Modern Masters Vol. 25: Jeff Smith by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T W E N T Y - F I V E :

JEFF SMITH

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Modern Masters Volume 25:

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T W E N T Y- F I V E :

JEFF SMITH edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Jeff Smith front cover color by Steve Hamaker all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • February 2011 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-024-3 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2011 Jeff Smith unless otherwise noted. Big Johnson Bone, Bone, Little Mouse, RASL, and all related characters ™ and ©2011 Jeff Smith. Pan-Fried Girl ™ and ©2011 Paul Pope. Marv, Sin City ™ and ©2011 Frank Miller. Batman, Captain Marvel, Sandman, Superman and all related characters ™ and ©2011 DC Comics. Alfred E. Newman ™ and ©2011 EC Publications, Inc. Doonesbury ™ and ©2011 Garry Trudeau. Popeye ™ and © 2011 King Features, Inc. Pogo ™ and ©2011 Walt Kelly. Peanuts ™ and ©2011 United Features Syndicate, Inc. Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge ™ and ©2011 Disney. My Neighbor Totoro © Ghibli. Star Wars ™ and ©2011 Lucasfilm Ltd. Jaws © Universal Pictures. The Seven Samurai © Toho Co. Ltd. Return of the King © J.R.R. Tolkein. Editorial package ©2011 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To the Thorn in my side, Donna, and my little rat creatures, Iain and Caper.

Acknowledgements Jeff Smith, for his time and thoughtfulness, and for creating a book everyone can enjoy. Kathleen Glosan, for coordinating things and keeping Jeff in line. Steve Hamaker, for digging into the archives and unburying so many treasures. Special Thanks Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Five:

JEFF SMITH Table of Contents Introduction by Eric Nolen-Weathington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: An Artist in the Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Interlude: Under the Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Part Two: A Dream of Syndication, a Life in Animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Part Three: Entering the Great Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Part Four: And Now Back to Our Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Part Five: The Magic of Words and Scientific Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Introduction

So what makes Bone so special? There aren’t any super-heroes, and the main characters are weird looking. It’s got lots of funny jokes and talking animals. And the art is so cartoony. In other words, it has every ingredient that typically kills the sales of a comic book in the direct market. And yet Bone sold quite well in the direct market. Again, what makes Bone so special? Was it a matter of luck or good timing? Perhaps a bit of each was involved, but at the crux of Jeff’s success lies his extraordinary talent as a cartoonist and storyteller.

eff Smith is an anomaly. That is to say, he has beaten the odds. He became a success in the comic book field long before he drew a single page for DC or Marvel. That is a rarity in this day and age, though it is becoming somewhat less so—in large part because of his success. Bone was on library shelves before libraries had separate sections for graphic novels. Bone is prominently displayed in major bookstore chains. Bone is even sold at school book fairs. Just over a year ago, I was giving a lecture on interviewing to the eighth grade Language Arts classes at my son’s school. At the end, while taking questions, one of the kids wanted to know if I had ever interviewed anyone famous. I said, “Well, you’ve probably never heard of most of the people I’ve interviewed, but I’m going to be interviewing Jeff Smith soon. How many of you have read any of the Bone books?” Out of about a hundred 13-year-old kids, over a third of them raised their hands.

Jeff was 31 when Bone #1 hit the shelves. Early readers of the series never saw the growing pains of a new artist finding and developing his style. Jeff had already worked through those issues. In fact, he had already spent decades analyzing the work of his predecessors—not just their artwork, but their writing, as well. He had spent hour upon hour, day upon day honing his craft. But most importantly, he had come to realize that pretty pictures and clever words were not enough if he truly wanted to make an impact with his audience. And so, when Bone #1 finally came to be, readers discovered a rich, new world filled with amusing, horrible, wonderful characters and a beautifully drawn story with depth and meaning that was well worth reading.

Let me repeat that: Over a third of them raised their hands. Talk about reaching your audience! And how many 13-year-olds do you suppose are reading DC or Marvel comics? Surely not one out of every three. That’s not to say one-third of all 13-year-olds in America have read Bone, but given the wide economic diversity of the school, I’d wager it’s not all that far from the truth.

Really, that’s what every reader, regardless of age, wants from any book, graphic or otherwise. And, boy, does Jeff deliver. Eric Nolen-Weathington

Part 1:

A Cartoonist in the Making

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in McKee’s Rock, Pennsylvania, on February 27, 1960. But you moved to Columbus, Ohio, when you were pretty young.

JEFF: No, they were in New England. Both my parents originally came from Connecticut. But I would see them at least once a year on vacations while I was growing up.

JEFF SMITH: Right. I was, like, two, so I have no memory of Pennsylvania.

MM: You said you have a brother. Was he interested in art as well? JEFF: A little. Not as much as me. In fact, he’s an aeronautical engineer now. He liked airplanes. My dad made ice cream, I make comic books, and my brother makes airplanes. We’re all quite happy. [laughter]

MM: Was the move because of a job? JEFF: Yeah, my dad got transferred to a Columbus plant. He worked for Borden’s Ice Cream. MM: Did your mother work as well?

MM: What captured your imagination first, was it the comic strips you saw in the newspaper, comic books, cartoons on TV...?

JEFF: Part-time. She was mostly a stay-at-home mom. She’d make a little money doing paintings, though. She would paint little plaques with flowers. They were pretty nice. She would sell them in local shops. She would pile me and my brother in the car once a week and drive around to all these shops that were selling them and pick up money for any that sold and drop more off.

JEFF: I think it all happened simultaneously, because it just seems like there was more of it in the culture in the ’60s. The Sunday newspaper comics section was such a bigger deal back then than it is now. Peanuts was coming into its heyday with Snoopy flying in his Sopwith Camel fighting the Red Baron. Saturday morning cartoons were really still dominated by reruns of theatrical shorts, like Bugs Bunny and Heckle & Jeckyl. The quality was much higher and they were a little more sophisticated. Both the newspaper strips and the theatrical cartoons were aimed not just at kids, but at the adults who were also sitting there. Even before I could read, my dad would read Mad magazine to me. He loved Mad magazine, and I was a

MM: So you were actively exposed to art at an early age. JEFF: Yeah. My mom had paints, and she encouraged me to draw. She would bring me home markers and things, and I loved that. My grandparents, especially my grandmothers, were really into creativity—stories, reading, clay, all sorts of stuff like that. MM: Did you see them much? Were they in the area? 6

Previous Page: Cover art to “The Gem,” one of Jeff’s first Bone stories written and drawn when he was ten years old. This homemade comic measures about 3" x 5" and was drawn with a blue ballpoint pen. Left: The first two pages of “The Gem.” Each page of the 21-page story (!) consists of two half-page panels. Below: In this panel from page 11 of “The Gem,” Jeff is already experimenting with light and shadow. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

huge fan of Don Martin and “Spy vs. Spy.” I just got into that stuff. MM: When you first started drawing, were you imitating what you were seeing in the comic strips and cartoons, or were you creating your own characters right away? JEFF: That’s a good question. I think I was trying to draw my own characters, but of course I was trying to draw Woody Woodpecker and Donald Duck and Huckleberry Hound and whatever I was looking at, trying to figure out things like, “How do you draw an eye?” and understanding that there’s the white part and then there’s the black part—the pupil— and that points towards what he’s looking at. Very obvious stuff, but I remember being three or four and trying to figure out those little tricks.

JEFF: That probably wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade, about nine years old. That was when I discovered Walt Kelly and Pogo. That really changed everything. That was when I began to see the real quality of artwork and look beyond just the construction of the drawing. I really wanted to know the techniques that Walt

MM: Did you ever trace? JEFF: You know, I really didn’t. And as a result my drawings weren’t very good. [laughter] MM: When did you start getting a sense of thickness of lines and that type of thing? 7

Kelly was using to make these beautiful drawings. I’d go to the library and try to find books that would explain it. MM: What kind of tools were you using? Did you discover that artists used special pens and brushes at that point?

Above: Panels from pages 12 and 17 of “The Gem.” In the first panel, Jeff plays with underwater distortion. In the second, he shows an early understanding of perspective. Next Page: When Neal Adams burst onto the comics scene in 1967, he brought a rarely-beforeseen sense of realism to the artwork, including hairy chests and nipples. This made quite an impact on Jeff as a young, aspiring cartoonist. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith. Batman, Ra’s al Ghul ™ and © DC Comics.

JEFF: Yeah, for sure. I have a memory of going to the library to xerox a comic page I had made, and it didn’t reproduce, because back then you put your dime in and there were no adjustments. The pencil wasn’t dark enough. The librarian came over to help me and explained to me that there’s a process of inking that makes the artwork dark enough to reproduce. I think I ended up trying crowquill pens. That took a long time to learn how to use. MM: What were you doing to practice your inking, just making comics? JEFF: Just making comics. I had a real good friend, Jim Kammerud. We grew up together, read comics together, drew comics together, and Jim was always trying to find new materials. He would find things like Rapidographs. He was the first person I knew to use a brush. When he did that... wow! It looked like the Walt Kelly line. “You did it, Jim. You found it.” MM: It must have been good to have likeminded friends you could share information with. JEFF: Oh, absolutely. We were just two friends and that’s what we were interested 8

in. We both read science fiction and Conan, we rode our bikes around to different drug stores to find the next issue of Batman with Neal Adams artwork. That was just our thing to do. MM: So you were paying attention to the creators at that point. JEFF: In 1968 or ’69—whenever Neal Adams kind of came onto the scene—that was a thunderclap in our little brains. I mean, he was drawing in such a dynamic way. No other comic book looked anything like that. And there was acting. Neal Adams’ characters would squint and wince and be surprised and frown and laugh. And they had hairy chests. Prior to that, if Superman had his shirt off, he would just be smooth and wouldn’t even have nipples. Here, all of a sudden, Batman is a man. It was awesome. MM: Did that inspire you to look for anatomy books, or were you just looking at comic book anatomy? JEFF: I did get anatomy books. Of course, the first one I got was the Burne Hogarth book—another comic book guy. And even more over-the-top and dynamic than Neal Adams. But I did really want to figure out how the body works, and those anatomy books would show you how to do foreshortening—concepts I was seeing in Neal Adams’ pages. MM: Were you getting any encouragement from outside your family? Were there any teachers that helped you along the way?

JEFF: I lost interest in comic books once I got into middle school. Once Neal Adams kind of dropped out of comics, I lost interest in them. The last thing in comics I remember getting was Kirby’s Fourth World books. I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever seen in my life. I’ve revisited those stories, and I maintain my opinion. [laughter]

JEFF: It was mostly just between my friends who were into comics and drawing. Every other year it seemed there would be a teacher that would be encouraging. But most teachers thought cartoons were what you would expect them to think: that they were a waste of time. MM: By the time you got to middle school, you were already drawing complete stories. Most kids that age don’t have that kind of attention span.

MM: Why do you think you lost interest? JEFF: Girls. I mean, I would still look at them if I saw them, but they weren’t something I spent much time with. I still enjoyed comic strips. I don’t think I ever stopped reading comic strips. I continued to buy Peanuts collections and things like that. Later, in high school, I really got into Doonesbury. And I never lost interest in Pogo. I was always searching for Pogo books, which were out of print, but you could sometimes find them in used book stores.

JEFF: That’s interesting you say that. It turns out that once you’re grown up and doing it in real life, it takes an incredible amount of discipline to go over the same information in a story over and over again. You make the outline, you thumbnail it, letter it, pencil it, ink it. By the time you get done with a comic book that takes 15 minutes to read, you’ve spent months on it. MM: Did you have any interests outside of cartooning?

MM: Were you looking at them more analytically at that point beyond just how the artwork was done? Were you studying the storytelling methods?

JEFF: Oh, yeah. I liked movies and television shows. I liked playing outside, climbing onto the roof, jumping off the roof—kids’ stuff. MM: You lived in the suburbs of Columbus. Did you go into the city much? I assume there were museums there. It’s a fairly large city.

JEFF: Yes and no. I spent a lot of time just trying to breathe in those strips, because the good cartoonists are able to just pull you in and hold your attention. I would read them two or three times, and during the second and third times is when I’d really look at what’s happening. But the first time reading a Pogo book, I never paid attention to technique. I just soaked in that crazy language and the ridiculous situations.

