All-Ages Reviews - A Skeleton Story
In this review we learn that the dead are people too...or were at least...
It seems to be human nature to want to explore what exactly happens to people after death. Alessandro Rak and Andrea Scoppetta’s version is explored in the pages of A Skeleton Story.
Issue 4's cover is my favorite, but to be fair, they're all good.
A Skeleton Story is essentially like Monsters Inc., only with dead people. The dead are hanging out in the afterlife, doing the things they do, when a living little girl finds her way into their realm. The story follows various characters as they try to get a hold of the girl each for their own reasons.
In a little more detail, the story follows Will Musil, a skeleton man who was a criminal in life, but has become a cop after death and is desperate to find something that will prove he’s worthwhile. At first he sees the girl as just a ticket to get on Death’s good side, but over time, he starts to come to the realization that a living girl just doesn’t belong in the land of the dead. So, I’ll revise a bit, it’s a bit more like Monsters Inc meets Grim Fandango - which sounds like a winner in my book!
Kitty!
The writing on this is interesting, the story seems to wander quite a lot. Not much time is spent on setting up things and characters seem to wander in and out of the story, and at the same time, a lot of the atmosphere is just explained through the art with entire pages with no dialogue…usually a move that would slow pacing down, but not here somehow. All that said, though, I don’t really mind the erratic pacing on this. It’s difficult to explain, but somehow it works. The result feels less like a hurried mess and more like our main character is just stumbling into these scenes as he goes along. Even the ending is left wonderfully vague (I hate endings where everything wraps up neatly, I like being left with questions to consider on my own).
Wait...where are we now?
Will’s a pretty good protagonist - a dynamic character, though it seems that he’s already done most of his changing before we arrived, going from criminal to cop, and we’re just here to see the final step. Most of the other characters get very little characterization, we get Frog, Will's former partner in crime and still a criminal in the afterlife, celebrating the freedom that he believes this way of life gives him. There are several other named characters running through it, but the only one that really has any kind of presence is Burma, a large, mute “zombie” (I think he just has flesh because he hasn’t been dead as long) who has absolutely no trouble wrestling with the question of whether or not to save the little girl, and spends much of the story keeping her from Will and the other, more shady characters.
What a weirdo, always looking for living cats...
For our antagonists, we have “The Old Lady” who seems to be the personification of Death here, though she isn’t really that villainous. She also doesn’t seem much like other depictions of Death - ancient and wise - she just seems to have a very superficial understanding of what’s going on and only looks at the situation from the perspective that anything that arrives in the realm of the dead belongs to her - even if it’s living. She doesn’t read as mean or evil so much as she just reads as thoughtless, the pain she’d cause people by keeping the girl there just doesn’t occur to her.
How can you hate anyone who loves kitties!
Which leaves one of her henchmen, Scarlett, as our main antagonist or at least the more threatening one. He’s a high ranking cop, but is ambitious and always wants more. He doesn’t care about the girl - or anyone else - at all. All he’s interested in is a bargaining chip to get himself more power, and so he comes across as far more malevolent than Death does.
For all that I talk about what’s good an interesting in this story, there are a lot of aspects about it that confuse me. Because of the wandering and fast paced way it’s written, there isn’t a lot of time to answer the reader’s questions. For example, there’s a bit of the story where Will runs into Frog and his old gang and doesn’t seem to remember them. His confusion seems genuine, and that combined with some other lines make it seem as though he doesn’t remember what his life was like. But there are also points where he laments his life spent as a criminal, which seems to contradict the other scenes, and leaves me wondering if he was lying about having forgotten them. I suppose it’s possible that he only has very vague memories, but I’d be interested in knowing if that were the case. It seems like an interesting story point that could be expanded upon.
And how did you get in there, anyway?
Issues like these may be chalked up to the fact that this comic was originally written in Italian. It’s possible there was a translation error. Overall it reads quite smoothly so I’m not criticizing the translator here since I don’t know the original, but it seems like a very difficult and nuanced job in which some small mistakes would happen pretty easily. It’s also possible, however, that there’s something that an American like me is just not going to get, that the writing style is specific to the area and with me not being culturally Italian, I’m just not going to get it. Again, though, not having the original (and I wouldn’t be able to read it even if I had it) I can’t really make that call.
