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 Bones 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.