JEFF: It’s large enough. In the ’60s, downtown was where you’d have to go to get to the department stores. And my mother would take me to the art museum. There was a science museum, the Center of Science and Industry, which is still here in town. That was great. I was fascinated by that as a kid. Science and comics—there you go. [laughter] And I was a big reader. I love to read.

MM: As you were nearing the end of high school in 1977-78, it was during that time that you first read Lord of the Rings and Heavy Metal, and Star Wars had just come out, too.

MM: Did you read mainly genre fiction?

JEFF: That was all during the summer between my junior and senior years. My friend, Jim Kammerud, had loved The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings since he was a kid, and he’d been trying to get me to read them, but I just had no interest. He finally talked me into it that summer, and I couldn’t believe it. “I really like this book. Why did I wait so long to read it?”

JEFF: When I was a kid it was all genre. I loved science fiction and fantasy—Doc Savage, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian. I don’t think I read Moby-Dick until I was in high school, but I liked Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. MM: Was there ever a point, say in high school, where you gave up comics? 9

Above: The February 24, 1983 Thorn strip for The Lantern. This strip was later reworked into the final page Bone #6. Next Page: Two Thorn strips from October of 1983, in which Fone and Phoney go up against an escapee from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. At this point, the designs for the Bones are getting pretty close to what future Bone fans will see, but Thorn and Gran’ma Ben are still in the early stage of their development. Bone, Thorn ™ and © Jeff Smith.

At the same time Heavy Metal came out—Métal Hurlant, from France—and that blew my mind. It showed you could approach comics from an entirely different place. This was not Spider-Man or Batman; these were comics that were done because the artists had stories they wanted to tell. Sometimes they were dark, genre-driven fantasy stories, but sometimes it was World War I trench warfare by Jacques Tardi. Just beautiful stuff. As for Star Wars, I took a date to see it, and I don’t think she was that impressed with it. But I was like, “What in the world did I just see?” and I went back a couple of weeks later to see it again. I don’t know that today you could explain to someone who wasn’t there at the time what it was like when that opening shot came onto the screen. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. The logo was hard and modern, then you start with a little moon and the camera pans down and you see the horizon of the planet. Then the first little ship shoots in, and you go, “Oh, my gosh! That’s the best animation of a spaceship I’ve ever seen.” And then the big ship rumbles in and blows the collective minds of the audience. It was great. MM: You had been drawing the Bone characters since you were nine. Was it at this point where you started coming up with an actual story for them? JEFF: I think it was the collective experience of The Lord of the Rings, Heavy Metal, and Star Wars that led me to wanting to tell a story. What was special about Lord of the Rings was that I really saw what a story could be or do. It was so well constructed, and it had a 10

lot of power to it. Over the years, as the Star Wars trilogy rolled out—by 1983 you could feel a similar completeness and structure to the story to that of Lord of the Rings. I began to wonder what was there that made those stories work so well. The fires lit in my mind, and I wanted to create a story myself. I could draw, so it made sense to take Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and do them as a Heavy Metal comic. MM: Did you have a plan in mind for what you were going to do after graduating from high school? JEFF: No, not really. I won a scholarship to the Columbus College of Art & Design, which is a very good school, and I was happy to get that opportunity. But I thought, “Well, I could probably get a job as an animator at Disney.” One of my art teachers—one of the good ones—stopped me. When he heard my plan to go work for Disney, he said, “You wouldn’t last a week there. Don’t do it.” [laughter] He knew my personality, that I was too much of a troublemaker and wouldn’t fit in there. I’m so grateful to him that I didn’t go that route. MM: So you end up going to Columbus College of Art & Design. What was the atmosphere there like? You didn’t stay very long, so I take it you didn’t really find what you were looking for there. JEFF: No, I didn’t, which is funny, because now—30 years later—they do embrace cartooning and animation and teach classes on those subjects. But at the time they were just like every other institution that treated comics and cartoons as basically

just garbage for kids. Apparently they hadn’t seen Heavy Metal. [laughter] So I didn’t really fit in there, and I couldn’t connect with any of the professors, so it was probably best that I just got out of there.

tion from that art school, just in terms of concepts like how colors relate to one another. And certainly from the History of Art class I saw a lot about how artists used light and shadow and composition through the different periods. I got a lot out of it, and I continued to look into it on my own, going to art museums or looking through art books.

MM: What classes did you take there? I assume they focused on fine art and industrial design. JEFF: Exactly. I took classes on color concept, 3-D design, history of art. That was actually a great class. I loved History of Art, and I actually did well in that class, too. I could hardly believe it, because it didn’t seem like my style. But the history of Western art is the history of Western civilization. They just go together, and it makes a great story. I was fascinated by it, and by the leaps in techniques. You see carvings of statues of people standing straight, and then 100 years later you see much more natural poses, like an arm resting on a knee. It was just like looking at comics when I was a kid and seeing a shirtless Superman with no chest hair and no nipples, then all of a sudden you see Neal Adams’ Superman.

MM: You didn’t immediately enroll at Ohio State. What did you do after you left Columbus? JEFF: I bummed around for about four years. I worked at a loading dock at the university bookstore. I liberated many, many interesting books on art and story from the back room. I worked at the ice cream factory that my dad managed. I did that for a while. MM: Did having to work those types of jobs spur you on to reapply yourself to your art? JEFF: I don’t think so. I was just a young kid, and I was exploring. MM: What was it that made you decide to go back to college?

MM: Beyond the history class, was there anything useful that you took with you when you left?

JEFF: There are a lot of different stories I could tell you. [laughter] The one I’ll stick to now is that I met my future wife, Vijaya, on campus. We had mutual friends and we

JEFF: Yeah. I don’t think I would have admitted it to myself at the time, but I absorbed quite a bit of informa11

Above: Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip for August 25, 1975 was likely in one of the treasuries Jeff lugged around through college. Next Page Top: Jeff makes an appearance in the Thorn strip for July 29, 1983, showing that in the early days of the concept, nothing was out of bounds, not even breaking the fourth wall. Next Page Bottom: A mid-’80s one-panel Thorn gag illustration. Doonesbury ™ and © Garry Trudeau. Bone, Thorn ™ and © Jeff Smith.

ended up playing cards together as partners one night in Euchre. She was enrolling at Ohio State that fall. My friend, Jim, had also been bumming around and not really going to school, so we both decided to enroll at Ohio State and do cartoons in the student newspaper. This was 1982. MM: Were you looking for a specific type of instruction or for a broader art education? JEFF: All I was looking for was The Lantern—the student newspaper. It had a circulation of about 50,000 at the time, and intermittently it would have student comic strips inside, but nothing that would appear every day. So I went to them with a couple of weeks’ worth of strips under my arm and talked them into carrying it. They weren’t that picky. [laughter] I think they paid me seven bucks a week. MM: You actually got paid? Not much, but still. JEFF: It paid for my board and my ink and a trip to McDonald’s. 12

MM: Had you done anything for your high school paper? Did you have any practical experience going into it? JEFF: I did drawings for them, but I don’t remember exactly what I did. I’m sure Fone Bone was in the drawings, but they weren’t strips and he wasn’t a recurring character or anything like that. MM: So this was the first time you were being published on a regular schedule. JEFF: Yes. Now, at this point I’d been carrying around two or three of those big Doonesbury treasury editions by Garry Trudeau. Those were worn ragged. I thought they had the best writing and pacing. He would draw what looked like the same panel four times, but it wasn’t. There was very subtle acting going on. I thought those were great, and the characters were great. By now I really did want to draw a comic strip. It was Peanuts, Pogo, and Doonesbury, and I was ready to go. MM: You said there were other strips, but

JEFF: Let’s see, I took a lot of racquetball. [laughter] I took fencing. That’s all. [laughter] I was there for four years and I almost had enough credits to be a sophomore.

yours was the only one to appear every day. How many strips would there typically be on any given day? JEFF: Usually it would be me and one other person. I was in there pretty much every day, five days a week, for four years. About every quarter they would try some other strips. One guy named Steve Spencer, who does a lot of cartooning here in Columbus, had a strip that was pretty funny and outrageous. He would put stuff in there that the editors wouldn’t catch. “Man, I can’t believe you got away with that.” [laughter] We had a lot of fun. And Jim was doing editorial cartoons and a lot of illustrations for them, so we had a mini-fraternity of cartoonists.

MM: You were only taking one or two classes a semester? JEFF: I think you’re starting to get the picture. [laughter] I was there to use The Lantern. There were just very few options back then, and here was a vehicle for printing comics, and that’s what I needed practice doing. That’s my vocation. I just took whatever classes I needed in order to be eligible to be a student and get into the paper. I followed no major, no agenda. I did get the practice I needed with The Lantern, but probably the biggest break for me was, right before I got to Ohio State, Milton Caniff [creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon]—who had gone to Ohio

MM: Was there any kind of editorial oversight at The Lantern, or did they let you do whatever you wanted to do? JEFF: They let me do whatever I wanted to do. They had no interest in it. Occasionally they would want to drop it, because they saw it as a waste of space. “Some real news should go there.” I’d have to argue with them about it sometimes. MM: Did you try your hand at editorial cartoons at all? JEFF: I did one or two. I’m pretty much a leadfoot editorial cartoonist. I beat people over the head with my opinion. I decided I should stick with stories. That way I could use a little more finesse in getting my point across. MM: What was that like for you, meeting a daily deadline on top of all your classwork? Did you have a parttime job, as well? JEFF: I worked in the bookstore on campus, checking in books. I’d start working on the comic strip around ten o’clock at night and finish around two in the morning. I did that every day. MM: What kind of things were you getting from your classes that you were able to apply to the strip? 13

Above: In the Krazy Kat strip from April 2, 1938, you can see how George Herriman made use of a razor blade to scratch away speed lines from inked areas. The Thimble Theater strip from November 1, 1929 appeared during the first year of the strip, when Popeye was only a supporting character. Thimble Theater was not a typical humor strip. Each storyline was a long adventure which lasted several weeks, and not every day’s strip ended with a punchline. Next Page: This fullpage Thorn strip ran in the university’s humor magazine, The Sundial, in 1986. In 1994, Jeff expanded the strip into an eight-page story for Disney Adventures magazine. Popeye © King Features, Inc. Bone, Thorn ™ and © Jeff Smith.

State—had donated all his papers and originals to the university to do with as they pleased. One of the librarians, a woman named Lucy Caswell, took this collection and started the Milton Caniff Research Library. It’s gone through many names. Now it’s the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. It’s really grown. It’s one of the finest collections of original art in the US. But I met Lucy Caswell as she was just starting this library, so I had this unique opportunity to sit in a room and go through originals from masters like Winsor McCay [Little Nemo] and Milton Caniff. She was getting donations from Garry Trudeau [Doonesbury] and Charles Schulz [Peanuts], and I was very excited. She had Krazy Kat originals. You could hold them up to the light and see all the textures from his brush and where he used a razor blade to scratch things out, because he didn’t have white-out. It was fascinating. MM: It must have been interesting to see how large they were working, too. JEFF: Yeah, you’re right. I could actually see that a lot of them used blue pencil, which I had never heard of before that. I hadn’t seen that in any of the few books I had read on how to make comics. So that was interesting. She had original Walt Kellys, and I 14

could really study those and see the blue pencil. Maybe I should explain that, since nowadays with computers it’s not as necessary. Comics used to be shot on film, and it had to be a high-contrast film that could only see black or white. If you used a regular pencil, that could sometimes show up on the negative of the film, but if you used a blue pencil it wouldn’t show up. That’s why they used to use blue pencil. MM: It sounds like you were spending more time in the library than you were in your classes. JEFF: I discovered E.C. Segar in that library. I only knew Popeye from the TV cartoons, which is how most people probably know him. She had a book — it might have been one of Bill Blackbeard’s early books — that had the whole first year of Popeye in Thimble Theatre. It blew my mind. It was the funniest thing. Have you ever read that? MM: Yes, I have. It’s great stuff. JEFF: I just couldn’t believe it. Popeye was so funny. Then I went to the stacks, and they had newspapers on microfilm going back to the early 1900s. I went through and read years and years of Popeye on microfilm, and L’il Abner and Dick Tracy — all that stuff.

