On Sunday I was speaking with a children’s librarian at the store, talking about comics and graphic novels that would be appropriate for the younger folk. As a former librarian myself, I’m always happy to speak to other librarians and further the comics cause, as it were. Anyway, we were talking about Jeff Smith’s Bone series and its recent reissuing in color from Scholastic Books, and whether or not is was okay for kids to read. I reassured her that Bone is in fact just fine for kids, with no sex or naughty language, and only some fantasy-style violence and the occasional scary monster.
She then mentioned that she was at some trade show/booksellers’ convention/something or other where a Scholastic representative told her that there had been some changes made to Bone‘s content for its color edition. Not that I’ve been on top of this story every second, but this is the first that I’ve heard of it. I know Smith made some changes to the original comics when they were initially reprinted in trade paperback form, but that was mostly just for storytelling clarity and similar reasons. The implication that I got from this rep, via the librarian, was that changes were made to make the material more appropriate for children. That seems hardly likely, since Bone was family-friendly from the get-go, unless Scholastic got nervous about upsetting some of the more hypersensitive parents and insisted changes be made. More likely is that Smith perhaps tweaked the artwork some more for the color edition, and the rep, hearing that changes were made, incorrectly assumed that these changes were made to make the material more kid-friendly.
Anyway, I don’t own the color editions so I can’t compare them to the black and white versions myself. Has anyone out there come across anything in the Scholastic Bone books that could be seen as a change made to remove so-calld “offensive” material, as opposed to just plain ol’ art tweaks?
