COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Bone 9 Signature
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Grade:
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9.8
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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2815225001
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Owner:
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DocGo
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
Label Notes
Jeff Smith story, cover, and art
Synopsis
The locals begin to find Phoney’s Mystery Cow a tad suspicious, Fone Bone starts his love poem to Thorn, and Tom shows up at the race with another gal (what a jerk).
The Slab
Highest grade! Purchased as a 9.8 via a Heritage auction in 2022. UPDATE: Signed by Jeff Smith at the 2023 Heroes Con and officially graded on June 29, 2023. Big thanks to Rich Henn for facilitating!
Inside The Comic
Twenty two pages of story and two full pages of letters. The inside front cover has a drawing of Fone Bone reading Moby Dick from page 12 along with the brief prologue and credits: By Jeff Smith at the top and Cover Airbrush by David Reed on the bottom. The back cover has a panel from page 13 depicting Ted helping Fone with his love poem to Thorn.
Bone-a-Fides
The Bone-a-Fides were mostly from fans this time around with a single industry letter from Dark Horse editor Diana Schutz. She mentioned that she orders her new Bone issues from a local comic store…and that’s the only copy they ever get. She said that publishers getting retail support was absolutely crucial in the comic book publishing game (which I’m sure Jeff & Vijaya took to heart).
A fan from Singapore chimed in and even Jeff was wondering how he got a copy ;-) Several referenced the Cerebus #161 preview as their introduction to Bone as well as the first mention of Wizard in this regard (specifically the Palmer’s Picks section). The readers also continue to cite Pogo as a clear inspiration for Jeff’s work.
For the first time, Jeff mentions logging onto the internet! He didn’t have the hang of it yet but he could be messaged at CompuServe with the address 71732,1342 and Prodigy with address DSHR91A (yes, this is how it was in the beginning). He thanked his friend Kevin Yee for turning him into a cyberpunk.
Ads
The inside back cover has the first advertisement for the first TPB: The Complete Bone Adventures Vol. 1. It reprinted Bone #1-6 and later became known as Out From Boneville (as many of you know, this was the first step into a much larger publishing world for Cartoon Books). The bottom half of the page has the typical information about ordering a subscription and/or back issues with a note that the individual issues of Bone will be the current printing.
Estimated Copies Sold: ????
Back Cover Collectible
Cerebus #161
This is the second in the holy trinity of influence that sent Bone popularity into the stratosphere. I’d also call it the second most influential of the three behind Disney Adventures magazine (described in Bone #12). The comic was published in August 1992 so it came out just after issue 5. Dave Sim makes mention of this in his introduction and what follows is THIRTEEN WHOLE PAGES of Bone #3 plus an ad for subscriptions, back issues, and the Spirit of Adventure print. It starts from page 10 of the third issue and goes all the way to the conclusion where Phoney stuffs Gran’ma’s pie into Fone Bone’s trap. I admit that my pull list was rather short around this time but giving this amount of pages to a book that wasn't financially tied to Sim’s Aardvark-Vanaheim publishing house was incredibly generous and, perhaps, unheard of. Also, it’s quite clear that he and Gerhard really loved the work so that probably played a small part ;-)
My copy isn’t the highest of grades. I’d say 9.4, 9.6 at best after a press, and the pages are probably off-white to white. My initial dream was to have both Dave & Jeff sign a copy but I’m not sure that’s possible nowadays (without having to encapsulate one signature before getting the other). It was easier and much less expensive ten years ago so the perfect time has probably passed me by.
I won’t rehash the conflict between Jeff and Dave but I’m confident in saying that the vast majority of us would be on Jeff’s side.
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