📚 Book🎬 Tweens · Ages 11–13Graphic Novels / Comics

Bone: The Complete Saga (1991)

About This Book

Three cartoon bone cousins, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone, are chased out of their hometown and lost in a vast, mysterious valley populated by fearsome rat creatures, a warrior princess, dragons, and an ancient evil stirring beneath the mountains. Smith blends slapstick humor with sweeping epic fantasy, shifting between laugh-out-loud comedy and genuinely stirring adventure without ever losing its balance. Over 1,300 pages, the story builds from quirky comedy into one of the most satisfying fantasy epics in any medium.

Why It's a Classic

Jeff Smith self-published the Bone series over thirteen years, maintaining complete creative control while building one of the most ambitious works in graphic novel history, a story that begins as a funny animal comic strip and gradually transforms into a Lord of the Rings scale epic without ever abandoning its sense of humor. The visual contrast between the simple, cartoonish Bone cousins and the richly detailed realistic world around them creates a unique aesthetic tension that somehow works perfectly, grounding the fantasy in recognizable comedy. Thorn's journey from farm girl to warrior queen is one of the great coming-of-age arcs in comics, and the relationship between Fone Bone and Gran'ma Ben is simultaneously hilarious and deeply moving. Smith proved that a single creator with a vision could produce a work of graphic literature that rivals anything from major publishers.

Fun Fact

Smith started drawing the Bone characters when he was five years old, refining them for decades before launching the comic in 1991. He self-published every issue through his own company, Cartoon Books, turning down offers from major publishers to maintain creative control. Scholastic later republished the series in color, which introduced it to millions of young readers who might never have encountered the original black-and-white comics.

Parent Note

The complete saga is long, at over 1,300 pages, but the episodic structure makes it easy to read in sections. The story includes some intense fantasy battle sequences and genuinely frightening villains, balanced by abundant humor. Younger tweens may want to start with the first volume to see if the tone appeals to them before committing to the full saga.