Rose #3 Page 39 by Charles Vess, Jeff Smith from the Bone Saga

This was a great miniseries written by Jeff Smith and painted to perfection by Mr. Vess. It told the story of a young Gran’ma Ben growing up as a princess alongside her sister Briar. Here, under the control of Briar and the Lord of Locusts, the dragon Balsaad was seemingly invincible as it could reattach any dismembered limb. Remembering the advice from the Great Red Dragon, she leads him to the river where she initially freed him in issue #1. Conveniently, the water is raging this time and any cleaved arms & legs would be out of Balsaad’s reach. She finishes the job on the next page (see Gil David’s gallery).

I included Jeff Smith's name in the title because I believe he did the initial script layouts for each page. These were followed by a finished penciled page from Charles and then the final painted version (explained in Bone #39). Signed by Jeff and Charles at the bottom. The additional image shows the published page with dialogue attached.

IMHO, this piece is one of the better action pages in the series and I’m very happy to have acquired it. Curiously, the auction description claimed that this was “From the collection of Darren Shan” aka Darren O’Shaughnessy. He is the author of the Saga of Daren Shan series which began with Cirque Du Freak and later The Vampire's Assistant.