Jeff Smith’s Bone is huge, epic, beautifully drawn, and almost entirely devoid of character development. This didn’t stop me from loving the characters, and it didn’t stop the book from being impossible to put down. But it recalled a weird feature common to many of the most popular comics, which is characters that never change. Most comic strip characters and superheroes are timeless, not just in their enduring appeal, but in how they don’t change, don’t age, and don’t die (permanently, anyway). Calvin and Hobbes¹ ran for ten years, and for ten years, Calvin was six. Superman always got your back and he just won’t stay dead. And so on.

I suppose the preserved character is largely a feature of serialized fiction with a run of unlimited or undetermined length. Bone probably fit this description for most of the 12+ years it was released in issues. Superhero franchises are like this, but on a much larger scale, so superheroes seem more like archetypes than actual characters: “Spider-Man” will be a character in a specific story arc or miniseries or film, but Spider-Man is more (or less, depending on how you look at it) than a character. Spider-Man is instead a vaguely-defined vessel for characters to inhabit in specific stories. His costume, his attitudes, even his origins, are malleable.

I used to think of the static character as a flaw, something “unnatural”² in stories: in real life, people change. But character development for its own sake is arguably just as “unnatural”: some people don’t change all that much, or change over a different time scale than the one depicted in the story. And anyway, lots of “unnatural” things happen in stories: Bone has dragons and rat-creatures and, uh, bones. All that matters is that we can suspend our disbelief–surely this can apply to certain aspects of characters as well. As I was nearing the end of Bone, I expected certain characters to change their ways, to suddenly learn from their experiences the true meaning of…whatever, I don’t know, something. And really, I was thinking that because in my mind, that is just what’s supposed to happen in stories: characters learn the errors of their ways.

Now, a character that changes is probably going to be more compelling than one that does not, but I found myself attached to the characters in Bone anyway, just as I will always have a soft spot for the unchanging characters of Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, I don’t have much of a conclusion to arrive at, but it’s probably a good thing to question one’s expectations? I guess?

This is something I’ll be thinking about.

1. I keep coming back to C&H. It’s really the most amazing comic strip I’ve ever read. A quote from Bill Watterson:

   When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I’m juxtaposing the “grown-up” version of reality with Calvin’s version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer.

   I used to vehemently believe, like Calvin, that Hobbes was real. Really real. My arguement was that Hobbes is wiser than Calvin; how could Calvin invent someone who was wiser than himself? But now I’m not so sure, which I think means I must be growing older and lamer. [↩]

2. Turns out any argument based on whether or not something is “natural” is pure bunkum. [↩]

Tags: ballpoint, bartleby, eeen, index card, pen, watercolor

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