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4 1/2 stars. This is my final review of this fantastic (and meticulously detailed, cartoon-meets-realist) fantasy epic. Now that I've completed it, I had to dock one-half star for a (to me) incomprehensible ending. I'll save my discussion of that to the end though, so that I can lead with the rave.

Bleach the colors from Walt Kelly's Pogo (with Al Gator as Smiley Bone, Pogo as Fone Bone, and Pork Pine as Phoncible ('Sponsible?) P. "Phoney" Bone) and shove them into Elfquest via Australian aboriginal mythology*, then sprinkle with inside jokes and literary/comics allusions galore and you have this wonderful book. The characters and dialogue are so enjoyable, and the story so engaging that author Smith can even wink directly at the audience... "I just can't get over it! A princess! I mean, who'd have thought that our little Thorn -- living in a cottage with her grandmother out in the middle of an old, dark forest -- would turn out to be a princess?! Unbelievable!" (Dragonslayer volume), and get away with it.

*[footnote here - I assume Bone's "Dreaming" mythology and its accompanying ghost-circle stick figures are inspired by aboriginal world views, but as I know virtually nothing about aboriginal culture, I couldn't say for certain. If anyone can suggest a good entry point into this terra incognita for me, I'd really appreciate it.]

I discovered this book when I browsed the first volume in the library with my son (who's 6) and let him use his card to borrow it. I pretty much had to run back immediately to the library to get out the remaining volumes, because his 8 year-old sister started devouring this epic at the rate of 150 pages/day (and I too wanted to know what happens next). Both my kids enjoyed reading this to themselves (as did I), but let me tell you, play-acting the dialog in different voices is a whole new level of tremendous fun. I recommend a group reading, with assigned parts. Fun-fun-fun. Suffice it to say that once you start, this graphic novel is well-nigh impossible to put down. It says something for the tremendously underrated sophistication of comics as an independent literary genre (sequential art? graphic novel? can we please dispense with these annoying euphemisms?) that what took Smith twelve years to create, we Falks (including wee Falks) devoured in only about a week (and re-read, too, as my son continued to pick up random volumes to re-experience especially funny moments before I could return them today to the library, something which I suppose is akin to track-selecting off DVD copies of Casablanca or Airplane!, etc. to relive the best moments.

Be warned that the end of the penultimate volume and the last volume are a bit of a disappointment. First, in deviating in tone and content from the majority of that which precedes them, they are arguably inappropriate for littler people. Like Harry Potter, the intensity rises at the end, but here the transition is stark rather than gradual as medieval violence that was previously offstage or implied is suddenly rendered in gory detail (sharp teeth embedded in thighs, scythe-beheadings, eviscerations, etc.). Didn't faze my 8 year old (though I wouldn't have allowed her to read this part if I knew it was coming: stupid, stupid rat parent), but my 6 year old was only too happy for me to synopsize this for him and move his bookmark forward past the egregiously rough stuff.

From a literary vantage point, I have to complain that the end of this work sacrifices a semblance of internal consistency in order to cinematically accelerate pacing. Not a satisfactory (or necessary?) trade-off. As in The Matrix (a more or less contemporaneous work), Bone is a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist's maturation coincides with increasing abilities to directly impact the "real" world. In Matrix, this was Neo discovering himself to be wetwired into a vast virtual reality simulation, and then successfully hacking it until he could change simulation events in real time. In Bone, we have a pre-to-post pubescent girl named Thorn discovering how to intermix dreams with reality, using the content of the former to change the latter. Narratively, the problem with each plot involves the articulation of what, if anything, restricts these powers. In the first of the Matrix movies, such apparent omnipotence manifested itself by Neo's distorting the laws of physics -- ostensibly slowing time to make it possible to dodge or redirect bullets. We viewers may give the Wachowski brothers a pass here (all the pyrotechnics are part of the point of the film's appeal), but c'mon, folks, if I were able to change reality, then why not cause those bullets to become drifting flower petals or simply to vanish entirely? Perhaps the agents can thwart this in real-time themselves (which might lead I suppose to bullets flickering in and out of reality), but as depicted, the agents seem to be incapable of preventing the ceiling from suddenly morphing into a falling grand piano and crushing them (or for that matter, the agents simply exploding without resort to external firearms).

You can see where such reality-changing leads. Partly, it presents the Green Lantern problem, in which your ability to affect others is limited only by your ingenuity. Partly it also presents the Superman or God problem, in which all monolithic threats (that is, no horns of a dilemma, such as being forced to choose one among multiple victims to rescue) to the protagonist appear trivial. Set aside for a moment the bizarrely bad paternal example set by Supes in the recent film Superman Returns (no mean feat setting this aside; this was so mind-numbingly *wrong* for the film's intent and tone, it made me want to scream "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???" at the movie screen). What really undercut the film's credibility for me was that the limits of Superman's powers were never adequately established. Why should a guy who seems to make quite an effort to land a plane at the start of the movie be able to use about the same amount of oomph to lift and carry an ISLAND OF (rare???) KRYPTONITE into space. That feat alone would seem to trivialize everything that's come before.

Back to Bone, it's no spoiler to tell you that Thorn's complete mastery is revealed when she takes to the air a la Superman. (There's emotionally satisfying commentary that accompanies this which I will not reveal.) The immediate problem to the narrative becomes why she doesn't continue unimpeded to her objective (she is given no reason to stop), and then of course, the follow-up problem, that if she can now thus impose her will on the waking world, what can't she do?

The book does not lack for exposition. In a way, the discussion of religion and politics that arises from Jeff Smith's characters discuss and consistently challenge the work's central mythology is one of the richer themes of the book. Throughout the series we are treated to tons of exposition regarding the novel's mythology: the relationship of the living to the dead, the origins of the world, the various animals and their histories, the "hum of the Earth," and the dreaming and waking states. Yet there is much readers are asked to take unacceptably on faith. Once the uber-villain has been destroyed, there follows an apocalyptic anti-climax full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Readers might wonder whether Mim, a dragon large enough to encircle the globe, was crazy or not, captive or not, alive or dead? Are the dragons constructive, destructive, or neutral agents and why do they act the way they do? Unfortunately, none of this is satisfactorily explained in the context of what (over 900 pages) has come before. Things just happen at increasing volume and velocity until they wholly independently stop. Not too satisfying, that.

Nor does Smith appear here to be ignoring a considered, if deliberately-ambiguous ending simply to rush to a conclusion, as following the confusing anticlimax, Smith pads his last volume with filler the equivalent of An Ewok Christmas. While the winter solstice episode was mildly amusing and entertaining, absent any attempt to tie up (or even address) the plot's loose ends, I'd have preferred to skip right to the epilogue which treats our protagonist's respective fates. Still and all, it pays to stay with the book for its last pages, as Smith makes up for his semi-cloying outtro by closing with a deliciously satirical commentary on the confluence of greed, religion, and politics in another wink at the audience. Surprisingly, this appears to have been written in 1998, not 2004. If so, Jeff Smith should get credit as something of a prophet.

All in all, if Bone falls a few crumbs shy of a feast it is amply filling nonetheless. Yea, brothers and sisters, as far as I'm concerned this text is worthy of canonization, repeat study, and devotion of at least a week of evenings. Even if it lapses into incoherence at the tail end, it's still an impressive and ambitious achievement in all-ages fantasy.