One of the greatest joys to the concept of Batman is that he isn’t one thing, that he contains all the Batmans that have walked the streets of Gotham City in the last sixty-five years, Infantino’s elegant Batman, Sprang and Schwartz’s big gray Boy Scout, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. None of them more real, more valid, more true than any other. But in my heart, he is a spectral presence, a creature straight out of the gothic romances, and that, for me, is how he will always remain.

This was written for Batman: Cover to Cover, 2005. It’s a book of covers of comics with Batman on them, with occasional essays. A web search will show you the covers I talk about here.

Bone: An Introduction, and Some Subsequent Thoughts

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.