PugJesusRitual dagger, Tibet, 17th century AD
https://piefed.social/c/historyartifacts/p/2154388/ritual-dagger-tibet-17th-century-ad
Bone game pieces, Sweden, 550 AD - 800 AD
https://piefed.social/c/historyartifacts/p/2149163/bone-game-pieces-sweden-550-ad-800-ad
Bone die, Sweden, 1250 AD - 1350 AD
https://piefed.social/c/historyartifacts/p/2140995/bone-die-sweden-1250-ad-1350-ad
Devlin 
Richard Michael Blaberhttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/07/record-number-of-people-waiting-for-nhs-diagnostic-tests-in-england. "A total of 1.92 million #patients in #England are waiting to have a #test to #diagnose their #illness such as by an #ultrasound #scan, #assessment of their #hearing, #bone scan or various #tests for #cancer."
The New Renaissance MindsetT.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Rose (Bone #0) by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Rose is a prehistory written with the pressure of legend. It does what the best origin stories do: it enlarges the world without flattening it. Rather than functioning as mere background for Bone, the book deepens the moral architecture of that universe by showing how inheritance, fear, and choice take root long before the main saga begins. What emerges is a story less about one character’s fate than about how a whole mythic order is born from fracture.
The novel’s greatest achievement is its double portrait of sisterhood. Rose and Briar are not simple opposites so much as two divergent responses to the same hostile world. The author draws them as figures of emotional and ethical asymmetry: Rose is steadier, more sacrificial, more earthbound; Briar is restless, hungry, and increasingly receptive to forces that promise power in exchange for surrender. The tragedy of the book lies in how convincingly it makes both women legible. Briar is not reduced to a villain; she is rendered as a human being whose desires have been cultivated by fear, resentment, and the seductive rhetoric of destiny. Rose, meanwhile, is heroic not because she is invulnerable, but because she persists in responsibility even when certainty collapses around her.
That tension gives the book its literary gravity. Smith repeatedly returns to images of dwelling, weather, and enclosure—farmhouse spaces, winter landscapes, hidden chambers, narrow roads—so that setting becomes a moral language. The world feels perpetually on the edge of being overrun, and that atmosphere is crucial: Rose is not just about people in danger, but about the vulnerability of ordinary life itself. Small acts of care matter here because they are performed against the backdrop of gathering ruin. In that sense, the book’s visual storytelling is inseparable from its ethics. The illustrator’s clean line and expressive staging let silence, gesture, and negative space do much of the narrative work, giving the story a stately, almost folk-ballad rhythm.
The dialogue and narration are equally effective in their restraint. Smith rarely over-explains, preferring a pared-down language that sounds inherited, as if the story were being retold from memory rather than invented anew. That tonal choice matters because Rose is concerned with how history turns into legend. Details are not merely information; they are transformed into emblems. A glance, a warning, a journey through snow, a moment of hesitation—these become the kind of narrative units from which folklore is built. The book’s emotional resonance comes from this compression. It knows that myth is not the opposite of intimacy; myth is what happens when intimate suffering is remembered too well.
As a prequel, Rose also performs an elegant reversal. Instead of explaining away mystery, it preserves it. Even as it offers backstory, it leaves behind the haunting sense that history is always larger than what can be fully told. That withholding is one of its strengths. Smith understands that the past should not feel solved; it should feel charged. Rose achieves precisely that, giving Bone its ancestral depth while standing on its own as a bleak, tender meditation on sisterhood, corruption, and the lonely courage required to remain good in a world that rewards surrender.
It is a beautifully disciplined work: modest in surface, rich in implication, and quietly devastating in retrospect.
#BONE #BookReviews #GraphicNovels #JeffSmith #LiteraryCriticism #Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 9: Crown of Horns by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 9: Crown of Horns is the series’ most overt movement toward apocalyptic resolution, yet it remains deeply committed to the intimate emotional textures that have always distinguished Bone from simpler fantasy adventure. What might have been a mere end-of-quest climax becomes, in this author’s hands, a meditation on fear, sacrifice, memory, and the terrible cost of choosing life over power. The volume gathers the story’s mythic materials into one final storm, but it never loses sight of the small human feelings that give those materials their force.