Above: The October 17, 1984 Thorn strip. In just a year, Gran’ma Ben had quickly evolved and become much closer to the design Jeff would use in Bone. Below: Another mid-’80s Thorn illustration. You can see Garry Trudeau’s influence in the figure of Thorn, particularly in the shape of her eye, nose, and upturned smile.

MM: Having access to originals and the collections—the reproductions—were you comparing the differences between the two? What worked and what didn’t? JEFF: Yeah, I was very fascinated with the technical aspects of what was going on. When you see the originals, you can see where they do things to them. Like, Terry

and the Pirates, there were weird things on them where he’s taken a photostat of a panel, pasted it down on a new board, and added an extra half-inch around it. “What the heck? What is going on here?” But then, when you look at the broadsheets, the actual newspaper sheets from around the country, you can see that some of them are stacked vertically, some are horizontal, and they required differently shaped panels. Cartoonists would have to do that. That’s ridiculous. MM: Even now Prince Valiant runs in four or five different formats depending on how much space each newspaper gives it. Getting back to your Thorn strip for The Lantern—what kind of reaction did you get on campus?

Bone, Thorn ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: It’s interesting. The initial reactions were all very negative. I didn’t put punchlines in in a conventional way. I would go for more of a Doonesbury type of punchline, where if there’s a joke, great; if it’s more a set-up for the next day, that’s cool, too. I was really into all the different kinds of strips. I mean, I like Dick Tracy as much as I like Peanuts. I just wanted to blend all those things together. I think overall I got a decent response. I was in there every quarter for four years. It was good enough. It wasn’t great—there were people who did question my judgment—but it must have been good enough or they wouldn’t have kept running it. MM: Was it enough that you were encouraged to feel you were on the right path? JEFF: Yes, exactly. It was enough to encourage me. That’s the best way to put it. 16

Interlude:

Under the Influence

Walt Kelly The first thing that struck me about Walt Kelly was his artwork. Comic strips in the ’60s were being taken over by a wave of minimalist cartoonists, like Charles Schulz. Schulz is a brilliant artist, who can convey emotions, but there’s really very little detail in his panels. Also, the strips were starting to shrink in printed size for the first time. And yet here was Walt Kelly doing strips that looked like a Disney cartoon. They were fully drawn, and they caught my attention. I was amazed by how good his drawings were. Pogo came out around the same time as Beetle Bailey, B.C., and Wizard of Id, and there was such a different level of cartooning and story and energy in Kelly’s strip.

Carl Barks His name wasn’t in the Uncle Scrooge books, but you knew when it was a Carl Barks story. His drawings were immediately recognizable. They were just so much better than the other artists’. The backgrounds were more realistic, the linework was so precise, and the characters just looked better. Of course, I didn’t understand until much later that he wrote and drew his stories, as well. His stories had a huge influence on me very early when I was reading Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics. As I look at the early Bone comics I made for myself at home as a kid, I would point to the Carl Barks Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories as the main influence on what I was doing. The Boneville you never see in Bone is simply Duckburg. The Bones’ roots are pretty directly traceable to Carl Barks. And his stories would go to far-off, exotic places. Just the idea that Scrooge still had the very first dime he ever earned and treated it like a good luck charm, and he would always manage to drop it out of an airplane over the ocean. But because he was also the richest duck in the world, he could afford to mount an expedition to the bottom of the ocean, go to Atlantis, and find his dime. Just think about that. That is so awesome!

ney. cle Scrooge ™ Dis

Peanuts ™ and © United Features Syndicate, Inc.

Charles Schulz Mark Twain

Schulz was a big influence on me. I think the design of Bone can be traced pretty directly to that of Snoopy. I was a big fan of that character. And also the idea of the different character personalities in the ensemble cast. That was true of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, as well. You had this group of kids that were so clearly defined as individuals—Pigpen, Linus, Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Schroeder—it made it so much fun and the personalities all rang so true. What I looked at as a cartoonist was that each character had their own way of speaking, their own way of viewing the world, and in no case did it ever feel like one author’s voice coming out of all these different drawings. Each character had his own personality, his own soul, and that was very impressive to me, and still is.

The way he wrote in the way people would really speak really interested me and hooked me in. Huckleberry Finn is a book I read every few years. It just keeps on giving, though I hate the ending. There’s a moment where Huck is on a raft with the runaway slave, Jim, and Huck has been struggling with the notion that he’s done something bad by helping Jim escape. He’s trying to figure out, “Am I going to go to hell, because I’m stealing someone’s property?” He looks over at Jim and says to himself, “Well, the heck with it. I’m going to hell then.” What a powerful book. If I could ever create half that power in a book, I would be thrilled. 19

George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkein

Star Wars ™ and © Lucasfilm Ltd.

What Lucas did with those first two Star Wars movies startled me. There’s something similar about Lord of the Rings and Star Wars that took me a while to figure out. They were both looking at old mythology for their source material, and I think they really tapped into a goldmine when they did that. The Return of the King © J.R.R. Tokei n.

Stephen Spielberg One of the first movies that captured my imagination was Jaws. It’s a movie I cannot see enough. I love everything about the mystery and the terror and the characters. Everything, for me, comes down to the personalities of the characters. There you have three guys trapped on a boat, and they have that moment where they’re drunk and bonding. It’s just a great movie.

I discovered Kurosawa because Lucas loved his work. The Seven Samurai is one of my favorite films of all time. It’s an epic story, and, again, each of the seven samurai is a strongly defined character.

Jaws © Universal Pictures.

Akira Kurosawa

He’s an auteur in the world of Japanese animation. I didn’t actually see his work until the mid-’90s. I was at Jim Valentino’s house for a post-San Diego Comic-Con party, and somebody put in a video of My Neighbor Totoro for the kids to watch. Everybody was out in the yard having a great time. “Where’s Jeff?” “He’s with the kids watching the movie.” I was astonished by what a perfect film it was. 20

My Neighbor Totoro © Ghibli.

The Seven Samurai © Toho Co. Ltd.

Hayao Miyazaki

Part 2:

A Dream of Syndication, a Life in Animation

MM: So how did you end up going into animation after college rather than comic strips?

MM: By the end you were working on national accounts, right, not just local advertising?

JEFF: My first goal was to do a comic strip. That’s what I really wanted to do, was do Bone as a daily comic strip. But I just couldn’t sell it. I got a little encouragement from a couple of the New York syndicates. I would try sending them submissions and they would make suggestions and I’d rework them, but nothing happened. During that time I needed to do something to make a living. One of my friends from when I was young, Jim Kammerud, was going to school at OSU, too, and he and I took an animation class. We met a fellow classmate named Marty Fuller, who was really into animation. He really understood and could do it. He understood intuitively how far to make the drawings change. He had keys to the camera room; he was trusted by the university. [laughter] We had a lot of fun. We did a couple of student projects together. After that, I think Marty suggested we form a little animation company, because he had contacts with some ad agencies around town, and he thought we could eke out a living at it. So that’s what we did. I said, “What the heck. Let’s try that while I try to get my comic strip published.”

JEFF: We did things for White Castle and McDonald’s, but a lot of corporate headquarters are in Columbus—Warner Cable, Wendy’s—so all the major ad agencies have big branches here. We were also starting to do movies. When a studio would get close to their crunch time, they would start looking for little studios like ours to do five to ten minutes of film—15 minutes if they really trusted you.

MM: It was just the three of you at the beginning?

MM: Would you be producing full animation or just the keys or...?

JEFF: Yeah, just the three of us. MM: Were you getting enough work to be comfortable? JEFF: We did it for, like, seven years. In the beginning it was a little slow, but with only the three of us, we could survive on a lot less. By the end we had maybe eight permanent people and 30 to 50 people we’d bring in depending on what the project needed.

JEFF: It would just depend on the job. Sometimes they’d send the storyboards already done. Sometimes they’d send the keys, and we’d just do the in-betweens. Sometimes we’d do the whole thing. MM: You were still hoping to do something with Bone, so what were you getting from these animation jobs? Obviously, you were drawing all day. 21

Above: Jeff and childhood friend, Jim Kammerud—two of the three co-founders of Character Builders. © Jeff Smith.

home for the first time, and we were. I sure wish we had digital at that time, but we could slow it down and back it up. We could look at them pretty much frame by frame and see exactly what Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng were doing. If Bugs was going to hammer something—a big, fast movement like that—the hammer would be up in the air in one shot, and then the middle shot would be a huge smear. The hammer would still be up in the air, but it’s grown and mushes all the way down to where it’s going to end up, so it’s like one giant, curved hammer. Then in the final drawing the hammer is down on the ground. That gives it such speed and solidity. We were completely taking apart and deconstructing all the cartoons.

JEFF: I don’t think you can underestimate that. I mean, just the sheer amount of drawing is going to improve your quality level at some point, but also the fact that it’s animation and you’re drawing in three dimensions in your mind. The character has to be able to turn around and look one way then turn and look the other way, so his head has to be three-dimensional in your mind. So my level of construction skills really went up. MM: You had to think about foreground and background. JEFF: Yes, you had to think composition the whole time, especially being a small house like we were. We were doing our own stuff. If I was doing a 30-second commercial, I was probably designing the characters, but I was also doing the main layout, so I was constantly thinking, “Where is my guy going to be on this background? I’ve got to make sure that it’s not cluttered in his path.” You’re constantly thinking about composition and readability and things like that.

MM: Do you have a favorite director? JEFF: On any given day it might be a different guy. I’m a big Chuck Jones fan, but I like Friz Freleng an awful lot. MM: Really? That’s not a typical answer. I’m more of a Bob Clampett guy, myself.

MM: During that time, were you getting more analytical about the cartoons you were watching? Did you go back and study things like the old Looney Tunes shorts?

JEFF: I came to Clampett late. His work wasn’t very available back then. I do like Clampett. What I like about Friz is he’s just funny. And he’s fast, and he sets up jokes and pays them off.

JEFF: Oh, yeah. With VCRs, you could get copies of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons to watch at 22

MM: Chuck Jones really emphasized the dialogue and the timing of the dialogue. That’s something that’s very important in Bone, as well. JEFF: I think there’s a connection between Jones and Walt Kelly. They’re very intelligent, and they assume you are intelligent. It kind of tickles your imagination that way. Imagine making a cartoon where the punchline is “pronoun trouble,” or “acoustically perfect.” [laughter] But I got it. I understood it—or if I didn’t I looked it up. MM: What else did you get from working in animation that you could adapt to a static page? JEFF: One thing is, if you’re storyboarding, you have to be very aware of, “Where does your scene begin? What happened right before your scene? What happens at the end?” There is a real process of beginning, middle, and end, and you do your work all at once. You don’t just start at the beginning and start drawing until you get to the end. You learn to figure out ahead of time what you’re going to do, where your guy is going to go, what has to be accomplished in the scene. You know what your first drawing is, you know what your last drawing is, and you know what your middle drawing is. Then you keep breaking

it down to the middle. That’s a structural process I brought directly into comics. I always approach each scene or each issue of a comic—any given section of the story—in that way. I want to know where it begins, what the end is, and what’s in the middle. Then I’ll break down the first half the same way and the second half the same way, and just keep breaking it down like that. Recently, in an interview with John Canemaker, I said, “Comics are just like storyboards.” And I saw somewhere on the web that, “That was a horrible thing for you to say. Comics are their own medium,” and how dare I say comics are just storyboards for movies. Of course, that’s not at all what I meant. I meant from an artistic standpoint, when you do a storyboard, you need to see the motion or the movement or the story that you are telling, and you need to pick the moment that is most expressive and most important and put that on the storyboard. And that is very similar artistically to what you do when you decide what to draw in a panel of a comic. Then there are all sorts of subtle differences between animation and comics. In comics, there are different kinds of timing that happen between any two given panels. It’s much more subtle and rich than what storyboards are, because they are just an outline for a separate, larger thing. MM: Also, when you’re talking about animation, you have the same format—the same screen size—for every shot. Did you find that challenging early on when you 23

Previous Page: Animation cel from a commercial produced by Character Builders. Above and Left: Jeff sculpting and painting pieces for a commercial. © Jeff Smith.

moved to the comic book format, where you can make the panels any size you need to make the story work?

