BONE

Jeff Smith was a guest of honor at the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) a couple months ago when he heard that the fourth volume of his Bone series had been slandered by an Apple Valley, Minnesota woman, Ramona DeLay, who was urging her son’s elementary school to remove the book from its library. She professed shock at seeing “illustrations and content relating to drinking and smoking and gambling," reported Brigid Alverson at Publishers Weekly. “She also alleged that there were ‘sexual situations between characters’” in Smith’s epic fantasy tale, “widely regarded as one of the best all-ages graphic novels.”

 When Alverson asked Smith about it, he laughed. “I'm laughing,” he said, “because it doesn't seem like you could really find those things.” All the characters in Bone are adults, he said, and he acknowledged that some of them, the more unsavory ones, “will try to pull gambling scams, try to rig bets and things, and it always goes wrong. So no one is rewarded for doing any unsavory behavior in Bone, and it's difficult for me to see how anyone could think Bone would encourage kids to do unsavory things. Also, none of the main characters do these things. My conclusion is that some people aren't smart enough to read comic books.”

Smith noted that one of the characters, Smiley Bone, has a cigar in his mouth, but the cartoonist thinks of it as a comedic prop, a “stogie,” a left-over from another age. He recalled the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” in which a baby smoked a cigar. “So a cigar to me was like a Groucho Marx vaudeville prop, it was an anachronism. When I created the dragon, it was not the evil it is now. When I quit smoking in the middle of Bone, the cigarette just disappeared from the dragon's mouth.”

In a letter to the school board that he posted on his blog, Smith said that while beer and gambling are depicted in Bone, they’re only story devices and play “a very small role in the overall Bone story. As far as sexual situations between characters are concerned,” he continued, “I know of none. Nor was it ever my intention for there to be any. The main character Fone Bone has a crush on the young woman Thorn, but it's innocent, and certainly goes no further than holding hands. ... Since the mid 90's, millions of parents all over the world have read Bone with their children. This is the first time I have ever heard it suggested that it was age inappropriate. It is hard to imagine that any bad behavior could be seen to be encouraged in these stories. Frankly, I believe it is just the opposite."

The Apple Valley school committee apparently agreed. Made up of three teachers, five parents, an elementary principal, an elementary media specialist and a middle school media specialist, it listened to Delay's objections, examined the Bone graphic novels, and then voted 10-1 to keep them available in the 12 of the district's 18 elementary school libraries that have purchased copies of the graphic novel series.