Happy 2016 -- the time has come for another Bone re-read post. In order to avoid my positive comments being hyperbolic or various notes becoming repetitious, from now on I'll be structuring these Bone recaps with proper headlines and everything!
PREVIOUSLY ...
While Thorn and Fone Bone get along quite well, Gran'ma Ben and Phoney have gotten off to a rotten start -- and Phoney hates the idea of sleeping in the barn before they go to Barrelhaven for the Cow Race.
Locations
First of all, I love the idea of starting this chapter with a wide shot of the farm. Interestingly, as the last few pages set up, it is important for us to know and like this place so that when the literal "burning homestead" portion of the Hero's Journey comes around, we care, same as the characters.
As for other locations in this chapter, we get some more well-drawn woods and finally a new setting; the mountains where the Hooded One and thousands of other rat creatures meet. Ominous!
Characters
Fone Bone
We know by now that Fone, despite slightly askew motivations where Thorn is concerned, represents our chivalrous hero against the forces of ... well, his nasty cousin right now, but also the forces of evil later on. He doesn't develop a whole lot over the course of Chapter 4, and he doesn't have to: he's helpful, polite and trying very hard not to take advantage of a beautiful young woman. Which often means he's boring. I say he's trying to be a good guy, which is fine, because we also get Phoney.
Phoney
Speaking as an adult, Phoney Bone is just so bad without relief that at this point he might as well be the villain. And this all works very well, because he's hilarious and horrible in equal measure. Luckily for anyone reading Bone to their kids, the complete amorality of the character is so heavy-handed that it's a running joke, and is obviously not the sort of behaviour to mimic.
After the meeting between our stupid, stupid rat creatures and Kingdok, Phoney is completely silent as he hides behind the tree . This teases us with potential development of "the one with the star on his chest", now that Phoney knows that he's who everyone wants to find and is probably terrified.
Thorn
Leaning into the "bits for kids, bits for the parents" ethos of family entertainment, we get one sequence that greatly serves both. Thorn doesn't have a lot of story in this chapter until the very end, but in the middle when she and Fone go for a skinny dip to clean up, she might as well be a Disney character.
Bouncing happily through the woods and describing her plan to sew a bright blue dress, it almost feels like Kingdom Hearts, with our (metaphorically) three-dimensional human princess at ludicrous juxtaposition to the puffy skeletal version of Mickey Mouse. A cartoon who, we are reminded soon after, is more Roger Rabbit than Disney as Fone literally chokes down his libido with a bar of soap. Yeah, that scene is strange.
Regardless, by the end of the chapter, things take a turn for the very serious and there is a wonderful, anime-esque use of flashback that helps develop a sense of context -- if not for the world then at least for Thorn herself. We'll get more on this in the books to come ...
Kingdok
At last, in this chapter we start to meet our bigger baddies -- particularly Darth Vader here, apparent leader of the rat creatures, giant and toothy. Sure, he doesn't have the complex past of a certain Star Wars villain (that part will go to our Emperor Palpatine stand-in, the Hooded One) but at least Kingdok has his own character arc throughout Bone. I'll try not to give too much away for those reading along, just suffice it to say that I recall that this is the most he ever speaks in the series.
Gran'ma Ben
Ah, the anomalous "gitchy feeling" -- possibly one of her best secondary skills, if you could call it that. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better, and Gran'ma Ben feels it.
The Possum Kids
Glad to see these guys hanging around (oof, that might be one pun too many) and happy to know they'll have more of a role to play in a later book.
Pros
Once again, I am floored by how well Mr Smith weaves quite a lot of dialogue into so many panels per page. It really works, even though it goes against common wisdom of comic writing.
Conversely, in the low- to no-dialogue moments, we see a suspenseful use of silence. Not just Phoney hiding from Kingdok, but the later scene of the moon rising over spooky mountains and the horde of rat creatures.
On the visuals alone, the rat creatures must really, really stink. I mean, they certainly look gross enough -- it helps to multiply their fright factor when they finally attack the farm en mass.
Finally, tying into this week's lesson, another pro is the continued dropping of names and places in the name of world building (and to a lesser extent, foreshadowing). We learn that the Hooded One knows of the dragons, and of Gran'ma. We hear places like Deren Gard and Old Man's Cave mentioned, and we're introduced to Gran'ma's Spidy-Sense, the "gitchy feeling". As the world around the protagonists seems more dangerous and more complicated, our absorption into the story is almost complete.
This week's lesson
I thought that, without a doubt, the lesson of this chapter is about how the momentum set up by the initial "find the Bone cousins" motivation has continued to turn, all fuelled by the jigsaw of what has already been laid out in the previous three chapters. Making use of the downtime between chapters, the story so far has kept from becoming too breakneck or overly complicated. Instead it remains focused squarely on the characters that we've been attached to since Chapter 1.
In fact, at the start of this chapter you could be forgiven for thinking that the story had slowed down, settling into some sort of pastoral comedy where Fone and Phoney bicker as they wait to be reunited with Phoney. But enter the first really big baddies and a few more hints as to the deeper back-story and off we go again.
Basically, Jeff Smith has now transmuted the foreshadowing and character relationships into a straight-as-an-arrow action beat: the Rat Creatures are coming to wreak havoc. Tune in next week.
What a cliffhanger.
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