Below and Next Page: Jeff created a claymation (stop-motion animation in which clay figures are moved slightly for each frame of film) commercial promoting White Castle’s kids’ meal. White Castle logo ™ White Castle Management Co. Photo © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: I had a strange epiphany when I did my first comic. The first comic I ever drew was Bone #1. Before that I had just been drawing comic strips, first for The Lantern for four years, and then for about two years I was drawing batches of strips that I’d send out every month to the syndicates—and have them rejected. [laughter] But, again, they were just three or four similar sized panels. Once I finally decided I’d do Bone as a comic book, and I sat down and started to draw, I was surprised at the freedom I suddenly had. Previously with the strips, I’d felt very constrained by those four little regular boxes. There are rules to comics: especially if you have a continuing story, you have to give up your first panel just to bring the reader back to what you were talking about yesterday. Then you just have a couple of panels left to move the story forward.

MM: And your last panel has to set up the next day’s strip. JEFF: Yeah, and have something interesting happen. It’s a good exercise. It really forces you to be disciplined, but having done that first and then diving into comics, it was like going from a wading pool to the ocean. I never found it confusing or complicated, I just thought it was glorious. [laughter] My pages and panels were very 24

instinctual. I didn’t pattern them after anybody’s layouts. I just wanted them to be very clear to make sure the reader could always follow the story. I thought the best thing to do was to keep the panels fairly regular in order not to lose anybody. If I do change the size of the panels, it’s for a reason. I do it for shock or to change the pace of the action. MM: As you were trying to sell Bone to the newspaper syndicates, what kind of feedback were you getting from them? What were their reasons for rejecting the strip? JEFF: The main reason I was given was that continuity strips were out of vogue. I told you that I read Thimble Theatre, which while it was funny, there would be very long adventures. Popeye would go on sea voyages or go rule a country, and it would take months. The same with Dick Tracy— all those strips. I really wanted to do something like that, and I thought that Doonesbury was the perfect model. It was funny every day, it was relevant, the characters were really, really strong, and yet the story progressed. Something would happen. Joanie would get pregnant and have a baby or whatever. I thought that’s what I was doing. I thought I was doing the Doonesbury version of modern continuity. But apparently my characters were so weird, it didn’t really make sense. Nobody really understood what it was about. I would get suggestions like, “Why don’t you get rid of all the dragons and fantasy and humans, and just do the Bones in Boneville?” That they could get their heads around. I got all sorts of suggestions. One story I’ve told quite a bit was that an editor at King Features suggested that I make the Bones talk in thought balloons, because Garfield was very popular and he talks in thought balloons. I was like, “Really? You’re the editor of comic strips and you don’t understand that nobody can hear a thought balloon?” That was very depressing for me. [laughter] MM: Did you ever get any useful suggestions? JEFF: No. Except maybe for, “You should go and find something else to do for a living.” [laughter] Which I did do.

MM: Did they ever say something like, “We like your art and we have an opening on one of our strips.” Did they ever ask you to try out for an existing strip? JEFF: No. I really wasn’t that good at that point. I’ve improved—probably because of the animation, but I’ve gotten a lot better since then. Above: Jeff adjusts a clay figure for the next shot. Next Page: Head studies of Fone Bone and Thorn. Photo © Jeff Smith. Bone, Thorn © Jeff Smith.

MM: What made you finally give up on doing a newspaper strip? JEFF: The incident that finally made me slap my forehead and say, “Why am I wasting my time?”—the syndicates used to send out these packages to the newspapers showing what their new strips were going to be—little press kits. I would see a lot of those, because they would send them to the library and Lucy would let me look through them. And one came in from one of the syndicates—I don’t remember the name of it—but it was clearly a Bone ripoff. They had changed the character a little bit. It was totally his body, but they’d turned him into a little dragon. Basically it 26

was just the Bones in Boneville, and I just looked at that and said, “That’s it. I give up.” And I dedicated myself for a couple of years to the animation. At some point in 1986, I went into a comic book shop, because I’d heard about Dark Knight Returns, and I had my mind blown. It was a really good comic, and it was done in a new way. The panels were colored differently, and there were no caption boxes filled with exposition, which was kind of a radical concept in comics. Nobody had removed that little exposition box before, but now you could just tell a story and cut to different scenes the same way you would in a movie. I knew that there were comic book stores, but I thought they just sold Archie and Batman and Spider-Man. I had completely missed out on the whole indie explosion. I was pretty shocked to see Love & Rockets and Cerebus and some of the other things that were around. That’s what made me think, “Hey, maybe that’s where I could do my big continuity strip.”

Part 3:

Entering the Great Valley

MM: Let’s talk a bit more about how Bone developed. The origins of the Bone characters go all the way back to when you were very young. Fone Bone was one of the very first characters you created, right?

Woodpecker, and I knew that Charles Schulz had made up Snoopy. So I was fascinated with the idea of coming up with a little character of my own. I was probably about five when I did the very first drawing of Fone Bone, and he was really angry. His mouth was wide open and was as big as the rest of his entire body. I don’t know what I liked about him, but I thought it would be fun to figure out what he would look like if that giant mouth was closed. That just caught my interest, and I’ve been drawing him ever since.

JEFF: Long before I was trying to write stories, I was fascinated with idea of trying to make a cartoon character—something like Top Cat or Huckleberry Hound or Woody Woodpecker. I knew that Disney had made Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, because I saw them every Sunday night on The Wonderful World of Disney. I knew that Walter Lantz had made up Woody

MM: At what point did you start creating other characters to interact with him? JEFF: I’m not quite sure. There were always other characters around. Snoopy was doing his Red Baron thing around that time, so I had a pilot Bone. He had the Red Baron’s flying helmet and goggles. There was a mailman Bone. There was a female Bone. There were other characters around, but I don’t remember doing much with them. I do remember that the angry character started showing up again, and one of my cartooning friends, Mike Brooks, drew a star on his chest. That was pretty much the moment that Phoney Bone crystallized as being separate from Fone Bone. Instead of just being “the angry Fone Bone,” he was now the phony Bone. I can’t tell you where Smiley came from. I’d have to guess at it and say he was the Goofy type character. The Honeymooners was on TV—The Jackie Gleason Show. MM: You can definitely see a lot of Art Carney in Smiley. JEFF: I was a big Art Carney fan. I thought his Ed Norton character was really interesting; he was kind of a cartoon character. MM: He was. JEFF: So Smiley was kind of an Ed Norton, Goofy type character. And later on I added the cigar, which came from Albert the Alligator in Pogo. MM: I want to go back to the female Bone you drew. 27

JEFF: I kind of pictured it to be like the world of Duckburg, where there were ducks with 1950s hair on the ladies and hats on the men. I thought that’s what Boneville was, too. MM: So your female Bone had hair and wore a dress? JEFF: Yeah, yeah. And, in fact, I just finished a story for Bone: Tall Tales which is about the early days of the frontier hero Big Johnson Bone. There’s a pie-eating contest, and he meets Gobbling Gertie. So there’s now a lot of different kinds of Bones—lady Bones, old Bones, short Bones, fat Bones—that you see in the crowd. But that’s the way it was back then in my imagination, too. MM: At what point did you start adding human characters to the mix? JEFF: That was probably from the Heavy Metal influence. That was done for the college strip. I was reading Heavy Metal, and there were a lot of beautiful women and fantasy stories. Richard Corben was doing “Den.” I was really into Bilal and Moebius. I somehow got this idea of a Heavy Metal fantasy world with monsters and dragons and my traditional three-fingered, bigfoot cartoon characters stumble into it. MM: Your college strip was called Thorn, so was she the first human character you created? JEFF: By the time I actually drew up some strips for the school paper, I pretty much had the cast and the basic situation figured out, but the cast grew even while I was going to CCAD. I think at that point I was drawing Fone Bone with a broadsword fighting a giant dragon. Somehow that dragon eventually became the Great Red Dragon. At first he was just a monster, but he developed a personality and worked his way into the story. I think Thorn started out as the princess who was being rescued. Gran’ma Ben came about because this girl I was dating in high school had a grandmother with a farm up in northern Ohio. She raised steer, and she was Gran’ma Ben. As a matter of fact, the father of the girl I was

dating was named Ben. Her father didn’t like me, and I didn’t really like him very much, so I was kind of making fun of him when I drew this little old lady with his face. [laughter] She didn’t look quite as much like Popeye back then as she does now. The characters just filtered in over a period of four or five years there between going to CCAD and OSU. I had a lot of friends and roommates, and we had a lot of adventures that filtered in as well. MM: What was your visual inspiration behind the Great Red Dragon? He’s certainly not a typical looking dragon with those tufts on his ears. JEFF: He was a combination of my big, 100-pound Labrador named Commander and Zonker from Doonesbury. When I was creating the characters in the mid-’80s before I started working on the Thorn strip, I was playing with the characters and they were evolving, especially the fantasy characters beyond the three cousins. And one of those was the Great Red Dragon, who started out in a drawing I was doing just for fun where Fone Bone was being chased by a giant dragon with floppy, hairy ears. 29

Previous Page: Jeff’s pencils for a new Big Johnson Bone tale done for Scholastic’s Bone: Tall Tales collection, in which Johnson meets and loses a woman after his own heart. Above: Part Zonker, part Labrador retriever, all Great Red Dragon. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

The way the dragon sat was based on my Labrador, but, as I’ve said, at that time I was completely captivated by Doonesbury. I loved the subtle acting Trudeau would draw—the twitch of an eyebrow, the upturn of a little smile. Zonker was this kind of magical character. He was the Snoopy, so to speak, of Doonesbury. I started drawing the dragon in profile, just like Trudeau drew a lot of his characters, and if you look at a picture of the dragon next to one of Zonker, you’ll see it pretty quickly. He has the same heavy-lidded eyes, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Cigarettes weren’t as alarmingly evil in the ’70s and ’80s. [laughter]

dragons and princesses. That’s all it was, and it was fine, but ultimately it really wasn’t going anywhere. When I sent it to the syndicates I got a little bit of interest, but they were telling me I needed to focus the strip. “Just do the Bones in Boneville. It’s very distracting to have all these humans running around. What’s going on? What is it all for?” At least I think that’s what they were trying to say. They might have been trying to tell me that I just wasn’t very funny. [laughter] But during the time between doing the comic strip and doing the comic book, I discovered mythology and fairy tales. Going back to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, they both have a depth to them that at first I didn’t quite understand. I looked at the strips I had done for The Lantern, which had the same characters that ended up in Bone, but there was just no point to any of it other than humor. What made Lord of the Rings and Star Wars such good stories, as far as I could see, Eric, was that they had characters and situations just as strange as what I had, but you cared about those characters. There was a point to the stories. So I started reading books about Tolkein and George Lucas to try to find out what they were up to and who influenced them. That’s what led me to mythology and Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. I started reading the myths—Hindu myths, Greek myths, and Norse myths.

MM: Did you have most of the story worked out when you started pitching Bone to the syndicates? JEFF: By that time I’d done the strip on a daily basis for four years. That was really good training in terms of discipline, making sure you get the work turned in on time, and I learned a lot about the art of moving the characters from one panel to the next. That’s tricky stuff that nobody can really teach you, and back then nobody was even trying to teach you. But the strip was a fish out of water story. It was humorous, yet the storylines would go on for weeks at a time, à là Doonesbury. I didn’t really have an ending in mind; I didn’t really have a story. It was just these three guys come from Boneville, a modern city with appliances and cars and libraries, and they’re stuck in this pre-technological, fairy tale forest with monsters and

MM: And you saw the structure of the hero’s journey, the hero’s quest. JEFF: Yes, but here’s the key: When I looked at my college story and what I wanted to do, I saw that you could set up a book like Huckleberry Finn and give it a beginning, a middle, and an end and have a literary structure, but that’s just linear. You have to have depth. You have to have this other axis, which in Huckleberry Finn is this moral decision he has to make. That’s so incredibly important. With Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, what gave them that depth, that other axis, was mythology, motifs, and symbolism. Suddenly all my memories spent watching slides in a dark room during my History of Art class came flooding back and I remembered all the talk about symbolism and cultural references. All of a sudden I got excited. “Okay, I have the characters. I like my characters. I like the situation. Now I need to put symbolism and motifs into it. I need to give it a mythology.” That changed everything. MM: Where did you start? Did you start with your mapping out the hero’s journey? Did you start with the backstory? How much of it did you plan out, and how much did you leave to fill in later as you got further into the story? 30

JEFF: I think it was all of that. By the time I got to the comic book, I knew the characters inside and out, so I had the basics. “Here’s this doofy outsider who stumbles into this situation and falls in love with a girl.” The story had sort of uncovered itself by accident as I did the strips for four years. I did the Roque Ja bit in the college strip, and he had talked about a coming war and having to pick one side or the other. And the Hooded One was there; she had revealed herself to be Gran’ma’s jealous sister. So I had some of these ideas come out without any real plan or structure. When you start reading mythology, you see the jealous sibling stories, and you can use that and start making plans and putting it all together. I think it really came together when I figured out what the ending was. I decided it had to be a big, mythological battle of good versus evil as the heroes make their stand. But I had to decide, “Are the Bones going to stay? Are they going to leave and then return? What kind of changes are the characters going to go through?” Figuring out the ending was the key. Then I decided to put the Roque Ja story smack dab in the middle, and wing it from there. MM: What made you decide to self-publish? Was it because of the negative experience with the syndicates?