One of the book’s great achievements is the way it turns grand fantasy into a drama of moral weather. The Crown of Horns, with its near-Biblical menace, represents not just magical catastrophe but the temptation to submit to destruction as a kind of release. It stages this temptation against the tenacity of love and loyalty, especially in the alliance between the central figures who have endured so much suffering that survival itself has become an act of resistance. The language repeatedly emphasizes endings, but the emotional logic insists on continuation. Even in the shadow of annihilation, the characters keep making claims on one another, as if relationship itself were the only force strong enough to answer ruin.
Smith’s tonal control is especially impressive here. Bone has always balanced comedy and dread, but Crown of Horns sharpens that balance into something elegiac. The humour does not disappear; instead, it becomes tragically necessary, a fragile human countermeasure against cosmic scale. That tonal doubleness is one reason the book feels so alive. The world may be tipping toward collapse, but the characters remain recognizably themselves: stubborn, frightened, brave, petty, affectionate. The writer understands that the apocalypse is most affecting when it happens to ordinary emotional beings rather than abstract symbols.
The visual storytelling deepens this effect. Smith’s line remains supple and expressive, able to carry both spectacle and nuance. In the climactic sequences, he uses composition to create a sense of inexorable pressure: bodies cluster, space compresses, and the page itself seems to lean toward fate. Yet he also finds room for stillness. Those quieter images matter because they let the reader feel what is at stake in the larger catastrophe. The book’s emotional climax depends not on the shock of battle alone, but on the recognition that endurance, grief, and tenderness are all intertwined.
A sample of the book’s emotional register appears in its repeated insistence on the finality of the moment: “the Crown of Horns,” “the last battle,” and “all is lost” are the kinds of phrases that define its atmosphere. Smith is not merely building suspense; he is testing whether hope can survive inside language that seems designed to extinguish it. Against those apocalyptic markers, the characters’ acts of care become luminous. The result is a story in which the smallest gestures carry the weight of a worldview.
What gives Crown of Horns its lasting power is that it refuses a simplistic victory narrative. The ending is earned, but not triumphant in a naive sense. Smith closes the long arc of Bone with a vision that is hard-won, emotionally resonant, and morally serious. He understands that the deepest fantasy is not escape from reality, but a sharper encounter with its essential truths: that love is vulnerable, that loss is real, and that choosing to continue is itself a profound kind of heroism.
In the end, Bone, Vol. 9: Crown of Horns succeeds because it makes apocalypse feel personal. Its magic is not just in dragons, prophecies, or ancient forces, but in the ache of attachment and the courage of staying when everything invites surrender. Few graphic novels conclude so boldly, or so humanely.
#BONE #BookReviews #GraphicNovels #JeffSmith #LiteraryCriticism #Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 8: Treasure Hunters by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 8: Treasure Hunters deepens one of the series’ most appealing paradoxes: it is at once playful and grave, elastic with humour yet increasingly governed by fate, memory, and inheritance. Even the title is revealing. “Treasure Hunters” sounds like a child’s adventure serial, but the writer uses that promise to expose how unstable “treasure” really is in this world. Gold, power, lineage, friendship, and survival all compete for the same narrative space, and the volume quietly suggests that the most consequential treasure is never the one that can be dug up from the ground.
What is especially impressive here is Smith’s control of tonal layering. He can stage slapstick, menace, and melancholy on adjacent pages without breaking the emotional continuity of the book. The visual language remains crucial to this effect: broad gestures, elastic expressions, and clean pacing make the comedy immediate, but the book’s shadows are never far away. In panels that dwell on the valley, on ruined spaces, or on the language of pursuit, Smith turns the landscape itself into an argument about history. The world is not just a setting; it is an archive of loss. That is why recurring terms such as “the valley,” “treasure,” and “dragon” feel heavier than their fantasy-stock equivalents. They accumulate symbolic pressure.
Fone Bone remains one of the author’s great achievements as a protagonist because he is so open to enchantment and so resistant to cynicism. His innocence is not emptiness; it is a moral stance. In Treasure Hunters, that innocence is tested by a world in which motives are never pure. The title phrase works doubly well because it applies not only to the comic schemes of the Bone cousins but to nearly everyone in the narrative: each character is, in some sense, searching for value, for origin, or for a usable past. Smith’s genius lies in making these searches feel both grand and absurd. The result is a quest narrative that understands greed not as a cartoon vice but as a distorted form of longing.
