Heavenly creatures

Jeff Smith's "Bone" and Dave Sim's "Cerebus" defined a comics era -- and helped make funny animals cool again. With both these epic series ending, the comics world is at a crossroads.

By Curt Holman

Jun 14, 2004 | In the ecosystem of modern comic books, funny animals are the endangered species. Superheroes still make up most of the population, but thanks to the rise of "literary" graphic novels, creatures of different colors -- war correspondents, lovelorn slackers and self-obsessed cartoonists -- roam alongside the men and women in tights. But the art form's increased respectability undercuts some of its youthful fun. Whole menageries of talking critters -- screw-loose squirrels, lucky ducks, li'l devils, amorphous shmoos -- are going extinct.

Overall the old funny-animal comics make no great loss, having mostly been cheap knockoffs of Disney properties or Saturday morning TV characters. But some ingenious creations did spring onto the scene, like Carl Barks' classic Donald Duck comics and R. Crumb's ribald adventures of Fritz the Cat. Two lesser-known yet landmark titles -- one accessible to all readers, the other forbidding and definitely not for kids -- have unfolded in recent years in extended but self-contained, novelistic story lines, and will conclude within months of each other. Dave Sim's "Cerebus" finished its staggering 6,000-page, 300-issue publication in March, while Jeff Smith's "Bone" completes its more modest but still impressive 55-issue run this month.

Jeff Smith's Bone cousins don't look like bones, but rather like half-pint, pie-faced humanoids -- distant kin to Walt Kelly's Pogo the Possum or Casper the Friendly Ghost, perhaps. And Dave Sim's Cerebus should not be confused with Cerberus, Hades' three-headed guard dog in Greek mythology. Instead, "Cerebus" chronicles the exploits of a talking aardvark who drinks heavily and has a penchant for violence, one-liners and messianic tendencies.

"Bone" and "Cerebus" share superficial similarities. They're both drawn in black-and-white and self-published by their creators. In both, quirky, anthropomorphic beings shed light on mankind's foibles and virtues. Both books extend their lives outside the comic shops through hefty, trade-paperback reprint volumes available at bookstore super chains. The 16th and last "Cerebus" collection, "The Last Day," chronicles the aardvark's final hours and publishes this month, while Smith will sandwich all 1,300 pages of "Bone" between two covers in a volume due to publish in July.

But beneath the surface, "Bone" and "Cerebus" prove to be so different, they're almost like photographic negatives of each other. "Bone" celebrates optimism and narrative simplicity, while "Cerebus" embraces cynicism and experimentation worthy of a mad scientist. Sim and Smith started as comrades in arms, yet their relationship soured into one of the industry's strangest feuds. "Bone" and "Cerebus" mark opposite ends of the comic-book spectrum in tone and complexity. Their heroes aren't technically human, but you can place virtually all modern graphic novels somewhere between them.

Smith's "Bone" may be the most friendly and engaging comic book of the past decade. Since 1991, Smith has written and drawn the adventures of the three Bone cousins: good-hearted mensch Fone Bone, happy-go-lucky goofball Smiley Bone and greedy, hot-headed Phoncible P. "Phoney" Bone, who needs constant rescuing when his get-rich-quick schemes go awry. The "Bone" saga begins with the trio fleeing their never-seen home of Boneville and discovering "a deep, forested valley filled with wonderful, terrifying creatures." Recurring characters include an enigmatic, cheroot-chomping red dragon; a farm girl named Thorn who becomes Fone Bone's unrequited love; and ravenous, none-too-bright Rat Creatures, the book's answer to Wile E. Coyote. Fone Bone's exclamation "Stupid, stupid rat creatures!" became a comic shop catchphrase.

Next Page: "Bone" may have begun with "The Great Cow Race," but it gradually became a sprawling, dark epic

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