JEFF: Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure I analyzed it very deeply. I had just had the miserable two-year experience with the syndicates where they just didn’t understand my comic, and as far as I could tell they didn’t even understand comics at all. Here I looked at the comic book market, and I didn’t quite grasp the lay of the land at first. I didn’t know who the different publishers were or anything. I think the first comic I saw where a light bulb went on in my head was The Tick. That was published by New England Comics, which was the name of a comic book store. It was kind of like it was self-published. It was in black-&-white, written and drawn by this guy named Ben Edlund, and it was very funny. I could tell from the whole package that he was having a blast doing it, and it was kind of successful. I kept getting it as it came out, and at some point I said, “Okay, if King Features isn’t going to publish Bone, I can’t imagine that Marvel would. I need to go this underground route. If I can make enough money to pay for the printing and justify my doing it, that’ll be fine, and I can keep doing animation.” MM: This was after the black-&-white boom and bust, but indies were starting to come back a bit. You mentioned The Tick, but there were a few other titles that were doing well. 31

Previous Page: The Bones flee Boneville in this frontis piece from the first volume of The Complete Bone Adventures. Above: It’s a family reunion, but not a happy one. Stories of jealous siblings run rampant throughout mythological and religious texts, going all the way back to Cain and Abel. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had happened right around that time. That helped me convince my wife that it’s possible to make money at this. “I thought everyone could make money like the Turtles. Who knew?” [laughter] MM: Vijaya helped you with the selfpublishing from the beginning, right? JEFF: Yes. She was a computer scientist. She worked on mainframe computers doing software. She got offered a job out in Silicon Valley. I had done four issues of Bone at that point, so I sold my third of the animation studio, which was just starting to do well, and followed Vijaya out to San Jose. We lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, and she commuted to a little start-up company while I stayed up in the woods drawing comics. MM: Did you set out with a plan of how long you could devote to the book before having to pack it in and get another job? Did you go into it with that mindset? JEFF: Yeah, and just saying that is so much more than a lot of people can do. I think a lot of people think, “I’m going to do this. I want it. It’s my dream, and it’s just going to work out.” But you have to actually have a plan. You have to approach it just like anything else. Whether you self-publish or you go to Marvel, you need to understand what you’re getting into and keep your eyes open. In my case, since I was self-publishing, I had to go find out how to get a book printed, how to get it shipped, how to get it into the comic book stores. MM: Why did you pick the name Cartoon Books for your publishing house? Were you aware of the stigma that funny books had in comic shops?

JEFF: No. No, I didn’t. [laughter] I just called it Cartoon Books because that’s what I thought it was. I was aware of EC, so for my company logo I was doing a riff on the EC logo. No, I did not realize I would spend the next 15 years defending myself. “This isn’t a kids’ comic.” Well, of course, it is, but it would have been financial suicide if I had let myself get labeled that way. MM: What kind of research did you do before you released that first issue? There were multiple distributors at that point, so you really had to make the rounds in order to get noticed.

Above: Jeff’s logo for Cartoon Books is based on the logo of Golden Age publisher EC Comics.

JEFF: I think there were 15 distributors. MM: The big ones were Diamond and Capital City, but there were a lot of players.

JEFF: I think I started in the most obvious place. I just went to a comic book store and said, “Hey, I want to draw this comic. How does this work? Who should I talk to?” At that time Diamond and Capital both had distribution warehouses in Columbus, so they sent me over there, and I talked with the people running them. I showed the lady at Diamond a xerox copy of the first issue, and she gave me great advice. She explained to me about the catalog and all that, but her good piece of advice to me was, “If you know anybody in comics you can get a quote from, you can 33

Previous Page: Cover art for the first issue of the ongoing Bone comic. Above: Pencils and inks for a panel from page 6 of Bone #1. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Above: Fone Bone finds his way to the wilderness of the Great Valley in Bone #1, just as Jeff was entering the wilderness of self-publishing. Next Page: Want to get retailers to order your comic? Give them free sketches! Of course, it helps if you have a great book. This Bone drawing is a detail from a two-page tribute to Pogo creator, Walt Kelly. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

put that in the catalog and that will probably help.” Well thanks to the fact that Lucy Caswell had, over the years, invited cartoonists to come speak at the library, I had met Will Eisner, Art Spiegleman.... For some reason I decided to send a letter to Will Eisner. I couldn’t believe it, but he sent me a reply that was gracious and complimentary, saying, “Keep going. This is like George Herriman and Walt Kelly combined.” It made my hair stand up. I was so excited. Now that I’ve been in the business for 20 years, so many people send me stuff, and I try my best to respond to them. I just look back on that and I think it’s absolutely astonishing that Will Eisner pulled my little xeroxed thing out of a box and took the time to do that. And it did make a difference. I had that quote in the catalog soliciting Bone #1, and I think it made a big difference. 34

MM: You also had the advantage of having run a business with your animation studio. JEFF: Exactly. I knew how to keep books and hire employees and meet payroll and how to think as a businessman. I knew I needed to figure out how much money I needed to produce a few issues, and that I needed to borrow that money from the bank while making sure I’d be able to pay it back in a reasonable amount of time. There was research I had to do, and a little math. I mentioned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earlier, and I was reading a lot of articles about that and collecting that information. When I made my presentation at the bank to get a loan, I showed them all that. “Look, these guys who created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are millionaires.” The bank was like, “Hey, I think you need a little more money.” [laughter]

you come with us and check it out?” I wrote to the convention and told them I’d like to set up at a booth. I threw my easel and cover art and my first three books into the car, and the three of us drove to Baltimore. I set up and I met all these retailers. What was really important about meeting the retailers was that they, in this business, are the actual customers. You know that, and I know that, but someone just looking at the business would think the customers are the people going to the stores and buying the comics—the readers. But they’re not. The business model for the direct market is non-returnable, so it’s really crucial to convince the retailers that they should buy your book, and this was a really great way to do this. They still have these summits, but they’re not as big as they used to be; there’s only one distributor instead of twelve. But I sat behind my table and gave away the first three issues to anyone who would come over. And this was big, too: I would also draw them a little picture of Fone Bone. That was a novel thing. It’s usually just the publishers at these shows. The DC salesmen are there, and they’re talking about what’s going to happen to Batman next year, but that’s it. And here I was, the actual artist, drawing pictures. A little crowd would form around the booth, and that would get more people to stop. That was a huge moment for me. I didn’t know any other cartoonists in the business at that point; I only

MM: What was your print run for the first issue? JEFF: I think it was 3,000 copies, because that was the smallest run the printer would do. I think my orders were only for about 1,100, but that was still more than I needed in order to break even. So I was already making a little profit. And I had planned ahead and borrowed enough money to print three books, because it takes that long to get them all in the pipeline and start seeing a return on the money. MM: You had a slow build at the start. I believe it took you five or six issues before you really started getting a lot of attention. JEFF: Yeah. I think after the fourth issue is when I started seeing write-ups in Comic Buyer’s Guide and The Comics Journal. There was a TV show called The Anti-Gravity Room out of Toronto, which was pretty cool. Do you remember that show? MM: It was syndicated, and one of my local channels ran it on Saturday mornings for a while. JEFF: I was so excited to see a television show about comics, and I remember Neil Gaiman was asked what he was reading, and he gave Bone a big boost with that. It got a lot of people to look at it. MM: What were you doing on your own in terms of promoting the book? Were you going to a lot of conventions? JEFF: It usually takes three issues before you start getting feedback, because it takes that long for the books to get printed and into the stores. I think it was around the third issue that I went to my first comic book convention. I went to some small shows and the Mid-Ohio Con. I’d take an easel and paperclip some original cover art to it. I took out an ad in the Comic Buyer’s Guide, maybe even in The Comics Journal. They were a couple hundred bucks or so. I don’t know if anything happened from those or not. The first thing I did that seemed to really work was when I went to a retailers summit. The distributors used to hold big summits, and comic book store owners from across the country would attend. A couple of the local comic store guys I knew were going to one of these summits—I think it was Capital’s first one. They said, “Why don’t 35

Above: A swarm of locusts gives a hint of things to come, while also serving to separate the Bones, in the first issue of Bone. Next Page: One of the iconic scenes in Bone, the first appearance of the rat creatures establishes the balance of tension and humor for the series. Timing is everything with this page. Just as your eye registers the rat creatures weighing down the fragile branch, you are hit with the punchline. The line, “Stupid, stupid rat creatures,” became something of a catch phrase with fans. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

knew retailers. Even if there were other artists there, and there probably were, I didn’t hang out with them. I hung out in the hotel lounge with Jim Hanley and Rory Root and Joe Fields—the actual retailers. That turned out to be very lucky for me, because they would tell other retailers about the book. Jim Hanley would say, “Hey, this is a neat comic. Come over here, Rory, and look at this.” And Rory Root ended up being one of the biggest retailers of Bone in the country. MM: From a storytelling standpoint, what was your goal with that first issue? JEFF: What I wanted to do on the very first page of the first issue was introduce three characters in a situation that would look very familiar. In other words, I wanted the reader to open up the book and feel very comfortable. “This is Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck out on one of their many adventures, and something has gone wrong.” I wanted the readers to see at first glance that they were in trouble and very quickly understand their relationship with each other. I wanted to establish a rapport with the readers and the characters right away. MM: How important was it to you to establish a balance of humor and drama early on? JEFF: I figured once I laid a little groundwork and spent two or three pages on the Bone cousins bickering amongst themselves, getting off as many jokes as I could, I thought it was important to very quickly establish that this was not The Smurfs or Donald Duck, but that this was going to be something different. For story purposes I needed to have the three cousins split up, so that they could 36

spend the first part of the story looking for each other. I thought the best way to split them up was to do something biblical. So I had this wave of locusts descend on them, and I figured there are ways to draw bugs and there are ways to draw bugs. You could draw big, cartoony bugs or just a big cloud, but I decided to go the Winsor McCay route and see if I could knock the readers’ eyes out. MM: In the second issue you created one of the most memorable moments in the series. Of course, I’m talking about the chase scene with the two rat creatures. In one panel Fone is perched on a tiny branch saying how stupid the rat creatures would have to be to follow him, and in the next panel they’re on the branch with him, and Fone shouts, “Stupid, stupid rat creatures!” It’s kind of a comic book equivalent of the smear shot in animation we talked about earlier. Did you have to work to get the timing of that sequence just so, or did it just come to you? JEFF: People ask me about that a lot. I think it’s clear that the seven years I spent as an animator did affect my thinking along those lines somewhat, but on the other hand I was really into comics long before I got into animation. I’d already decided in my mind how to tell a story, how to pace a sequence. I would sometimes read a Marvel comic or a Heavy Metal story and think, “Oh, if there was just one more panel there, you would really feel that move.” I think the action sequences just come very naturally to me. I don’t know where it comes from or what exactly influenced it, but I don’t have to work too hard on them. I mean, I have to concentrate and plot it out, but it does come fairly naturally as opposed to scenes where there is a lot

MM: When you first mention Moby-Dick in the third issue, had you already thought of doing the dream sequence? Had you thought it out that far ahead? JEFF: No. I did have things planned out that went beyond that sequence, but when I put the first Moby-Dick joke in, it was just that: a joke. I’d had that experience as a lover of Moby-Dick. I’m a huge fan of Melville, and I just love that book on so many levels. Yet, when I would try to talk to somebody about it, they would all say, “Oh, God, here he goes. He’s talking about Moby-Dick again.” MM: Later on, when Smiley tries to put the rat creatures to sleep by reading MobyDick, it doesn’t work. Then Fone reads and the rat creatures instantly pass out. Is that the way you yourself felt?

