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)

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.

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.

Boneville.com added to Sci Fi Blogs

I want you to notice that we've added Boneville.com, the official blog of comic author/illustrator Jeff Smith, to our "Sci Fi Blogroll." Considering my mild Bone addiction, you may be surprised it's taken this long.

Notice the March 2 entry, which shows a young man who won a Jeff Smith sketch in an auction. It's hard to make it out very well, but the sketch looks like one of the cutest and most charming images I've seen of Thorn and Fone Bone. Now why won't Smith do some cover art like that?