The volume also sharpens the series’ meditation on doubling. It demonstrates Smith’s fascination with pairs: comic and tragic, rustic and mythic, childlike and ancient, surface and depth. That tension is visible in his dialogue, which often sounds breezy on the surface while carrying a second, darker register underneath. Even a simple phrase like “treasure hunters” becomes ironic when set against the book’s larger concern with what is buried, forgotten, or inherited against one’s will. His world is full of people who think they are looking for objects, when they are actually being drawn toward destinies.
As a work of fantasy, Treasure Hunters is less interested in spectacle than in resonance. Its adventure machinery is finely tuned, but its real force comes from the way it links comic motion to moral consequence. Smith never lets the book become merely whimsical; he keeps reminding us that whimsy can coexist with danger, and that wonder is most valuable when it is underwritten by vulnerability. That balance is what gives Bone its lasting authority. It is funny without being frivolous, epic without being inflated, and intimate even when it seems to be roaming through myth.
In the end, Bone, Vol. 8: Treasure Hunters feels like a hinge volume: outwardly full of pursuit, inwardly full of recognition. It is a story about hunting treasure, but also about learning what kind of treasure can be trusted. Smith answers that question not with a speech, but with craft—with pacing, irony, and a visual imagination that makes every seemingly light moment carry the weight of old stories.
#BONE #BookReviews #GraphicNovels #JeffSmith #LiteraryCriticism #Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 7: Ghost Circles by Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 7: Ghost Circles is one of the series’ most haunting achievements (no pun intended), a volume in which the fantasy adventure grows stranger, darker, and more inward-looking without losing its wit or momentum. What makes the book so compelling is that it does not simply escalate the plot; it deepens the atmosphere. The valley is no longer just a stage for comic peril and mythic pursuit. It becomes a place where memory, fear, and enchantment blur into one another, as though the land itself were remembering older wounds.
At the centre of the volume is the eerie idea of the “ghost circles,” those supernatural zones where the ordinary laws of the world are warped or suspended. Smith uses them not merely as a plot device, but as a literary emblem. They externalize the emotional disorientation that has been gathering across the series: the characters are not only trying to survive danger, they are trying to understand what kind of world they inhabit. In that sense, the ghost circles function like a visual metaphor for instability itself. They suggest that reality in Bone is never solid for long, and that beneath the surface of comedy and quest narrative lies something ancient, unsettled, and fearful.
This volume is especially strong in its tonal control. The author balances the grotesque and the whimsical with remarkable precision. A scene can begin in near-fairy-tale simplicity and end in uncanny menace. That oscillation is part of the book’s power: laughter never fully cancels dread, and dread never erases tenderness. The result is a world that feels alive because it is internally contradictory. Even the more playful moments carry undertones of loss, while the most frightening passages are haunted by absurdity.
One of Smith’s great virtues as a storyteller is his refusal to flatten his characters into functions of the plot. In Ghost Circles, their reactions to the valley’s strangeness reveal as much about them as the dangers themselves. Fone Bone’s decency, for instance, remains a stabilizing moral center, but it is tested by uncertainty rather than rewarded by clarity. Thorn’s growing awareness of her own place in the larger mythology gives the volume real dramatic force, because her identity is no longer merely something to be discovered; it is something that seems to be unfolding under pressure. Even the supporting figures are drawn with enough personality to make the world feel populous rather than merely populated.
Smith’s art is crucial to the novel’s effect. His line work can turn a panel from open, humorous clarity into dense visual unease with almost no warning. He understands pacing in a deeply literary way. Pages do not simply advance the action; they modulate suspense. The use of shadow, spatial distortion, and repeated visual motifs gives the volume a dream logic that suits its subject perfectly. The ghost circles are not only described; they are felt in the structure of the page.
If the earlier volumes of Bone sometimes leaned more heavily on the pleasures of adventure and comic relief, Ghost Circles marks a maturation of the series into something more ambitious. It is still accessible, still fast-moving, still funny, but it now carries the weight of a fable about perception, inheritance, and the instability of the real. Smith seems increasingly interested in the way stories themselves create zones of uncertainty: once characters cross into myth, they may not return unchanged.
The book’s achievement, then, is not simply that it entertains, but that it alters the reader’s sense of the whole series. It widens the emotional and symbolic field. By the end, the valley feels less like a setting than a living pressure system of memory and fate. Ghost Circles is a reminder that fantasy can be playful without being shallow, and that children’s literature, in the hands of a serious artist, can carry real metaphysical unease.