Above: A pre-Bone drawing of Fone Bone and the great, white whale, Moby-Dick. Right: The ’Possum boys get a dose of Moby-Dick in this frontis piece from The Complete Bone Adventures, Vol. 2. Next Page: In Fone’s dream, Fone becomes Ishmael and Phoney slips into the role of Captain Ahab, as Fone’s favorite book turns into a nightmare in Bone #13.

of acting. If the characters are just sitting around and talking to each other, then you really have to draw the heck out of that. You’ve got to communicate emotion and spend a lot of time blocking out the scene. If the characters are shuffling around a room, it takes a lot of work to keep the reader aware of where you are in the room at all times and keep them interested enough where they don’t remember they’re reading a comic book. It’s so much harder and takes a lot longer to accomplish.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: [laughter] Well, yeah. That’s kind of the joke. It began as a one-off joke, just to give you a sense of Fone Bone’s personality and to embarrass him in front of Thorn. But it was popular. I got feedback from people, and I could tell they liked it, so I used it a couple more times and it developed into something much bigger. I was able to use Fone Bone’s love of Moby-Dick to start illustrating his role in the bigger Dreaming story. It was about ten issues after that first joke that I said, “Oh, I can pull this into the service of Fone Bone’s tale.” Moby-Dick was a huge inspiration for me as an author trying to craft a large story and taking symbolism and metaphor and trying to create multiple layers upon

layers in the story. That’s what Moby-Dick was, and it was what I was wanting to do, too. So while it started off innocently as a one-off joke, it became a deep well for me to draw from. MM: Dreams play a big role throughout the series, especially later on. You mentioned Jung earlier. Were you reading about dream psychology and trying to incorporate that into the story? Above: Fone and Thorn begin to realize their dreams are significant and try to figure out what they mean. Next Page: Eventually, Thorn discovers the Dreaming and enters it on her own terms. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: In the beginning I just needed some way to communicate that there are powers in the universe that we can’t see—that there is more than we can know with our senses. That’s a big part of mythology and fantasy, that allusion to powers that are beyond our senses. I think I jumped into the deep end of the pool, though, because I wasn’t aware of what a gigantic subject it was—and what a wonderful subject, as well. It was so much fun doing research on the topic. So, yes, I did a lot of reading on dreams. I read a little Freud and more Carl Jung. I got into Joseph Campbell and was reading a lot of his work. But it was more after I got going that I realized how useful it was and how interesting it was, not only in terms of psychology, but in terms of storytelling and symbolism. MM: Had you planned on doing trade paperback collections of Bone from the very 40

beginning? Did you go into the series hoping you’d be able to turn them into books? JEFF: That was planned from the beginning. When I really started pursuing doing Bone as a comic book, I realized that it was going to be necessary for me to sell my part of the animation studio to my partners and strike out on my own. Vijaya was supportive of that on one condition: I had to write up a business plan and explain how this would work. She loved my comics and completely supported me artistically, but she said, “If you’re going to quit your job, I need to know how you’re going to make money.” So I wrote up a business plan. I made projections saying what I’d put out each year. In my original business plan I said, “Because this is an ongoing story of indeterminate length”—I imagined I would do it for at least ten years—“once a year I will collect the issues like with a Pogo or Calvin & Hobbes collection so that they will always be available and accessible to new readers.” In 1993, the first issue of Bone was going for about $300, which was a very fast rise up the price guide charts. So it was crucial for me to make that story available for next to nothing. With the trade you could get the first six issues for $12.95. I was told repeatedly by other publishers, other independent artists, and retailers that, “If you

do this you will seriously compromise the trust that retailers have in you, because you’ll be stealing the $300 they can make from selling Bone #1. You’ll be compromising the value of back issue sales, which is a huge part of a retailer’s income.” MM: But you weren’t exactly setting a precedent. Dave Sim had been publishing the Cerebus phone books for a while. Above: The first three volumes of Bone in their original trade dress. Next Page: In Bone #10, Phoney and Smiley make their last preparations for the Cow Race. When all Phoney’s plans backfire, the Bones are forced to remain in the Valley a while longer. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: Yeah, and Cerebus doesn’t get talked about enough. He was really the first one to take an ongoing series and say, “The permanent version of this will be these phonebooks.” Wendy and Richard Pini were also collecting Elfquest, but that was about it. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman may have had a couple of collections, too. But Cerebus and Elfquest began this early trend of putting an ongoing story into a permanent graphic novel collection. What happened with Bone was that I made a much smaller collection. It was more affordable, and, unlike Cerebus, my covers were in color. I think that was a little more attractive. And I happened to do it just at the right time. MM: I thought it was interesting that on the spine you would say what issues each book was collecting. 42

JEFF: Yeah, and I think I originally called them The Complete Bone Adventures. MM: That’s right. JEFF: I did that for the first three volumes before getting rid of that and giving each book its own title. I went back and The Complete Bone Adventures, Vol. 1 became Out from Boneville. MM: And you completely redesigned the trade dress and made the covers much cleaner looking. They looked like they belonged on a bookshelf. JEFF: Yeah. The Cerebus collections were called “phonebooks” because they were huge and because of the paper he used. I think I just hit on the right size and the right price. That first Bone graphic novel sold about 50,000 copies in its first year. MM: Wow! I had come into the series with issue #4 or 5, so I bought that first collection. I enjoyed reading it in that format so much that I stopped buying the issues and only bought the collections. Did you see that as a trend with some of your readership? Did sales drop on the individual issues, or were you able to pick up enough new readers to cover for that?

MM: In the first book you set up the rat creatures as a threat, but not an overwhelming threat. They’re a little scary, but they’re also pretty stupid and somewhat comical. The Great Cow Race puts the exclamation point on that. How did you come up with the idea of something as out of left field as a cow race anyway?

JEFF: That’s a good question. I don’t know the numbers without having the sheets in front of me. That was many, many years ago, but my memory of it is that it was very volatile at first. I don’t think it hurt the individual sales. The first graphic novel collection came out just when Bone began to bubble up in the comic book buyers’ consciousness. I was constantly getting new readers who were just hearing about it, and the book allowed them to get into the series. It was just good timing. Bone was getting a lot of press. It was the anti-gimmick book in a time of gimmick books, and I think a lot of people bought it who wouldn’t have normally bought it. Certainly, in San Diego that year it was crazy. There were so many people crowded around, and I only had one assistant. There were people with their fists full of dollars reaching over each other trying to buy the book. It was crazy. But Bone really was planned from the beginning to be one story. I think it worked very well in the books; it wasn’t really a collection of comics issues as much as a collection of chapters. And Cerebus is also like this.

JEFF: [laughter] One of my early impulses to write a story was to have Phoney Bone con the villagers. I just like that type of character, and I think it’s a lot of fun to explore the psychology between the conner and the connee. The Dragonslayer story was loosely based on a bit I had done in the college strip, but that had to come later in the story, and I needed Phoney Bone to pull a scam early in the story that would get them stuck in the valley for a while. The early engine of the story was the Bone cousins trying to

MM: You’re right. It has to do with the flow of the story, I think. JEFF: There’s a flow that made it work in that format better than a collection of X-Men, even if it’s an X-Men story arc, it’s still referring to a history of the characters that I wouldn’t know anything about if I read it. MM: Another factor is that on the opening pages of each issue of Bone, you didn’t have a full-page splash like you would see in a typical Marvel or DC book. You had a very small logo in the upper left corner, but you just picked up the story right where the last issue left off. It didn’t disrupt the flow of the story once it was printed in the book format. JEFF: I actually thought of each issue of the Bone as a chapter in the book. In fact, now with RASL, when you open the cover of RASL #7, it says RASL, Chapter 7. I’ve gone the whole way with that idea. The opening splash pages of Bone were based on the splash page style of Carl Barks. All the Uncle Scrooge stories started with what Will Eisner would call the metapanel—the whole panel and then two inset panels, or something along the bottom. Each issue of Bone starts off with that one big meta-panel, to establish the story and get things moving, and then two little panels. So it’s stoccado, dot, dot, and you’re in. 43

Above: While Jeff may have backed into actually depicting a cow race in the pages of Bone, it turned out to be one of the high points of the story. Right: Jasmine only appears in five panels and only says one word, but she looks suspiciously like another Jasmine from a certain Disney animated film. Jeff would soon be teaming up with Disney officially. Next Page: On the left is a panel as it appeared in Bone #28. On the right is how the same panel appeared in the first printing of the Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border trade paperback collection a few months later. As you can see, Jeff enlarged the figure of Roque Ja and also redrew his head, making him more supercilious in appearance.

find each other so they could get out of the valley and back to Boneville. Now that they had been reunited, I needed some reason to keep them around, and I thought a good way to do that was for Phoney Bone to get in trouble and have to work off his debts. The cow race just bubbled up out of a couple of throwaway lines where Thorn tells Fone Bone that her Gran’ma Ben is a crazy, old lady who races cows. It was just a weird, surreal Far Side or Monty Python type of joke. I thought it would be funny. The idea came from the grandmother of the former girlfriend I mentioned before. Like I said, she raised steer, and she used to run around like crazy in her tennis shoes chasing the cows around.

Anyway, I started getting letters from readers saying they couldn’t wait to see Gran’ma Ben race the cows. I had been planning on having the Bones finally get back together at a fair in town, and people kept saying, “I can’t wait to see the cow race when they get to the fair.” Then I started to panic, because I had never planned on actually staging a cow race. But it picked up momentum, and I probably fed into that. I think I did an interview in The Comic Buyer’s Guide, or something like that, and drew a betting sheet for the race. I definitely was my own worst enemy, and I ended up having to draw a cow race. Thank God it turned out okay. [laughter] It sure seemed silly while I was working on it, but apparently it was what was called for. MM: In issue #9 there’s a little cameo of Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin. It wasn’t long afterwards that you hooked up with Disney Adventures magazine. How did that come about? JEFF: The comics editors for Disney Adventures digest were Marv Wolfman and Heidi MacDonald. They’re comic book people through and through, and they were at WonderCon—I think it was the year of the first ProCon, which was a preWonderCon show just for professionals. Marv and Heidi sat down with me and suggested that I do a new, original Bone

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

story for Disney Adventures. I did a little eight-page story, and it went off very well and got a lot of nice letters. Then I agreed to serialize Out from Boneville in eight-page sections over a two-year period. I had to make up a new opening page and ending page for each eight-page section, and that was it.

JEFF: No, he just went to it. They asked him to give it a 3-D look, which I don’t think he wanted to do. Tom Luth is one of the best colorists in comics, but Disney asked him to do something that ended up looking a little weird. MM: Did you find it strange to see Bone in color? Because you had always intended it to be in black-&-white.

MM: Was there a significant bump in sales as a result of that?

JEFF: It didn’t bother me too much, because it was a promotional adventure. We were cutting the thing up into eight-page chunks, so it was just, “Let’s see what this can do.” Artistically, the trade books were what I was focused on. This was almost the equivalent to me of doing a calendar or a set of bubble gum cards. This was promotion for the comic book.

JEFF: Oh, my goodness, yes. Disney Adventures was a huge checkout-line magazine. It had a readership of, like, six million. I think the circulation was about three million, but they figure everybody shares a copy with a friend or brother. But it was very noticeable. This was in ’94, ’95, and Bone’s circulation was doubling with every single issue.

MM: As you were putting together the books, and even when you would have to reprint one of the books, you were sometimes going in and making changes to the art or to the story. What kind of changes were you making?

MM: Didn’t you have a problem with the magazine over a scene in the book with Thorn? JEFF: Yeah, they cut out a couple of panels where Thorn was taking her leather stockings off to wade into the hot springs. I wasn’t very pleased with that. In fact, they wanted to continue on and serialize the next book, but because of that I didn’t do it. They took out the dragon’s cigarette, too, but I had reluctantly agreed to that.

