Jeff Smith

Born February 27, 1960 (McKees Rock, Pennsylvania)
American author, illustrator

For his 1,300-page epic Bone, Jeff Smith is considered among the greatest comics creators of all time. Bone follows three cousins on an adventure into the unknown. "It's a fish-out-of-water story," Smith told Publishers Weekly. Combining the flavor of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy with the universal appeal of Charles Schulz's Peanuts and Walter Kelly's Pogo comic strips, Smith engages readers with action-packed, humorous stories of friendship, compassion, and courage. Smith's ability to create an entertaining and smart tale for all-age readers truly distinguishes his work.

"I just wanted to read a giant comic book that had all the elements that a book like Moby Dick or Le Morte D'Arthur or the Odyssey had."

"Jeff Smith mixes humor and adventure perfectly," wrote Michael Arner on the Pop Matters Web site, adding that "while story and art are certainly 'cartoony,' Bone is anything but childish." Bone has earned Smith dozens of the comics industry's top awards, including ten Eisner Awards, eight Harvey Awards, and recognition from the National Cartoonist Society.

Bones up on cartooning

Born on February 27, 1960, in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania, Jeff Alan Smith grew up in Columbus, Ohio. He loved storytelling from an early age. Some of his earliest memories are of drawing cartoon characters in crayon. By the time he reached kindergarten, he had created the basic characters for Bone. "I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons and draw these Bone characters, and have them go on little adventures—same stuff they do now," he told Columbus Alive. The characters were still with him by the time he reached college. At Ohio State University, he continued the characters' adventures in a comic strip called Thorn, which ran in the student newspaper Lantern between 1982 and 1984.

Best-Known Works

Bone Graphic Novels

The Complete Bone Adventures (1993).

Bone Volume One: Out from Boneville (1995).

Bone Volume Two: The Great Cow Race (1996).

Bone Volume Three: Eyes of the Storm (1996).

Bone Volume Four: The Dragonslayer (1997).

Bone Volume Five: Rockjaw, Master of the Eastern Border (1998).

Bone Volume Six: Old Man's Cave (1999).

Bone Volume Seven: Ghost Circles (2001).

Bone Volume Eight: Treasure Hunters (2002).

Bone Volume Nine: Crown of Horns (2004).

Other Graphic Novels

(Illustrator) Sniegoski, Tom. Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails: The Adventures of Big Johnson Bone, Frontier Hero (2000).

Rose. Charles Vess, illustrator. (2002).

College did not hold as much interest for Smith as his comics. He left school in 1985 in order to fully devote himself to his work. Thorn had gained attention from newspaper syndicates, but the cartoonist quickly ended negotiations when it became clear that he would lose creative control and ownership of the comic strip. He shelved his strip and instead started the Character Builders animation studio with Jim Kammerud and Martin Fuller in Powell, Ohio. "[We] were all self-taught, learning everything we could from books like Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life," Smith told Jeff Mason in an interview with indy magazine. The studio flourished, taking on several advertising, public announcements, and film projects.

For the next five years, Smith and his two partners were preoccupied with various projects. Despite the success of the animation studio (which continued to do well into 2006), Smith remained interested in his comic series. He left Character Builders in 1991 to launch Cartoon Books with his wife, Vijaya Iyer. The sole purpose of Cartoon Books was to publish Bone in comic book format.

Launches an epic adventure

Smith envisioned Bone as a sort of combination of Bugs Bunny and the Lord of the Rings. Though he wrote the story for his and his wife's entertainment, Smith remembered in an interview with Ain't It Cool News that he had "very low hopes" when he began to publish Bone "because the market is so dominated by superheroes, X-Men and stuff like that. But I thought we might find a small niche, because I was positive that more people liked Bugs Bunny than Wolverine." To Smith's pleasant surprise, the market welcomed Bone, and he reported having made money on Bone from its first publication in 1991.

Bone is the story of three cousins' adventures in new lands. Unlike many other epic adventure stories, the heroes of this story didn't boldly set out on an adventure; instead, they seemed lost. Chased out of their hometown, Boneville, by an angry mob, the cousins find themselves lost in a desert and simply want to go home. With their distinctly different temperaments, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone adapt to their new surroundings in unique ways. Fone Bone's levelheadedness, Phoney Bone's cranky attitude, and Smiley Bone's happy-go-lucky way provide readers with a variety of insights into the culture of the valley in which the Bones find themselves. Filled with an assortment of good and evil characters who are engaged in a battle for control, the valley becomes a place where the Bones experience real tests to their character and grow, sometimes despite themselves.

Bone becomes a richer tale of good versus evil with the addition of Thorn, a girl whose royal blood thrusts her into the vortex of the valley's power struggles and who becomes the object of Fone Bone's affections. The Bones become enmeshed in the royal family's fight to win back its throne.

