Originally serialized in comic book form, the material in Volume One essentially covers five issues worth of prolonged build-up. The digest-sized paperback includes the covers to each ish, though at least one of these - issue four's image of a nekkid Sean and Wendy being frighteningly confronted by his weapon-wielding relatives - doesn't reflect anything that happens in the first volume at least. (Perhaps in the concluding Volume Two?) As with Granger's other recently published GN collection, Innocent, the art chores are parceled out to different artists on a chapter by chapter basis (though Pablo Augusti Lordi is given both chapters four and five), with one of the players from Innocent, Manny Abeleda, showing up to illustrate chapter three. Seeing the number of diverse hands on the art front, I initially wondered if it would prove disruptive for this more sustained storyline, but that didn't prove to be the case. All four of the book's main artists do an efficient job capturing Bones' hardscrabble rural world, even if Sean's girl Wendy looks too pristine to be true.
At times, Granger's preparations for the concluding second volume seem a little too protracted - Sean and Wendy's fishing expedition takes up sixteen pages of story - though I suspect the story is better served by its paperback packaging than it was as a monthly comic. This is the kind of work where you quickly know that something's terribly wrong, though the full nature of that wrongness is more deliberately doled out in bits and pieces. If Volume Two is where it all hits the fan, Granger and his collaborators have done enough to get this reader happily anticipating the moment Sean learns the awful truth about Aunt Faye and Uncle Ray.
Article comments