This is the first edition of Comics Disassembled in a while, and while I missed a ton of big news – bankruptcies! non-payments! other not very fun things! – I already sort of wrote about all that this week in my two features. So instead of that old news leading things off, I’m going to highlight something that snuck by me in late November, before focusing on assorted items I picked up from throughout the week.

So let’s dig into ten things I liked or didn’t like from the week of comics, led by the return of the king.

1. More Bone! Like Jeff Smith Bone!

On one hand, writing about news that originally arrived in November isn’t exactly “smart” or “timely” from a journalistic standpoint. On the other, this item is about Jeff Smith’s Bone, so all rational thought goes out the window for me because of that. It seems we’re getting more tall tales from Bone, or, more specifically, More Tall Tales, because that’s the title of the upcoming graphic novel. This release has the same approach as the previous Tall Tales book, which was an anthology of stories told by the Bone Cousins (and Bartleby the Rat Creature) to a group of young scouts, with each story having a different artist this time.

This book will be co-written by Smith and his oft collaborator Tom Sniegoski with art by Smith, Scott Brown, Stan Sakai (!), Katie Cook (!), and Matt Smith (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), with, as you may have noticed based on the exclamation points, I’m particularly excited on the Smith front. If there are two comic book facts of my life, it’s that a) I love Bone and b) I love Matt Smith’s art. The Lake of Fire artist is a master, full stop. Him working on Bone is David Harper fan fiction, too good to be real, except it is. I genuinely cannot wait to read his contributions, because they will be brilliant.

While it’s worth noting that I liked but didn’t love Tall Tales, I cannot help but be excited about new Bone, particularly with such a glorious cadre of creators involved. This book drops on September 5th. I am very, very excited for its arrival.

2. Comics and Kickstarter, Delivering

This item isn’t “news,” at least not in the sense that someone announced it this week or something. I just came across something that I thought was worth noting as I was researching my five questions about 2023 piece from this week, thus, the noting of it. It’s about Kickstarter, the crowdfunding giant, and to be more specific, the statistics page where the platform highlights key metrics daily. On it, there’s a “Projects and Dollars” chart that showcases a wide variety of stats per individual categories. In most of those metrics, the Comics category lands somewhere in the middle of the pack, but there’s one it finishes at the top on: success rate, or the percentage of funded projects versus projects overall.

Evidently 64.82% of comic projects fund, making it one of two categories that are over 60% as well as only one of two categories with 20,000+ projects launched that succeed more than half the time. While that’s evidently down from the 74% it hit in 2020, it being well over 20% above the average category’s success rate is still extremely impressive, underlining the value and hit rate of Kickstarter as a platform in comics. It’s worth noting that based on the other metrics, this isn’t because of comparatively low goals. Comics delivers far more dollars per project than those with a comparable number of launched projects.

This is all a healthy sign for comics and the platform itself (besides that drop since 2020, at least), and an easy to point to competitive advantage Kickstarter might have versus its competitors in the increasingly crowded crowdfunding space. I love to see it.