The View from the Cheap Seats (24 page)

I. An Introduction

I WAS READING
Bone
from almost the beginning, handed the first two comics by Mark Askwith after a signing in Toronto. “You'll like these,” he said. I bought
Bone
until I met Jeff Smith and he started sending them to me, and I stopped buying it, but, month in and month out, I read it as the years went by, until at last it was done.

I even wrote an introduction to the second volume of
Bone,
The Great Cow Race
. (Which—because the edition with the introduction in it has been out of print for over a decade now, you probably haven't read, and if you have you've forgotten it—I shall now proceed to reprint here.)

                 
Readers tend to have two reactions to Herman Melville's remarkable novel
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
.

                 
Either they respond to the seafaring adventure yarn, with its huge, gaping, obsessive travelogue, but they hurry through Melville's chapters with titles like “The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View”; or they find themselves becoming obsessed with Melville's retelling of the minutiae of whaling and the physiognomy of whales, and with all the strange, experimental layers of creaking, wind-lashed, bloody-handed life aboard the
Pequod,
but becoming almost
impatient with the tale of Ahab and Moby Dick (and why
Moby-Dick
is hyphenated when it's the title of the book and not when it's the name of the whale is a mystery that passeth all understanding).

                 
The first time I read
Moby-Dick,
as a boy of ten, I read it for the exciting bits (and finished it convinced that it would make a terrific comic; then again, I recall, at about the same age, finishing
King Solomon's Mines
utterly certain that it would make a brilliant musical. I must, in retrospect, have been an odd child). More recently, as an elderly gentleman of three-and-thirty, sent back to
Moby-Dick
by the urgings of Jeff Smith and a long plane flight or two, I discovered that I was enjoying the thing as a whole: a great, misshapen humpbacked whole, with the broken spars of previous drafts sticking out of its side.

                 
Which is analogous in some ways to the experience of reading
Bone
. When I first read the stories here assembled, the parts I prized were the glittering set-pieces: the stupid, stupid rat-creatures, the honey hunt, the Great Cow Race, Fone Bone's heartbreakingly heartfelt love poems. That stuff's the accessible level of
Bone,
the stuff one latches on to immediately. It took a second reading—significantly, it took reading the whole six issues in one go—for me to appreciate the subtler backstory, the delicate, dreamlike hints about Thorn's childhood, the sensation of huge forces massing on innocents.

                 
The first long slurp of
Bone
has a certain aroma of Walt Kelly, and a bracing tang of Chuck Jones. It's the second sip that lingers, though. That's when you realize that there's more than that, a little Tolkien, a touch of Mallory, even a smidgen of the Brothers Grimm . . .

                 
I was introduced to
Bone
by Mark Askwith, who (and I place my life upon the line here for revealing one of the Big Secrets to the reading public) is one of the Secret People
Behind Everything. He gave me the first few
Bone
s when I was in Toronto being interviewed on the television show Mark produced, the late, lamented
Prisoners of Gravity
. I read them in an airport waiting room, and I laughed and winced and admired as I read. Since then my admiration for its creator and publisher has only increased.

                 
Jeff Smith can pace a joke better than almost anyone in comics (the only person who gives him a run for his money here is the brilliant Dave Sim); his dialogue is delightful, and I am in love with all his people, not to mention his animals, his villains, and even his bugs. This collection, the second, contains a number of individual moments you will enjoy (I say this without knowing you, perhaps presuming on our relationship a little, foreword-writer to potential reader, but I daresay I'm right nonetheless), and, I repeat, it bears rereading.

                 
The locale of
Bone
is that of the imagination. “It is not down on any map,” as Melville said of the island of Kokovoko. “True places never are.”

                 
The world of
Bone
is a true place. And the map is only another part of the puzzle . . .

                 
And with that, I pass you over to Jeff Smith. You are in capable hands. There is no one else I would trust to orchestrate a cow race; except, perhaps, Herman Melville, and his wouldn't have been anywhere near as funny.

                 
Neil Gaiman, 1995

II. Some Subsequent Thoughts.

THERE. THAT WAS
what I thought when I wrote that, fourteen years ago. I'm happy to say that there's nothing in there that, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd want to retract or amend.

Still, as the comic went on I began to miss the earlier issues—in Woody Allen's phrase, “the early funny stuff.” I missed the
shtick,
the perfectly paced jokes. The cow race. The
slapstick. I wasn't convinced that the adventure comic that
Bone
seemed to have transmuted into was enough of a replacement.

Rereading
Bone
now that it's all over and collected and in one place, I am struck chiefly by how wrong I was while I was reading it, and how very right Jeff Smith was, and how it was always, unquestionably, one thing, albeit one thing with tension—and a tension that, I suspect, helped make
Bone
what it was.

