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.