Bone Coda
Jeff Smith / Stephen Weiner
This small, black and white book contains a 40 page comic strip, featuring the cousins Bone and Bartleby. They travel by cow cart, just as they did in the last pages of the epic Bone saga. It's as if we've never left. Phoney is griping about his lost treasure, Smiley is goofing around with Bartleby and Phone is reading a map and tries to get them home. Instead, Phoney gets them into trouble. The rest of the book (about two thirds) is filled with text. Jeff Smith looks back on 25 years of Bone, Stephen Weiner gets to turn Bone inside out and finally there's an interview with Jeff Smith.
A new Bone story is of course nice, but it could've been longer and it should definitely have been colored. Stephen Weiner's look on Bone is much appreciated, even though it's just an illustrated and printed version of his ebook A Bone Companion. The price ($ 14.95) is relatively steep, considering that all full color Bone softcovers have a listing price of $ 12.99. Bone Coda is sold as an anniversary edition, but for a book that's supposed to celebrate one of the greatest stories of the past 25 years it's under par.
