"Based on a true story," Shawn Granger's Family Bones (King Tractor Press) recounts one teenage boy's horrendous summer in the American heartland. Dumped with his grandparents by his bickering parents, young would-be punk Sean is quickly shunted off to an aunt and uncle's farm after his grandfather gets hospitalized in a hunting accident. "Staying with your Aunt Faye and Uncle Ray will be like a vacation," our hero's kindly grandma tells him, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
His first day there, Sean's ordered by his mean-ass Uncle Ray to begin clearing rocks out of the fields. When the young boy reflexively mouths back, he suddenly finds himself on the ground, eating dirt. "I don't care if yer a Jew," his uncle declares, "yer gonna pick up these rocks."
Sean's Uncle Ray proves to be a tyrannical wife-beater who also is involved in something shady. Though we're not quite sure what this entails by the end of the first volume of this two-part black-and-white graphic novel series (all Sean knows for certain is it involves "funny business with some cows"), it's clear that Ray is not to be trifled with. After farmhand Robert makes some vague ultimatums demanding the money he's owed, the man disappears. Though battered Aunt Faye says the hand has "moved on," we've already been cued to disbelieve this.
True crime aficionados are already ahead of the rest of us once they've read the last name on the mailbox in chapter two. Sean's relatives are Ray and Faye Copeland, the oldest American serial killers ever to be sentenced to death row. Our young punk protagonist's summer away from home will definitely be more than a simple character-building experience.
All is not entirely Dickensian mistreatment down on the farm, however. Left on his own to plow the fields, our strapping young hero connects up with a rural beauty named Wendy. The awkwardly adolescent romantic interludes with Wendy are perhaps meant to show the flip side of the prairie heartland, but they also prove fraught with their own perils: Sean accidentally hits the girl with a brick that's unearthed by his tractor; a fishing trip concludes with a hook getting caught in the crotch of Sean's jeans; a trip into town turns into the inevitable confrontation with townies. If Sean's brutish relative doesn't do him in, his city boy ways could.
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