JEFF: With the first six issues, I don’t think I changed very much, because there wasn’t that much happening. I really started tweaking things with the third volume. At that point we were past the innocence. We were changing the tone. The Great Cow Race was the last fun moment of innocence before the story takes a darker turn. And once the story moved into fairy tale mode, where you have the hidden princess and storm clouds gathering, I had to keep track of mood and story threads. Occasionally I would just hate a drawing I had done, and I would change it. For some reason, it’s a lot easier to see a bad drawing when it’s published. [laughter] It was usually stuff like that. Sometimes it would be a very subtle change, like I might add a word balloon to slow a scene down and give it a little more mood.

MM: They ran the stories in color, too, which was a first for Bone. JEFF: Yeah, Tom Luth, the brilliant colorist for Usagi Yojimbo, did the coloring. MM: How involved in that process were you? Did you do color guides or have approval rights?

MM: When Bartleby came into the story, did you have a long-term plan for him? JEFF: He developed as I went along. He was originally a little bear cub in my Lantern comic strip. He was an orphan that Smiley and Fone Bone take up into the mountains to find his bear mother. I was kind of starting off with that same premise in the comic book. In fact, that’s why Bartleby has big bear claws, because I was just going to repeat that story. It was fun to see Smiley, who was such a loner, really become sentimentally attached to someone, and I liked that. At the very last minute—I can’t tell you why, Eric—it just occurred to me that it shouldn’t be a bear; it should be a rat creature cub. He retained the bear claws, though, because they looked cute. [laughter] MM: He must have gotten a big response from the readers, because you kept him around to the very end. He even goes back to Boneville with the Bones. JEFF: Oh, that was completely unforeseen. They were supposed to just take him up to the mountains and let him go, while I explored Smiley’s feelings and attachment to him and the sacrifice of letting him go. But I noticed right away that Bartleby was different than most of the characters I’ve come up with. Up to that point, I’d go to

comic book shows and book signings, and people would ask for sketches of the Bones. Occasionally someone would want me to draw Thorn or Gran’ma, but not very often. All of a sudden, Bartleby was the number one request; everybody wanted Bartleby. I took note of that, and I started making plans. Even before I got to the end where they let him go, I was thinking, “Oh, he’s going to have to come back.” And even then I didn’t know he was going to go back to Boneville with Smiley. That was one of those things where the characters take over and do what they want to do. Smiley in general was that kind of a character. I rarely understood the source of Smiley’s humor. The way I write, I know where the characters are and what the situation is and what their general reactions to most things would be. Then I’ll start roleplaying, because I usually have to get somewhere. I start playing off in my head, “How could this work?” Writing jokes is not as funny as you would think. [laughter] It’s a lot of sitting down, working things out, and trying them over and over again. But Smiley’s jokes would just come to me full-blown. His humor was out there, and I would actually laugh when thinking up a Smiley line. He would just pop into a scene and say something hilarious, and I would laugh and write it down. I rarely had to noodle around with it. 47

Previous Page: Disney Adventures magazine thought this scene was a bit too hot to handle, and edited out some of the panels when they serialized it. Above: Smiley takes an instant liking to the little rat creature cub, and later christens him Bartleby. For his part, Bartleby became a breakout character among the fans of the series, and Jeff decided to keep him around as part of the regular cast. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

they’d still pay Image, because their books were paying the bills. In some ways, they were just a larger, commercial version of what we were doing in the self-publishing movement.

MM: When writing jokes, do you run them by Vijaya or someone else in the office? JEFF: Oh, definitely. Sometimes I’ll have a scene where Phoney Bone and Fone Bone are doing something, and I’ll hit them with what’s going to happen. I’ll watch them, and if I get a big laugh, great. If I get a, “Heh, heh,” I’ll go back and work on it. Of course, a lot of times Vijaya will say very funny things. She has a unique way of viewing the world and putting things into context, and it cracks me up. I’ll often take something she says and give it to Smiley. She loves it when I tell that story. [laughter]

MM: You put out the Bone Sourcebook to explain the situation to your fans, and it also served as a primer for new readers. Was it a smooth transition for you? JEFF: My memory is that the transition was fairly smooth, and the readers didn’t seem to mind at all. I think the numbers transferred right over. If anything Bone became very high-profile, because people were thinking, “What the heck?” People that only read WildC.A.T.s started reading Bone. I mean, I did get a lot of flak, because some people didn’t really understand what was going on between Dave and me and thought I was abandoning the cause or something. But I wasn’t really. Well, maybe I was. [laughter] We’ll let history decide. I knew at the time, though, that I wasn’t going to stay at Image. I kept the trade books, which I felt were the real record of Bone, with Cartoon Books to make sure I maintained not only complete control in every way, but that I also kept Cartoon Books’ spot in the catalog so people wouldn’t forget to go there. I was only going to stay with Image until the industry got its bounce back.

MM: With issue #21 you moved Bone to Image. The comic book market was in a steep, downward spiral, and the move was made in the hopes of increased security. Were you comfortable with the move? Was that the only reason you went to Image? JEFF: Well, I hate to bring it up, but before that happened I got into a huge feud with Dave Sim. He and I had been pretty close for a couple of years, but he had gotten a bug up his butt and wanted to go at it. It was very upsetting, and I don’t want to reopen that can of worms, but we had been planning a big self-publishing tour. We were going to go to each stop and get all the local self-publishers and indie creators together. I pulled out of the tour at the last minute because of this feud, but Dave still went, and that’s what started the whole SPX, MoCCA, and Ape movement. The end result of me pulling out of the tour was that I found myself a little isolated. I was kind of outside the selfpublishing movement that I’d been such a big part of since I had gotten into comics. When the market started to crash, I didn’t have my normal support group to talk to and figure things out. I found myself talking to Larry Marder, who was working at Image, fairly often, and Jim Valentino, one of the Image partners. We’d talk about the dynamics of the industry situation. I can’t remember if they said, “Come on over,” or if I asked them if I could come in, but it made absolute sense that if people can’t pay their bills, the first person they’re not going to pay is me, but 48

MM: Did the move to Image free up any time in your schedule?

a carry-over from the tour you had planned with Dave Sim?

JEFF: No, it didn’t at all. Vijaya had been my business partner since year two of the comic book, and we continued to do everything exactly the same way as before. I did the comics and the covers, I sent them off to the printer, we collated the solicitation numbers, and Vijaya had the books shipped directly from the printer to Diamond’s warehouse. The arrangement wasn’t like I hung out at the Image bullpen. It was more like a franchise. I was paying a percentage of each comic to be in the Image section of the catalog and put the little “i” logo in the corner of the book. What I got in return was Image’s collective muscle collecting the money from the retailers and distributors and giving me my cut.

JEFF: Yes, it was one half of the plan. We were planning on taking a big set around and going to malls and have people join us. The set must have been my idea, because Dave didn’t have one on his tour. But once Charles and Linda and I started talking about doing a tour together, that’s when I came back to that idea. MM: What kind of reaction did you receive from the tour? How many stops did you make?

JEFF: Yes, I was. The Trilogy Tour was to mark my return to self-publishing. Issue #28 came out while we were on the tour, and that’s what I was promoting. I’d forgotten about that.

JEFF: Eight, I think. We spent a month on the road. We started at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, then went to Heroes Con. We did Chicago and San Diego, and I think we did four or five comic book signings in between the conventions. We were physically on the road for a full month with a giant truck filled with a collapsible tree and standing stones and all our books. And we each had an assistant or relative to help us out. We had the giant truck and a minivan, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had in comics.

MM: On the first tour you were with Charles Vess and Linda Medley. Was that

MM: You did a second Trilogy Tour the next year.

MM: Were you still at Image when the Trilogy Tour started?

Previous Page: Smiley sews up his Mystery Cow costume in a frontis piece from The Complete Bone Adventures, Vol. 2. Above: Charles Vess’ set design for the first Trilogy Tour. The backdrop, once constructed, was quite elaborate and very eye-catching. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Below: Cover art for The Dragonslayer, the fourth volume in the Bone saga. Next Page: Page 2 of “Greed,” a two-page story Jeff did for the Trilogy Tour II sampler comic.

JEFF: On the first tour, we would host parties at the cons. The idea was to get as many indie comic creators as possible into a hotel suite with retailers. We would get beer and pizza and sodas, and we would invite all the retailers and independent self-publishers that were there for the show, and we would have a big party. We’d do a big jam drawing and raffle it off at the end of the night and donate the money to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. In doing that we met a couple of people who really stood out to us: Jill Thompson, who was doing Scary Godmother and who is now one of the top comic book artists in the country; Mark Crilley, who was doing

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Akiko and who went on have best-selling children’s books based on his work; and the great Stan Sakai, who is still churning out unbelievably readable comics with Usagi Yojimbo. So for the second tour we expanded and got a bigger tree. We had a great time. MM: What do you think that tour did for you personally? JEFF: I don’t know. I think it accomplished what I had set out to do, which was let people know I was back to self-publishing. We were very noticeable that year; we got a lot of press. But I don’t know what it did for my career. It was just part of having friends in comics, which is really important to me. It’s doing more than just sitting in a room by yourself and your music drawing comics. It’s getting out on the road and doing things with people that you have a lot in common with. I just saw it as a really great adventure. Do people still remember the Trilogy Tour? I don’t know. It was big at the time, but I don’t know if it’s all that important in the bigger picture. MM: Had you talked about doing a third tour, or was it getting to be too much? JEFF: It was grueling and very expensive. I think it was hard for a couple of the artists to continue. We said, “Okay, we’ve done it twice. Let’s quit while we’re ahead.” MM: Getting back to Bone, when you get to The Dragonslayer, Phoney Bone becomes even more central to the plot. JEFF: One of the drivers of the story is the relationship between Fone Bone and Phoney Bone. He’s always been very loyal to Phoney, and Phoney, in his way, has always been loyal to Fone Bone. They drive each other crazy, but what’s happening in the valley, aside from the fairy tale story of good versus evil, is that Fone Bone is being pulled away from Phoney by this beautiful, young woman, Thorn. He starts off with a little crush on her, but he really falls for her. Phoney is acting out a bit against that and just following his own greedy impulses. He can’t help but take advantage of suckers if he can. I think he says the Shakespeare line at one point, “The play’s the thing.”

One of the big moments in the story is Phoney’s big scam of the epic, where he makes the ultimate betrayal by selling out Fone Bone’s best friend who happens to be the guardian of the whole valley. That was the centerpiece of the story I’d been building towards. MM: When you get to the next storyline, Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border, you really pare down the cast. There’s Fone Bone, Smiley, and Bartleby, and a few new characters, but that’s pretty much it. Were you worried about the pacing of the overall story? It’s an interlude of sorts in the main story, as you fill the reader in on some of the backstory. JEFF: Yeah, it was time to do a little exposition. I’d already had Gran’ma explaining things in a talking heads sequence, and I didn’t want to do that again. I already had the story of Smiley returning the bear cub, which became Bartleby, and Roque Ja was already written into the script, also. So I came up with these little babies whose parents had been eaten by rat creatures and who could then give us the parameters of the war—who’s on what side, and so on— without having to have another “let’s sit down by the fire” talk with Gran’ma. I was a bit concerned about the pacing

on the one hand, because it does feel like it stops the course of the story when you’re only reading an issue every two or three months. But I had in mind that eventually it would fit into the story and be the equivalent of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. When you read that, the story slows down a little bit, but once you’re done you look back at that rhythm and it’s just part of the story. Moby-Dick is like that, too. There are whole chapters where nothing happens. They’ll be up in the rigging waterproofing them with buckets of tar. They’re real story stoppers. So I was a little worried from the perspective of having to talk to people that year wanting to know what was going on, but in my head I felt it would work in the end. I had the same problem two years later when I was doing Ghost Circles. On an issue by issue basis, it looked like nothing was happening. It was just ash and black skies with four characters walking through the darkness. MM: I thought it was interesting to hear the exposition about the war in the voices of small children. JEFF: They had their own names for things, their own words. I tried to give them new words just to freshen it all up so it wouldn’t

