Here, though, the world they enter is more complex than they—or we—initially perceive it to be. Characters who seem to be introduced for simple comedic effect have huge backstories, until the whole of the Bone tale begins to feel like the tip of an iceberg, or the end of something huge. The joy of Bone is that Jeff Smith knows more than we do. The events of Bone are driven by what has gone before. Lucius the amusing elderly innkeeper has a history with Granma Ben. Granma Ben is also Queen Rose. The Hooded One is her sister Briar. The love triangle between Briar and Lucius and Rose is one of the engines of plot. Still, even their plot seems like a postscript to the tale of the Locust spirit and the Dragons, as if the plot is a sequence of Russian nesting dolls, each of which is paradoxically larger than the one in which it was hidden. Each of the human characters changes hugely, both in our perception of them and in the way that they come to terms with their past and complete their already-begun stories.

The Bone cousins barely change, no more than Barks’s ducks are changed by their experiences. Phoney is a creature of greed whose plans will backfire, Smiley always simple, good-hearted, easily led. Fone Bone undergoes tribulations including a broken heart, and takes a fragment of the Locust into his soul, but even he leaves the story more or less as he entered. Deepened, but still. Lessons learned are easily forgotten. Were Jeff Smith to take the Bone boys and send them into another adventure, it would be perfectly legitimate under the genre rules to which they are subscribed, although it might have the effect of lessening the impact of the first story, of Bone and the Harvestars. The Bones are cartoon characters (something that we are reminded of in the color editions of Bone—they work best with flat color, as if they are extra-real. The shading that works so well on everything else seems to lessen them by forcing us to consider characters who are looping brushstrokes are actually realistically drawn, in the same way that, say, Lucius is).

The Bones have served as a bridge between the ongoing comic and the huge overstory that fills the complete Bone. They acted as comedic relief, as subplots, as “bits,” providing instant accessibility for readers who may not realize the significance of something set up, literally, years before. But most of all, they gave us narrative tension. They set the plot in motion (after all, without Phoney’s balloon none of it might ever have happened) and they made us care about it and learn about it, incrementally, in a way that we could never have done if Jeff Smith had simply told us the story of Thorn. They solve the problem of the big story, and the problem of the issue-by-issue story.

I had always known, panel to panel, issue to issue, how good Jeff Smith was. There is a special delight, however, in realizing that over the long haul he proves himself a master.