I'm willing to throw out necessity and judge Rose not by its siblings in the Bone saga, but on its own. And in that case, it's fine. It's entertaining. It is nice to see the characters from Bone again, even if it feels far out of context. The fantasy on its own isn't really my thing, but it does go deeper into the mystical side of the original Bone books. Charles Vess is a good artist (he won an Eisner Award for his work on Rose, after all), and his work is different enough from Smith's to keep Rose from looking like a complete retread. Vess' art fits with the serious tone. The large splash pages are here, just like in Bone, but with Vess they're more Prince Valiant than Pogo. Even in the darkest parts of Bone, Smith's art had a whimsical look to it. That's part of Smith's style and it fit in the original Bone books since some of the main players (the Bone cousins) were cartoon characters and not humans. The contrast in appearance between Fone Bone and Thorn wasn't jarring because the characters were from different worlds and they looked like it. Smith's humans have a certain cartoon charm to them, but had Vess mimicked it too closely, he would've been masking his own artistic strengths. Rose is a fairly serious story about humans, so there's no need to cartoon-up the people.