Smith had imagined Bone as an epic tale from the beginning, sketching out the story format in the late 1980s. "I had the long view, goals, places the characters needed to get to in order to move forward," Smith related to Publishers Weekly. The predetermined structure did not impede Smith from infusing his tale with spontaneity. While working toward his goals, he explained to Publishers Weekly that "I allowed myself to explore and let the story go where it would. That's the only way to write comedy. You can't really meticulously plot jokes—you have to let go, and when the characters get into trouble, you see what's interesting." Smith infused his saga with knee-slapping humor, but never lost his focus on the direction he wanted the story to go. "Overall, there were very few changes. I've pretty much told the story I wanted to tell. Somewhere I have the last page that I drew in 1989 before I started. It's very similar to the final version, with the exact same joke," Smith told Publishers Weekly.

Prequels to Bone

The Bone saga is a stand-alone tale, but the richness of the adventure offered Jeff Smith the opportunity to explore various aspects of the story's history, and he created two prequels to Bone with the help of writer Tom Sniegoski and artist Charles Vess.

Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails is about the Bone cousins' pioneering ancestor Big Johnson Bone, founder of their hometown, Boneville. For this prequel, Smith teamed with writer Tom Sniegoski. Smith described Sniegoski as "one of the funniest people I'd ever met in comics" to the Comics Reporter. Their resulting story had a slapstick comedy feel much like that of Saturday morning cartoons. Big Johnson Bone, a bold adventurer, battles through the unknown much like his modern-day relatives. Big Johnson Bone and his companions Blossom the mule and Mr. Pip the monkey ride a tornado into the same uncharted valley at the time when the rat creatures were overrunning it. The powerful Big Johnson staves off the invasion for a while before he goes off to found Boneville. His adventures offer Bone readers insight into the early drama of the valley struggles and into the character of the Bones. It also reveals why the modernday rat creatures bob their tails.

In Rose, the early story of the valley's royal family, Smith relates Thorn's ancestral history, starting when Gran'ma Ben, whose name is Rose, was in her teens. The tale chronicles the events that created the dynamics of the Bone story. Readers learn why Gran'ma Ben has such a strained relationship with her sister Briar and how the Lord of the Locusts came to dominate the valley. Unlike the cartoony style of the art-work in Bone and Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails, Rose looks more like a fantasy comic with realistic artwork by award-winning artist Charles Vess. While both prequels add to the Bone saga, they stand alone as interesting stories in their own right.

Smith boosted the success of Bone when he began networking within the comics industry and at industry conventions. His creation really took off after Dave Sim featured a long segment of Bone #3 in his popular Cerebus the Aardvark #161 and the Comic Buyer'sGuide gave it a positive review. In 1993, Smith gathered the first six installments of Bone into The Complete Bone Adventures, with an introduction by leading comic book creator Neil Gaiman (1960–), and started raking in readers and awards. In 1993 alone, Smith sold tens of thousands of copies of his book and won an Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication, a Russ Manning Award for Most Promising Newcomer, and three Harvey Awards for Best Graphic Album, Special Award for Humor, and Best Cartoonist, among others.

Through the years, readers and awards continued to mount. In 1995, Smith republished The Complete Bone Adventures as Bone Volume One: Out from Boneville and created the rest of the saga as graphic novels until the series ended with volume nine. Smith published the entire Bone series in a massive single volume in 2004. Until that point, Bone was published in black and white; however, Scholastic had planned to print color editions of the series starting in 2006. Bone continued to sell in more than a dozen different languages throughout the world. With the completion of the series, Smith had yet to announce any new projects he might tackle.

For More Information

Periodicals

MacDonald, Heidi. "Jeff Smith on Bone." Publishers Weekly (October 18, 2004): p. 34.

Mason, Jeff. "Interview with Jeff Smith." indy magazine (January 21, 1994). This article can also be found online at http://www.indyworld.com/comics/jeff.smith.

School Library Journal (October 2003): p. 31; (December 2004): p. 25.

Starker, Melissa. "A Letter to Boneville from Columbus Cartoonist Jeff Smith." Columbus Alive (October 27, 1999): 12.

Web Sites

Arner, Michael. "Bone: One Volume Edition" (book review). Pop Matters.http://www.popmatters.com/comics/bone-one-volume-edition.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Boneville.com.http://boneville.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Dupont, Alexandra. "AICN Comics Exclusive! Alexandra DuPont Interviews Bone Creator Jeff Smith!!" Ain't It Cool News.http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=15592 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

"Jeff Smith." Mars Import.http://www.marsimport.com/display_creator?ID=910 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

"A Short Interview with Jeff Smith." The Comics Reporter.http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/resources/interviews/2257/ (accessed on May 3, 2006).