Bone Companion: 2 out of 5

Truth in advertising, at least.  The front cover of Bone: Coda promises an admittedly superfluous new Bone story, and that’s what we get: The Bone brothers – as though time has stood still in 25 years since Jeff Smith completed his epic – on their way home to Boneland, Bartleby in tow, having seemingly recently left the forest, and, of course immediately running into a few foibles on their journey.  The story is undeniably charming, and smith’s illustrative powers have none decreased in the intervening years, nor has working on his other titles – Rasl, Tuki – prevented him from slipping right back into the familiarly buoyant style of Bone.  But, yes, superfluous: Nothing new is really added, and because this is still a transitional snapshot – the boys still aren’t home – it’s especially disposable.  I can appreciate wanting to forever leave things open by never showing what happens after the fact, but tossing us a short like this feels… I dunno.  Pointless?  Completely harmless and by no means bothersome to read, but it’s certainly a good thing they padded this book out with some extras.

Such as: Jeff Smith’s “pizza party” text piece, which essentially covers the evolution of Bone from the creator’s perspective.  This is essential reading.  Smith, via the text, seems like a great guy – certainly proud of his accomplishments and happy with his work, but aware of the good fortunes that aligned to bring him to this point – and hearing his first hand account adds such grounding to the work, and, in a way, makes the preceding Coda story more enjoyable as a return to this giant chunk of creativity Smith offered to the world.

Unfortunately, every point Smith makes about the industry and his influences is rehashed in Stephen Weiner’s companion, a text also included here.  I understand this was written before Jeff’s piece, but the frustrating thing is how pedantic and boringly Weiner lays out the information, not to mention that its repeated again in N.C. Christopher Couch’s intro, and then again again in Weiner’s own pre and post-scripts.  It’s really ridiculous, and gob-smackingly Duh-inducing to read.  The bulk of the text would claim to be an analysis, but it’s little more than a story recap, with occasional repetitions of the info I’ve mentioned above.  If not for the author’s genuine and apparent love for the series, the Companion would be a frustrating read, instead of just somewhat boring, and then the acknowledgement that Weiner was one of the first to step up and try to write about the book from a historical perspective, even if he didn’t end up getting too much actual analysis across.

Coda is priced cheap like the Scholastic GNs, but is maybe only justifiable for the  Smith-scripted history.  The new comic pages are fun but pointless, and the companion offers little besides an increase in page count.