Bone: The Great Cow Race

"This is a series that came out from 1991 to 2004. It’s a real oddity, and it’s a glorious story. There were nine volumes and then they did a one-volume compendium , which is well worth picking up. It becomes a heroic fantasy in the style of Lord of the Rings : an epic struggle of good against evil, the evil being embodied in a mysterious figure, the Lord of the Locusts, and a monster named Kingdok, who is just this towering taloned fanged clawed hairy beastie. But in the middle of this there are these three characters who are like characters from a Disney cartoon – three little guys with bald heads and huge noses: Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone. Smiley is incredibly innocent and not the sharpest tool in the box. Fone Bone is a good-hearted everyman. And Phoney is a huckster, a conman who is constantly getting into trouble and getting his two cousins into trouble. These three characters come into the middle of this story which gets darker and darker around them, and more and more serious, with the stakes getting higher and higher. I love the whole thing, but I particularly love the early episodes where the comedic elements are to the fore. So in The Great Cow Race , there is this character they meet named Gran’ma Ben, who it turns out has a heroic destiny. But at this point, she’s just this grumpy old woman who is supernaturally strong. And every year in the village where she lives they have the Great Cow Race, where she races against cows, and she always wins. But this year, Phoney Bone decides he’s going to make money on the race, and starts a rumour that there’s a mystery cow – Gran’ma Ben’s getting old, the mystery cow is going to win this year. All the smart money’s on the mystery cow. And the mystery cow turns out to be just Smiley in a cow costume, and Phoney’s idea is to get everybody to bet on the mystery cow, and then Gran’ma still wins, so he gets to keep all of the stakes. But that’s not how it works out… It’s all played out against the backdrop of this old evil coming back into the world. There are monsters in the woods, and the race is going to go through the woods. So quite dark stuff going on in the margins, but it’s really silly and funny… and Smith pulls it off! It could easily have just been a mess. But actually it’s really funny, and really exciting, and the art is just gorgeous. It’s very simple line art. As a kid Smith loved Carl Barks’ DuckTales , Donald and his three nephews. He said, “I would have loved to have read a DuckTales story that was 1100 pages long, and had a Lord of the Rings majesty about it.” So he decided to create one. I think so, yes, but it’s a huge surprise to the reader. You buy into this silly innocent fantasy, and then it modulates in a really interesting way. The core audience is YA, but I think Smith said he never saw it in those terms. I think if very little kids read it, there’s some messed up stuff later on that could be disturbing. But then you can say the same for things like Harry Potter , and kids are emotionally robust. So I would not quarrel with it being read by children, provided the parents are looking over their shoulder and mediating a bit."