "I only ate your ice cream that one time!" to which Fone Bone replies, "I was little, and it was my birthday!" The writers for the game also poke gentle fun at some of Bone's absurdities; for example, Fone Bone wonders aloud why anyone is interested in the Cow Race at all when Gran'ma wins every year.

But the greatest part about this game is Moby-Dick. Fone Bone has his trusty copy of his favorite novel in his knapsack, and you can make him pull it out and read relevant passages to the different characters. I don't envy the poor intern who must have combed the novel to find a passage for each character. Moby-Dick's great and all, but once was enough for me.

It would be too much to ask, but I hope that in the future games they do a better job of capturing the relationship between Bone and Thorn. In the games so far, most of the hugging and hand-holding have been replaced with standing opposite each other and talking (while crossing arms). Thorn comes across as uninterested and uninteresting, and in The Great Cow Race she is remarkably moody; she sits and broods by herself for however long it takes to get Fone Bone to walk around the fair and think of dumb ways to impress her (an hour, in my case). I spent much of that time muttering, "You can find a better girlfriend than that, Fone Bone...." On the plus side (a little spoiler warning), if you play a frustrating carnival game something like three dozen times, you get an extra ten-second video in which Bone gives Thorn a stuffed animal and she kisses him on the nose. This, of course, shocked me no end. Kissing??? In Bone???? Hugging, yes. Group nude bathing, yes. Phallic symbols, yes. But no kissing; that's yucky.

The Sci Fi Catholic's Rating for Bone Episodes 1 and 2:

Myth Level: Medium (hard to say yet, but the new intro is quite mythic)

Quality: Medium (some good stuff, but falls prey to the problems with adventure games)

Ethics/Religion: Medium/High (same as the comic; no objection to anything but the balancing-good-and-evil part)

The Vivisection of Bone, Part 2: Mytho-Bone-esis

“And still the fragrant thorn is beautiful.” --Ebenezer Elliott, “Spirits and Men”

Read Part 1 of this series. For another, briefer discussion of some mythic motifs in Bone, check out Stephen Weiner’s “Using Graphic Novels in the Classroom, including Bone by Jeff Smith” p. 7, which briefly outlines some comparisons for which I don’t have space. Page numbers are once again from the Bone: One Volume Edition.

And here’s the requisite spoiler warning. Now let’s get started.

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell 1968:30).

Thus Joseph Campbell describes what he calls the “nuclear unit of the monomyth” (1968:30), that is, what he sees as the core of every myth. I’m uncomfortable with Campbell’s reduction of all myths to one, partly because Campbell’s monomyth, as he elaborates it, has notably different elements from the Hero Cycle in Stith Thompson’s motif index (Underberg 2005), but I certainly acknowledge parallels between the myths of the world.

Whether there is only one myth or several, Campbell’s nuclear unit is certainly common, which should be unsurprising, considering how basic it is. In particular, change in the mythic hero and his way of relating to the world is of the essence of the myth.

But if anything is not mythic, if anything defies the monomyth, it is the comic strip. In the Calvin And Hobbes 10th Anniversary, Bill Watterson explains in his introduction that some people enjoy comic strips because of their stability, because the characters do not change. This is evident in “Calvin and Hobbes.” Every event that happens to Calvin may as well have never happened; even when moral lessons are presented--and they are, sometimes in more intense forms than are typical of the funny pages--Calvin learns nothing. The events of his life slide off his psyche as if they never occurred; once Hobbes is returned, the stolen TV replaced, or the Snow Goons frozen, the crisis is over, Calvin forgets, and nothing changes. This is visible particularly in Calvin’s agelessness. He goes to school, goes on summer break, has numerous Christmases, and yet he never has a birthday. He is eternally six.

It is perhaps no surprise that, not long after the publication of the 10th Anniversary, Watterson retired, announcing he could do nothing more with the strip. Arguably, he could have done a lot more; he could have let Calvin turn seven, which would have opened up a new world of possibilities, but it would also have denied the inalterability that some see as intrinsic to the comic strip art form.