What lingers most is the atmosphere: that sense of being watched by the past, of moving through a world where the ground may not be trustworthy, and where every strange threshold opens onto another, stranger one. Jeff Smith gives us adventure, yes, but also a meditation on instability, and that is what makes this volume so memorable.
#BONE #BookReviews #GraphicNovels #JeffSmith #LiteraryCriticism #Smith
T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 6: Old Man’s Cave by Jeff Smith
With Old Man’s Cave, Jeff Smith deepens Bone’s strange alchemy of pastoral comedy, epic fantasy, and uncanny menace. What has gradually become clear by this sixth volume is that the author is not merely telling a children’s adventure story that happens to grow darker over time; he is building a mythic world in which humour, dread, and tenderness are inseparable. This instalment intensifies that balance. The result is a book that feels both nimble and ominous, light on its feet yet shadowed by forces far older and larger than any of its characters.
One of the volume’s great strengths is its control of tonal contrast. It can move from playful banter to genuine peril without fracturing the narrative’s emotional logic. That matters because Bone has always relied on the reader’s willingness to accept tonal instability as a feature rather than a flaw. In Old Man’s Cave, the jokes are not a distraction from the story’s seriousness; they are part of its structure. The comic rhythms make the danger more vivid, and the danger in turn lends the comedy a tremor of fragility. The world feels lived in because it refuses to stay in one register for long.
At the centre of the volume is the continuing development of Fone Bone, whose moral clarity remains one of the series’ quiet achievements. He is not “heroic” in the conventional sense. He is earnest, frightened, loyal, and often overmatched. Yet that very modesty gives him force. Smith uses Fone Bone as a kind of ethical compass in a world where power is frequently tied to deception, appetite, and illusion. Against the volume’s growing sense of historical burden, Fone Bone’s decency reads not as naïveté but as resistance. He is one of the rare fantasy protagonists whose goodness is not a superpower but a discipline.
The title itself, Old Man’s Cave, signals one of the book’s central concerns: the past as an enclosed, half-buried space that still exerts pressure on the present. Smith repeatedly suggests that history in this series is not a distant backdrop but an active environment. The cave becomes more than a setting; it is an image of memory, secrecy, and inheritance. Like much of Bone, it evokes the idea that the landscape itself remembers. Characters move through it as if through an archive of unresolved violence. In that sense, the volume’s fantasy geography is also psychological geography.
The comic artist’s visual storytelling continues to be one of the series’ great pleasures. His line-work is supple and expressive, capable of shifting from cartoon exuberance to eerie stillness with remarkable ease. He trusts gesture, silhouette, and pacing. Whole emotional transitions can happen across a panel or two. The reader does not simply receive information; the reader is made to feel the rhythm of discovery and alarm. This is especially effective in sequences where characters confront hidden spaces or ambiguous presences. Smith understands that suspense in comics depends not only on what is shown, but on how the eye is guided from image to image, from expectation to revelation.
Another of the volume’s notable qualities is its expanding sense of moral complexity. The forces at work in Bone are never reducible to simple good and evil, and Old Man’s Cave sharpens that ambiguity. Threat is often wrapped in seduction. Power presents itself as destiny. Characters are tempted to believe that they are participating in a story that has already been written for them. Smith resists that fatalism. Even as the mythic machinery grows more elaborate, he keeps insisting on choice, responsibility, and consequence. The result is a fantasy that feels less escapist than interpretive: it asks what kinds of people we become when we are forced to live under inherited narratives.
What makes Old Man’s Cave especially strong is that it advances the series without abandoning its openness to wonder. The book never becomes grim for the sake of grimness. Instead, it lets mystery remain mysterious. That restraint is crucial. Smith knows that the deepest enchantments are often the least explained ones. By leaving room for uncertainty, he preserves the reader’s sense that the world is larger than the plot. Few fantasy comics achieve that without losing momentum.
Ultimately, Bone, Vol. 6: Old Man’s Cave stands as a fine example of serialized storytelling that is both cumulative and self-renewing. It enriches the larger arc while functioning as a compelling chapter in its own right. More importantly, it reveals Jeff Smith’s rare gift for making a comic feel simultaneously accessible and mythologically resonant. The volume is funny, tense, and beautifully paced, but its deepest achievement lies elsewhere: it persuades us that even in a world of monsters, prophecy, and hidden caves, character still matters most.
#BONE #BookReviews #GraphicNovels #JeffSmith #LiteraryCriticism #Smith