The economic model of making long comics stories is one that is based upon the theory that the creator will need to eat while writing and drawing a page (perhaps) a day. So the food and roof are provided either by a healthy advance from a publisher (for longer works), or, more often, in a regular paycheck, by publishing a story in installments. So the normal model—the one on which
Bone
was built—is to publish a comic of around twenty pages every month or so. These comics are then collected together and published in book-length collections every year or thereabouts, and thus food happens, and a roof, and, in the case of successful comics, even clothing and shoes.

Thus the challenge for a writer or a writer-artist is to create something that works in installments, and also works as part of a whole. In a monthly-more-or-less story you need to recap information about a character last seen four years back, or about the sweep of a grand plot, or just to remind your readers what was going on in the story they read a month ago. (A lot can happen in your reader's life in a month.) You need to give your audience moments and sequences complete in themselves, resolutions that pay off, and most of all, you need to make it a sensible thing for the readers to have spent their dollars and cents on an installment of serial literature.

Dickens had similar problems.

But what you create as a monthly installment will eventually be read as a whole. A recap at the beginning of one episode might throw the timing of what you are doing off completely. The rhythms of the entire story—in the case of
Bone,
a story
covering more than a thousand pages—and the rhythms of the collected part of the story, and the rhythms of a monthly comic have different demands and different needs.

This is most obvious in the collected
Bone
in the first couple of chapters, when the Walt Kelly influence is at its height, and when Jeff Smith most needed to make the work accessible and bring people on board and occasionally the pacing feels more like a newspaper Sunday page than an ongoing comic. The story is, or seems to be, in second place.

As a periodical reader, reading the book an installment at a time, when the story darkened I missed the tone of the first few years. I missed the Jeff Smith who could “pace a joke better than almost anyone,” because the jokes were getting fewer and further between. I suspected that the nature of the comic had changed and I worried that the lurch from Walt Kelly and Carl Barks to something closer to Tolkien had unbalanced the whole thing.

As I say, I was wrong, and deep down I knew it, but it was not until I reread the whole of
Bone
that I understood how wrong I had been.

The Bones themselves are an anomaly. They stumble into the story much as Unca Scrooge, Donald and his three nephews might have crossed a mountain range and found themselves in a fantastic world. They are anachronistic, apparently irrelevant to the world they have found themselves in—twentieth-century creatures in a medieval world of the fantastic. And it's here, I suspect, that the narrative tension is created. In formal Carl Barks–style storytelling, creatures like the Bone family inhabit a world like ours and wander from our world into another, more primitive world—a desert crossing, a mist-shrouded valley, an almost impassible mountain range, these are the things that keep us from Oz or the Lost World. They adventure, change things for the better, then cross the barrier to return to their own world.

Here, though, the world they enter is more complex than they—or we—initially perceive it to be. Characters who seem to be introduced for simple comedic effect have huge backstories, until the whole of the
Bone
tale begins to feel like the tip of an iceberg, or the end of something huge. The joy of
Bone
is that Jeff Smith knows more than we do. The events of
Bone
are driven by what has gone before. Lucius the amusing elderly innkeeper has a history with Granma Ben. Granma Ben is also Queen Rose. The Hooded One is her sister Briar. The love triangle between Briar and Lucius and Rose is one of the engines of plot. Still, even their plot seems like a postscript to the tale of the Locust spirit and the Dragons, as if the plot is a sequence of Russian nesting dolls, each of which is paradoxically larger than the one in which it was hidden. Each of the human characters changes hugely, both in our perception of them and in the way that they come to terms with their past and complete their already-begun stories.

The Bone cousins barely change, no more than Barks's ducks are changed by their experiences. Phoney is a creature of greed whose plans will backfire, Smiley always simple, good-hearted, easily led. Fone Bone undergoes tribulations including a broken heart, and takes a fragment of the Locust into his soul, but even he leaves the story more or less as he entered. Deepened, but still. Lessons learned are easily forgotten. Were Jeff Smith to take the Bone boys and send them into another adventure, it would be perfectly legitimate under the genre rules to which they are subscribed, although it might have the effect of lessening the impact of the first story, of Bone and the Harvestars. The Bones are cartoon characters (something that we are reminded of in the color editions of
Bone
—they work best with flat color, as if they are extra-real. The shading that works so well on everything else seems to lessen them by forcing us to consider characters who are looping brushstrokes are actually realistically drawn, in the same way that, say, Lucius is).

The Bones have served as a bridge between the ongoing comic and the huge overstory that fills the complete
Bone
. They acted as comedic relief, as subplots, as “bits,” providing instant accessibility for readers who may not realize the significance of something set up, literally, years before. But most of all, they gave us narrative tension. They set the plot in motion (after all, without Phoney's balloon none of it might ever have happened) and they made us care about it and learn about it, incrementally, in a way that we could never have done if Jeff Smith had simply told us the story of Thorn. They solve the problem of the big story, and the problem of the issue-by-issue story.