Bone is intriguing for many reasons, but perhaps its central conceit is its bringing together of seemingly irreconcilable opposites: high fantasy with slapstick humor, realistically drawn characters with cartoonish ones. Perhaps most startling of its collided opposites is the confrontation of three comic strip characters with Campbell’s monomyth. Bone is a depiction of the unstoppable force encountering the immovable object: the all-changing myth meets the unchangeable character. Which one has to give?

This conceit has precedents. Others my age will remember Duck Tales, which demonstrated that talented writers could get a good deal of mythological mileage out of Disney’s iconic characters. The three Bone cousins, in their personalities and even to a degree in their appearances, are similar to some of the best-known Disney characters: brave, kind Fone Bone is much like Mickey Mouse; tall, silly, easygoing Smiley Bone is much like Goofy; greedy, squabbling Phoney Bone is something like a hybrid cross between Donald Duck and Scrooge.

In Bone, the monomyth is encased in what has come to be called the high fantasy epic. The high fantasy, by the narrow definition I’ll use for this essay, involves a fantasy world, usually described as “sprawling,” beset by a curiously camera-shy representative of evil, in this case the Lord of Locusts. Locusts, of course, symbolize chaos and destruction.

This evil overlord commands a vast army of hideous monsters, here rat creatures, who tend to be surprisingly inept fighters, at least when battling the heroes. Aligned against the villain and his army are a comparatively weak force of do-gooders, perhaps attached to the remnant of an ancient utopian or otherwise good society, such as the city of Atheia. There’s plenty of room for political intrigue and the exploration of the decadence of certain members on the side of good. Typically, the people representing good are divided, argumentative, and lazy, whereas the evil are unified and energetic, though they may have minor intrigues of their own, particularly when the army of inhuman monsters has to work in alliance with groups of misguided humans.

The politicized conflict between good and evil erupts into war, climaxing with a major siege battle in which evil's massive horde outnumbers good's small army.

Mixed into the political situation is a quest, frequently involving a magical artifact, either the evil overlord’s one weakness or the source of his power, which he has foolishly left lying somewhere in the countryside. The final siege battle forms the backdrop of the completion of the quest. Since fantasists back themselves against a wall with these paired conceits, an explanation is sometimes necessary that the evil army was bound to the will of the overlord and disperses peacefully or becomes otherwise incapacitated at his death.

High fantasies, particularly the quest portions, make good vehicles for unlikely or reluctant heroes. Sometimes, these heroes are what I call interpreter characters. Interpreters are mediators between the high fantasy universe and the reader. The interpreters may have a mindset or background closer to the reader’s than to the world of politics and magic occupying the book. Explanations to the interpreters keep the reader from getting lost, and their personalities keep the reader from getting bored. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits serve as interpreters. In the case of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, five students from the University of Toronto serve in that role. In Bone, the Bone cousins, who come from a society more-or-less like modern America, act as interpreters, filtering the story about dreams and demigods through easily digestible dialogue and worldviews.

Of course, everyone knows the high fantasy formula. Susannah Clements suggests in her fine lecture, “From Middle Earth to Fionavar: Free Will and Sacrifice in High Fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay,” that the real question in a high fantasy is not whether good will triumph over evil but how much it will cost good to accomplish that triumph.

In The Lord of the Rings, the cost is rather low, and for that reason the books are, in my opinion, unsatisfying in their conclusion. The biggest sacrifice is Gollum, a character nobody cares about (notice how they try to repair that deficiency in the films). The smaller sacrifice is more subtle: Middle Earth is a less magical place when the story is complete, but since the reader is about to leave it anyway, he probably doesn’t mind too much.

