Scholastic Corporation has teamed up with the cutting-edge book marketing company VidLit to create a nearly 3-minute animated short to promote Jeff Smith's series of Bone graphic novels, which are published under Scholastic's GRAPHIX imprint.  The animated short is available on the Internet at the Kidvidlit site.  The full color animated short took four months to make and it does an excellent job of introducing the key characters and providing a quick overview of the essential character dynamics of the Bone saga as well as a preview of The Great Cow Race.  The video uses word balloons, which give it a graphic novel/comic book feel, and which should help in marketing the Bone graphic novel series to librarians and teachers.

So far Scholastic has published two full color volumes of Bone (Bone Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race was just released in August) with two more titles slated for 2006.