This cameo kind of startled me, though.
The writing isn’t all or even most of what I like about this comic though, the real showstopper is the art. I love this art! It has this wonderful style to the drawing that’s slightly cartoony, just at the level that’s my favorite. The panels all have a beautifully painted quality to them and the whole thing uses very muted colors that make it feel very ethereal and dream-like.
If I had to nitpick, I’d probably criticize how small the artist draws the characters’ eyebrows, because when your characters are skeletons, the eyebrows are going to be our main source of expression, and it was hard to read their faces in some scenes. Also, on occasion, there is no background behind the characters and it’s just left a flat white. I probably wouldn’t mind this much if the backgrounds were at least colored in, so many of them are so highly detailed that he could get away with not drawing all of them, but the white is very jarring and takes me out of the story.
You should think about where you left it last!
All that said, the art is the real draw to me. The story is fine and the characters are fun, but there’s so much to look at on every page, and all of it is pleasing to the eye. I actually had a really hard time finding panels to scan for this review since there aren’t a lot of big, “important” splash panels that are really striking, because ALL of it is good and ALL of it is important. And that’s a problem that I, as someone who places a lot of value on the visuals, really like to have.
There is unfortunately no collected edition of this series yet, which is a shame, because I’d buy it in a heartbeat if one popped up. I also wish we’d gotten to spend a little more time with it. As I said, I love the ending, but what I would’ve liked was a little more time in the middle to flesh out more of these characters and maybe answer some of the questions that I had. Or to put it another way, six issues isn’t nearly enough time spent in this beautifully painted world. There is apparently an A Skeleton Story game, which I did look into at one point, though it looks like a pretty generic side-scroller, so I never bought it. Whether the comic is an adaption of the game or vice-versa, I don’t know, but the comic is the version that I personally enjoyed and heartily recommend to anyone who thought it sounded even a little interesting from this review.
Next time we'll look at Gladstone's School for World Conquerors!
It seems to be human nature to want to explore what exactly happens to people after death. Alessandro Rak and Andrea Scoppetta’s version is explored in the pages of A Skeleton Story.
Issue 4's cover is my favorite, but to be fair, they're all good.
A Skeleton Story is essentially like Monsters Inc., only with dead people. The dead are hanging out in the afterlife, doing the things they do, when a living little girl finds her way into their realm. The story follows various characters as they try to get a hold of the girl each for their own reasons.
In a little more detail, the story follows Will Musil, a skeleton man who was a criminal in life, but has become a cop after death and is desperate to find something that will prove he’s worthwhile. At first he sees the girl as just a ticket to get on Death’s good side, but over time, he starts to come to the realization that a living girl just doesn’t belong in the land of the dead. So, I’ll revise a bit, it’s a bit more like Monsters Inc meets Grim Fandango - which sounds like a winner in my book!
Kitty!
The writing on this is interesting, the story seems to wander quite a lot. Not much time is spent on setting up things and characters seem to wander in and out of the story, and at the same time, a lot of the atmosphere is just explained through the art with entire pages with no dialogue…usually a move that would slow pacing down, but not here somehow. All that said, though, I don’t really mind the erratic pacing on this. It’s difficult to explain, but somehow it works. The result feels less like a hurried mess and more like our main character is just stumbling into these scenes as he goes along. Even the ending is left wonderfully vague (I hate endings where everything wraps up neatly, I like being left with questions to consider on my own).
Wait...where are we now?
Will’s a pretty good protagonist - a dynamic character, though it seems that he’s already done most of his changing before we arrived, going from criminal to cop, and we’re just here to see the final step. Most of the other characters get very little characterization, we get Frog, Will's former partner in crime and still a criminal in the afterlife, celebrating the freedom that he believes this way of life gives him. There are several other named characters running through it, but the only one that really has any kind of presence is Burma, a large, mute “zombie” (I think he just has flesh because he hasn’t been dead as long) who has absolutely no trouble wrestling with the question of whether or not to save the little girl, and spends much of the story keeping her from Will and the other, more shady characters.