The Fionavar Tapestry, on the other hand, is too extreme in the other direction. The sacrifices are frequent and intense. At first, they are quite moving--Paul hangs for three days on the Summer Tree after the manner of Odin and Jennifer is graphically raped by the archvillain. But after that, the sacrifices are less dramatic and even routine: a race of sinless beings has a fall from grace, a sea god gives himself up to torture, and a man who just found the love of his life willingly dies in battle to save another. And it just goes on.

Arguably, Kay’s constant sacrifices aren’t a failure. The torments are varied and unexpected graces appear. The greatest problem is that the biggest and most moving sacrifices are at the beginning of the story rather than the end. The other great problem is the conclusion: The Lord of the Rings ends in decisive fashion with Frodo and the elves departing forever into the uttermost West, but The Fionavar Tapestry ends with the characters just sort of wandering wherever, deciding whether they’ll go back to our world or hang out in Fairyland. The obligatory separation that gives good fantasies their sense of completion is missing. Surely the interpreter characters must go back to their own world or move on to the next one--ultimately, they don’t belong in the world in which the story takes place.

It is a delicate balance to strike, and even great masters have missed the mark by at least a hair. Besides that, the effect for which the high fantasist is reaching is largely a subjective one gauged by the reader’s disposition, preconceived notions, and attitude at the time of reading. Some may be bored by The Lord of the Ring’s overextended post-climax conclusion while others may delight in it (I am in the former category). Some may find the end of The Fionavar Tapestry a relaxed relief after the preceding brutalities while others may find it an aimless extension of Kay’s sometimes ludicrous worldbuilding (I am in the latter category). But speaking from my own subjectivity, Bone strikes the balance precisely, both with a definite sacrifice and an ending in which the characters are separated. Bone matches my expectation of what emotional response a high fantasy will produce. I expect the high fantasy to make me want more, to open a yearning in the heart like a sweet wound. Others may prefer to end high fantasies with a sense of satiation, in which case I would suggest they’re reading the wrong kind of books.

The necessary sacrifice in Bone’s high fantasy myth is accomplished in two ways. The first is by a tease: we have every reason to believe Thorn will die at the Crown of Horns or even before. I say this because Fone Bone and Thorn have a competition for the role of central hero in this myth. The story begins by following Bone, yet when he arrives at the spring where Thorn is bathing, his role switches to that of “herald” to Thorn’s coming adventure and life change (cf. Campbell 1968:49-58). Fone Bone is the strange creature the hero sees as the quest begins, announcing the existence of a world beyond Thorn’s current ability to imagine. Taking the herald, combining him with the helpful companion, and then letting him take center stage in the role of a faux protagonist is certainly a unique idea. Smith’s execution of this isn’t perfect; without Thorn, the entire book of Rock Jaw Master of the Eastern Border feels like a pointless interlude, but such can be expected, for as far as I know, Smith is here exploring new territory outside the bounds of what we normally consider good writing. He succeeds anyway, combining the changeless comic strip protagonist with the high fantasy epic: as the story gradually morphs from light, episodic adventure to full-scale myth, Smith lets Bone fluctuate between first-place hero and second-rate sidekick. As this happens, Thorn changes via a rite of passage as a fantasy hero should while Fone Bone remains largely the same. In this way, Smith satisfies the needs of the myth and the comic strip simultaneously.

The interesting effect of this competition for first place is the conclusion in the reader’s mind that the story can ultimately do without one or the other of the characters. Briar detects this as well, for she says as she determines that Bone is a true protagonist, “...that means I no longer need you, Princess--” (p. 918). It would have made an interesting (and desolating) twist if Thorn had died after accidentally bequeathing a fragment of the Locust to Bone, forcing him to continue alone on a quest that was never rightfully his to begin with. While reading Bone for the first time, I convinced myself this was going to happen. Interesting though the idea is, it would have mortally wounded the story, for it would have killed the relationship that, as I’ve previously discussed, is Bone’s centerpiece. Nonetheless, the possibility of the story going on without one or the other of its main characters lends Bone