I had always known, panel to panel, issue to issue, how good Jeff Smith was. There is a special delight, however, in realizing that over the long haul he proves himself a master.

This is an essay written for
Bone and Beyond,
the catalogue for the Wexner Center's 2008 exhibition on Jeff Smith and
Bone,
and includes the original introduction for
The Great Cow Race, 1996
.

I
never met Jack Kirby, which makes me less qualified than a thousand other people to write this introduction.

I saw Jack, the man, once, across a hotel lobby, talking to my publisher. I wanted to go over and to be introduced, but I was late for a plane and, I thought, there would always be a next time.

There was no next time, and I did not get to meet Jack Kirby.

I had known his work, though, for about as long as I had been able to read, seen it on imported American comics or on the two-color British reprints that I grew up on. With Stan Lee, he created the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four (and all that we got from that, the Inhumans and the Silver Surfer and the rest), the Mighty Thor (where my own obsession with myth probably began).

And then, when I was eleven or twelve, Kirby entered my consciousness as more than the other half of Smilin' Stan and Jolly Jack. There were house ads in the DC Comics titles I was reading, that told me that Kirby Was Coming. And that he was coming to . . .
Jimmy Olsen
. It seemed the least likely title Kirby could possibly turn up on. But turn up on
Jimmy Olsen
he did, and I was soon floundering delightedly in a whirl of unlikely concepts that were to prove a gateway into a whole new universe.

Kirby's Fourth World turned my head inside out. It was a space opera of gargantuan scale played out mostly on Earth with comics that featured (amongst other things) a gang of cosmic hippies, a super escape artist, and an entire head-turning pantheon of powerful New Gods. Nineteen seventy-three was a good year to read comics.

And it's the Iggy Pop and the Stooges title from 1973 that I think of when I think of Jack Kirby. The album was called
Raw Power,
and that was what Jack had, and had in a way that nobody had before or since. Power, pure and unadulterated, like sticking knitting needles into an electrical socket. Like the power that Jack conjured up with black dots and wavy lines that translated into energy or flame or cosmic crackle, often imitated (as with everything that Jack did), never entirely successfully.

Jack Kirby created part of the language of comics and much of the language of superhero comics. He took vaudeville and made it opera. He took a static medium and gave it motion. In a Kirby comic the people were in motion, everything was in motion. Jack Kirby made comics move, he made them buzz and crash and explode. And he
created
. . .

He would take ideas and notions and he would build on them. He would reinvent, reimagine, create. And more and more he built things from whole cloth that nobody had seen before. Characters and worlds and universes, giant alien machines and civilizations. Even when he was given someone else's idea he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner, but instead built it into a functioning jet-pack.

(The readers loved this. Posterity loved this. At the time, I think, the publishers simply pined for their vacuum cleaners.)

Page after page, idea after idea. The most important thing was the work, and the work never stopped.

I loved the Fourth World work, just as I loved what followed it—Jack's magical horror title,
The Demon;
his reimagining of
Planet of the Apes
(a film he hadn't seen) as
Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth;
and I even loved, to my surprise (because I didn't read war comics, but I would follow Jack Kirby anywhere), a World War 2 comic called
The Losers
. I loved
OMAC: One Man Army Corps
. I even liked
The Sandman
—a Joe Simon–written children's story that Jack drew the first issue of, and which would wind up having a perhaps disproportionate influence on the rest of my life.

Kirby's imagination was as illimitable as it was inimitable. He drew people and machines and cities and worlds beyond imagining—beyond my imagining anyway. It was grand and huge and magnificent. But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and, in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict. Moments of tenderness, mostly. Moments of people being good to each other, helping or reaching out to each other. Every Kirby fan, it seems to me, has at least one story of his they remember not because it awed them, but because it touched them.

I did not meet Jack Kirby. Not in the flesh. And I wish I had walked across that room and shaken his hand and, most importantly, said thank you. But Kirby's influence on me, just like Kirby's influence on comics, was already set in stone, written across the stars in crackling bolts of black energy dots and raw power, and honestly that's all that matters.

Neil Gaiman

September 2007, London

P.S.:
In a perfect universe you would walk around a huge Kirby museum and stare at Kirby originals and also at the printed and
colored versions of Kirby's art, and Mark Evanier would stroll along beside you, telling you about what you were looking at, what it is, when and how Jack did it and why, because Mark is wise and funny and the best-informed guide you could have. He knows stuff. This is not a perfect world and that museum does not exist, not yet, so you will have to settle for Mark Evanier on the page.

The introduction to Mark Evanier's
Kirby: King of Comics,
2008.