Pop Culture Gadabout
Sunday, May 11, 2008
      ( 5/11/2008 08:18:00 AM ) Bill S.  


"WE'RE ALWAYS GLAD TO HAVE KIN STAYIN' IN OUR HOME." "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 flipside 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.

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.
# |



Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



On Sale Now!
Measure by Measure:



A Romantic Romp with the Fat and Fabulous
By Rebecca Fox & William Sherman

(Available through Amazon)

Measure by Measure Web Page







Ask for These Fine Cultural Blogs & Journals by Name!

aaronneathery.com News
Aaron Neathery

American Sideshow Blow-Off
Marc Hartzman

Arf Lovers
Craig Yoe

Attentiondeficitdisorderly
Sean T. Collins

Barbers Blog
Wilson Barbers

The Bastard Machine
Tim Goodman

The Beat
Heidi MacDonald

BeaucoupKevin
Kevin Church

Big Fat Blog
Paul McAleer

Big Mouth Types Again
Evan Dorkin

Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog
Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag

Blog This, Pal!
Gordon Dymowski

Bookgasm
Rod Lott

Cartoon Brew
Amid Amidi & Jerry Beck

Cartoon Web Log!
Daryl Cagle

Clea's Cave
Juana Moore-Overmyer

Collected Editions

The Comics Curmudgeon
Josh Fruhlinger

The Comics Reporter
Tom Spurgeon

Comics.212
Christopher Butcher

Comics Waiting Room
Marc Mason

Comics Worth Reading
Johanna Draper Carlson

a dragon dancing with the Buddha
Ben Varkentine

Egon

Electromatic Radio
Matt Appleyard Aaron Neathery

Estoreal
RAB

Eye of the Goof
Mr. Bali Hai

Fred Sez
Fred Hembeck

Greenbriar Picture Shows
John McElwee

The Groovy Age of Horror
Curt Purcell

The Hooded Utilitarian
Noah Berlatsky

Hooray for Captain Spaulding
Daniel Frank

The Horn Section
Hal

The House Next Door
Matt Zoller Seitz

Howling Curmudgeons
Greg Morrow & Friends

The Hurting
Tim O'Neil

I Am A Child of Television
Brent McKee

I Am NOT the Beastmaster
Marc Singer

In Sequence
Teresa Ortega

Innocent Bystander
Gary Sassaman

Irresponsible Pictures
Pata

Jog - The Blog
Joe McCulloch

The Johnny Bacardi Show
David Allen Jones

Journalista
Dirk Deppey

King's Chronicles
Paul Dini

Let's You And Him Fight
One of the Jones Boys

Mah Two Cents
Tony Collett

Metrokitty
Kitty

Michael's Movie Palace
Michael

Nat's TV
Nat Gertler

Ned Sonntag

Neilalien

News from ME
Mark Evanier

No Rock&Roll Fun
Simon B

Omega Channel
Matt Bradshaw

Pen-Elayne on the Web
Elayne Riggs

PeterDavid.net
Peter David

(postmodernbarney.com)
Dorian White

Progressive Ruin
Mike Sterling

Punk Rock Graffiti
Cindy Johnson & Autumn Meredith

Revoltin' Developments
Ken Cuperus

Rhinoplastique
Marc Bernardin

Scrubbles
Matt Hinrichs

Self-Styled Siren
Campaspe

Spatula Forum
Nik Dirga

Tales from the Longbox
Chris Mosby

TangognaT

The Third Banana
Aaron Neathery & Friends

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.

Toner Mishap
B2 et al

Trusty Plinko Stick
Bill Doughty

TV Barn
Aaron Barnhart et al

Unqualified Offerings
Jim Henley

Various And Sundry
Augie De Blieck

Video WatchBlog
Tim Lucas

When Fangirls Attack
Kalinara & Ragnell

X-Ray Spex
Will Pfeifer

Yet Another Comics Blog
Dave Carter



A Brief Political Disclaimer:

If this blog does not discuss a specific political issue or event, it is not because this writer finds said event politically inconvenient to acknowledge - it's simply because he's scatterbrained and irresponsible.




My Token List of Poli-Blogs:

Alicublog
Roy Edroso

Eschaton
Atrios

Firedoglake
Jane Hamsher

James Wolcott

Lance Mannion

The Moderate Voice
Joe Gandelman

Modulator
Steve

Pandagon
Amanda Marcotte & Friends

The Sideshow
Avedon Carol

Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo
Skippy

Talking Points Memo
Joshua Micah Marshall

This Modern World
Tom Tomorrow

Welcome to Shakesville
Melissa McEwan & Friends



Blogcritics: news and reviews
Site Feed



Powered by Blogger



Twittering:
    follow me on Twitter