What a weirdo, always looking for living cats...
For our antagonists, we have “The Old Lady” who seems to be the personification of Death here, though she isn’t really that villainous. She also doesn’t seem much like other depictions of Death - ancient and wise - she just seems to have a very superficial understanding of what’s going on and only looks at the situation from the perspective that anything that arrives in the realm of the dead belongs to her - even if it’s living. She doesn’t read as mean or evil so much as she just reads as thoughtless, the pain she’d cause people by keeping the girl there just doesn’t occur to her.
How can you hate anyone who loves kitties!
Which leaves one of her henchmen, Scarlett, as our main antagonist or at least the more threatening one. He’s a high ranking cop, but is ambitious and always wants more. He doesn’t care about the girl - or anyone else - at all. All he’s interested in is a bargaining chip to get himself more power, and so he comes across as far more malevolent than Death does.
For all that I talk about what’s good an interesting in this story, there are a lot of aspects about it that confuse me. Because of the wandering and fast paced way it’s written, there isn’t a lot of time to answer the reader’s questions. For example, there’s a bit of the story where Will runs into Frog and his old gang and doesn’t seem to remember them. His confusion seems genuine, and that combined with some other lines make it seem as though he doesn’t remember what his life was like. But there are also points where he laments his life spent as a criminal, which seems to contradict the other scenes, and leaves me wondering if he was lying about having forgotten them. I suppose it’s possible that he only has very vague memories, but I’d be interested in knowing if that were the case. It seems like an interesting story point that could be expanded upon.
And how did you get in there, anyway?
Issues like these may be chalked up to the fact that this comic was originally written in Italian. It’s possible there was a translation error. Overall it reads quite smoothly so I’m not criticizing the translator here since I don’t know the original, but it seems like a very difficult and nuanced job in which some small mistakes would happen pretty easily. It’s also possible, however, that there’s something that an American like me is just not going to get, that the writing style is specific to the area and with me not being culturally Italian, I’m just not going to get it. Again, though, not having the original (and I wouldn’t be able to read it even if I had it) I can’t really make that call.
This cameo kind of startled me, though.
The writing isn’t all or even most of what I like about this comic though, the real showstopper is the art. I love this art! It has this wonderful style to the drawing that’s slightly cartoony, just at the level that’s my favorite. The panels all have a beautifully painted quality to them and the whole thing uses very muted colors that make it feel very ethereal and dream-like.
If I had to nitpick, I’d probably criticize how small the artist draws the characters’ eyebrows, because when your characters are skeletons, the eyebrows are going to be our main source of expression, and it was hard to read their faces in some scenes. Also, on occasion, there is no background behind the characters and it’s just left a flat white. I probably wouldn’t mind this much if the backgrounds were at least colored in, so many of them are so highly detailed that he could get away with not drawing all of them, but the white is very jarring and takes me out of the story.
You should think about where you left it last!
All that said, the art is the real draw to me. The story is fine and the characters are fun, but there’s so much to look at on every page, and all of it is pleasing to the eye. I actually had a really hard time finding panels to scan for this review since there aren’t a lot of big, “important” splash panels that are really striking, because ALL of it is good and ALL of it is important. And that’s a problem that I, as someone who places a lot of value on the visuals, really like to have.
There is unfortunately no collected edition of this series yet, which is a shame, because I’d buy it in a heartbeat if one popped up. I also wish we’d gotten to spend a little more time with it. As I said, I love the ending, but what I would’ve liked was a little more time in the middle to flesh out more of these characters and maybe answer some of the questions that I had. Or to put it another way, six issues isn’t nearly enough time spent in this beautifully painted world. There is apparently an A Skeleton Story game, which I did look into at one point, though it looks like a pretty generic side-scroller, so I never bought it. Whether the comic is an adaption of the game or vice-versa, I don’t know, but the comic is the version that I personally enjoyed and heartily recommend to anyone who thought it sounded even a little interesting from this review.
Next time we'll look at Gladstone's School for World Conquerors!