Previous Page: Pencils for Scholastic’s edition of the fifth Bone collection, Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border. Below: In the Eastern Mountains, Fone, Smiley, and Bartleby meet up with a group of orphaned critters who have their own take on the events going on in and around the Valley. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Right and Below: Every now and then in Bone, Jeff decided to put the “cartoon” in Cartoon Books and have the Bones show their roots. Next Page Top: Promotional material for the Nickelodeon animated Bone movie, which unfortunately never came to fruition. Next Page Bottom: Stan Sakai drew the wonderful “Riblet” backup strip for the Stupid, Stupid Rat-tails mini-series, which was collected in a trade paperback in 2000 but has been out of print for some time. Bone, Riblet ™ and © Jeff Smith.

be a boring recap. And it had to be away from the village. I had a rule that I never discussed in the comic book, which was that I never showed the villagers and talking animals together. Fone Bone and Thorn were either with talking animals and dragons or they were in the village with humans. It was Thorn’s abilities in the Dreaming that allowed her to go out and talk to opossums and dragons and things. I had a lot of little rules with Bone. I had to be careful not to talk much about the technology back in Boneville. Obviously, I made jokes about nuclear power plants, and there’s a library where you can check out a copy of Moby-Dick, but I was very careful not to bring it up too often, because if I talked about it being just like our world, you’d wonder why no one ever flew over the valley in an airplane. I never let Fone Bone and Thorn kiss, because that would break the spell. He’s a cartoon character in love with a girl, and if they were ever to kiss on the lips, then what is he? He’s a horrible, little freak. MM: Going back to the fair in The Great Cow Race, there’s a scene where Thorn is talking to a boy at a booth and Fone Bone gets jealous. The kid shows off his muscles, so Fone Bone flexes and his arm turns huge and muscular. In a later scene, something happens and his jaw literally drops to the floor. They were like scenes out of a

Tex Avery cartoon. You didn’t do things like that very often, but when you did they stood out all the more. JEFF: For some reason I thought it was funny to not have the villagers notice that the Bones were so weird looking. The big spring festival brings strange people into town—carnies. [laughter] They treat the Bones like they’re carnies. They comment on the big noses, but they never mention that the Bones have no toes or certain other body parts. [laughter] It’s a Monty Python sense of humor that I love. MM: After you finished up Old Man’s Cave, you started working on a Bone animated film. Did you know you were going to be taking a whole year off from the comic?

JEFF: I thought I’d be taking two years off, because at first things were going very well with Nickelodeon. We all got along very well, and I was going to write and direct the film. We all thought—very naïvely in retrospect— that it wouldn’t take long to put a screenplay together, because most of the movie was already storyboarded. But, in fact, it was very difficult to make the adaptation, partly because I was only two-thirds done with the comic book and I didn’t know the details of the ending yet. I just couldn’t write the screenplay; I didn’t know what was happening. And, famously, we had many disagreements, Nickelodeon and I, about the tone of the movie. So I only ended up taking a year off, because there was a point that I realized the movie was falling apart. “It’s not going to happen, and I need to get back to where I belong. I need to get back to the comic before my readers abandon me.” So I gave up after a year on the movie, and I was panicked. I was like, “What have I done?” I did do a couple of side projects—Rose and Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails—but I was so worried that I wouldn’t get my place back on the store shelves. I called my friends—Alex Ross, Frank Miller, and Charles Vess—and had them each do a variant cover for my comeback issue. And it worked. [laughter] I got great numbers. The anti-gimmick kid pulled a gimmick, and lo and behold, it really did work. MM: How did Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails come about? Was that your idea, or did Tom pitch it to you? JEFF: I think I was at a Chicago Comic Con in Rosemont. It’s a little place outside the airport with nowhere to go. There’re maybe two places to eat. I went to lunch with Tom Sniegoski, and he made Vijaya and I laugh and laugh. We were crying. I was practically peeing my pants. He was writing Vampirella at the time, and I said, “Why aren’t you writing comedy?” He said, “I don’t know. Nobody really publishes comedy.” I was like, “Dude, I publish comedy. Let’s write something.” We batted around a few ideas, and I think Tom came up with this little pig named Riblet—named after the McDonald’s sandwich, I think [laughter]—and that became the back-up feature, which Stan Sakai drew. I need to find a place to republish that. 55

Right and Below: Big Johnson Bone follows in the footsteps of the great American folk heroes, particularly Pecos Bill. Next Page Top: A photo taken in Hocking Hills State Park, the site of Old Man’s Cave. Next Page Bottom: A page of Jeff’s layouts for the Rose mini-series inked and painted by Charles Vess. Bone, Big Johnson Bone, Rose ™ and © Jeff Smith.

The main story came from a one-line reference to the founder of Boneville, where Phoney had tied his big balloon to the statue of Big Johnson Bone. I pictured Big Johnson Bone as a Davy Crockett type of guy. I said, “Tom, why don’t you do a tall tale.” We batted that idea around until we came up with a tall tale of, “Why don’t rat creatures have tails?” Kids would ask me that all the time. “If they’re rat creatures, why don’t they have tails?” MM: Was this the first time you had drawn something written by someone else? JEFF: Yeah, definitely. It actually was really hard, because when I write I make things easier for myself. For example, if in one panel I have two people talking with each other—or in Tom’s case, five or six people talking with each other—I keep them talking in the same order through the next panel. If you don’t then you’ve got a tangle of balloon pointers or you have to twist around your staging. I ended up having to work really hard to get everyone to talk in the right order. But the finished product is something I think holds up really well. In fact, there will be a new edition of Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails. It’s now going to be called Bone: Tall Tales, and will be in full color and published by Scholastic. I’ve wanted to do this since the day we put it out: I’ve wanted to expand the tall tale to include Big Johnson Bone as a baby and Big Johnson Bone’s first love, because those are classic elements of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and a lot of the tall tales. And Tom 56

has been bugging me for years, “You have a hardcover version of all your books, but not mine.” The day has finally come. MM: What about Rose, which you did with Charles Vess? Obviously, there was a backstory for Gran’ma Ben, but you’d left it somewhat vague. Why did you decide to tell that story outside of the regular series? JEFF: It was when we were preparing to do the Trilogy Tour. Charles came up from Virginia to visit me, and I took him to see Old Man’s Cave, which is about 40 miles south of Columbus in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It’s a stunning state park with waterfalls and ravines and beautiful trees. It’s far from what you would think Ohio would look like. It’s breathtaking. So I took him there, and as we were walking though Old Man’s Cave, which is the name of both a giant, actual cave and the surrounding area, I was telling him how I grew up there as a kid and how you could make a great fantasy novel there. That kind of grew into me describing the backstory for Gran’ma Ben, training there with her royal sister.

I was telling him all this stuff never intending to ever draw it or show it, because you need backstory for your book. We were walking through this beautiful area surrounded by tons of Charles Vess moss-covered rocks and trees with roots coming out of the rock walls and reaching all the way down to the river, and he just stopped me and said, “I want to paint that story.” “Let’s do it.” Of course, then I had to come up with a story. It’s one thing when it’s just background information. It’s quite another when it has to have dialogue and a story. But we did it, and Charles won an Eisner for his painting on that story. MM: How did you work together? Did you give him a script or a set of thumbnails? JEFF: I did my regular scripts that I did for Bone, which are fast, penciled comic book pages. I don’t type out scripts. I just draw a little comic book, because I think in words and pictures simultaneously. He followed my layouts most of the time. Sometimes he would change things if he thought of a better way to do them—and he was usually right. It was a very good experience. 57

Part 4:

And Now Back to Our Story details in their design drawings. Fone Bone would have a backpack, and in the backpack would be a copy of MobyDick that would actually open so you could see the words, “Call me Ishmael.” I was blown away by the level of detail, so of course I agreed to it, and the person in charge of the project was Steve Hamaker. Then they got very involved in merchandising and doing toys for the American Godzilla movie. They ended up having to buy a lot of those toys back. At some point I got a call from Steve saying, “Oh, my God, they’re laying everybody off.” So I said, “Put all your stuff in a box and come over here, and we’ll hire you.” He came straight over from the office, and he’s worked with us for ten years now.

MM: You mentioned the variant covers you had when you came back to Bone, but you also reprinted issue #1, this time in color, which came packaged with a small Fone Bone PVC figure. JEFF: That was for the tenth anniversary of Bone #1, which we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary next year. I can’t believe it. I’ll have to color something else and get a new figure. [laughter] We wanted to do something fun to celebrate, so we decided to color the issue, and we put some fun things in it. We flew R.C. Harvey into town, and he sat down and did a little interview with me which we included in the book. And we included the little figurine, which was a hard thing to run through the distribution system.

MM: You did a second series of Bone figures, too.

MM: Steve Hamaker did the coloring and designed the figurine.

JEFF: We did. But that was just too difficult for a little company like ours to keep up. We didn’t lose money, but we didn’t make any money either. It was just a nightmare, and we gave that up after a year. But Steve turned out to have some great coloring and design skills, which we didn’t know about when we hired him. Because Cartoon Books is only five people including me and Vijaya, everybody has to do a little of everything. Steve ended up designing the toy packages, and I was really surprised at how good all his designs were. He would find images from our archives, scan them in and manipulate them, and they looked fantastic. At some point Steve said, “Let me take a shot at coloring some of the covers.” Once he did that, we started talking about the tenth anniversary issue, which he colored. These days he does every art job for Cartoon Books except for the actual comics. I still write and draw the comics by hand.

JEFF: Yeah, he worked with the model makers and the factory in Hong Kong. He did everything. MM: How did you meet him, and what led him to become part of the team? JEFF: In 1999, toys were really sweeping the comic book stores. McFarlane’s toys were blowing people’s minds; they were the most high-quality, beautifully sculpted action figures anyone had ever seen. A company called ReSaurus started up in Columbus that was the first company to rival McFarlane in terms of quality. They caught everyone off-guard. Duke Nukem was a video game character they started with. Then they did Street Fighter figures. I was surprised to find they were in Columbus. They were trying to figure out what their next toy would be, and somebody said, “Well, Jeff Smith is right here in town. Let’s call him.” They came over and gave me a presentation and I was very impressed with all the little 58

MM: Is he in charge of pagination, as well? JEFF: We have somebody else who handles that: Tom Gaadt. He does all our digital layout and pre-prep and all that. He also does the web page and deals with the letters pages. MM: You had the basic ending for Bone worked out very early on. At what point did you know how you were going to get there? JEFF: As you say, I had the basic idea for the ending in mind before I started, but during the one-year hiatus in 2000 when I was working on the Bone screenplay, I was also thinking about the ending. Originally, I had thought that the Bone cousins and Thorn would enter the ghost circles and work their way down to Atheia, get there, and then have to mount a journey back up through the valley to near Gran’ma Ben’s cabin and have the final battle there. But I realized that the stand had to be in Atheia—that all the evil characters would follow them to Atheia and trap them there. So it was just before I started work on the last arc that I could really see the ending and it was making sense. I knew, “From this point on, I’m just working towards the end.” Before that it was always kind of magical. “What new branch of the road will crop up that I can follow?”

MM: Once you figured out the path you needed to take, did it become difficult to keep up your enthusiasm? Most creative people get more enjoyment from coming up with an idea than from executing that idea. JEFF: I would say no. I enjoyed it greatly. Because at that point I had been doing it for ten years, and it was working. That’s the most amazing thing to me is that the story was working and I was able to keep my audience and entertain them with a single story for twelve years. So I was not losing any enthusiasm for the project at all. It was, however, becoming technically more difficult to write, because once you start trying to tie all the story threads together, well, you have to tie all the story threads together. [laughter] It would have been very easy to have done it in a cheap, easy way, but it wouldn’t have felt real. It was a lot of work at the end. MM: It sounds like you were tweaking the storyline as you went along all the way to the last issue. JEFF: Oh, very much. For example, when I said they were going to go back up to the top in the original storyline, the queen of the dragons was going to be immobile—a giant, stone mountain. That had to change when I decided to have all the evil creatures follow them South. Suddenly, Mim became animated again, which was far more exciting and interesting. 59

Previous Page: This detail from Bone #4 was used as the design for the PVC figure that was included with the 10th anniversary color edition of Bone #1. Above: Thorn leads the Bones, Gran’ma Ben, and Bartleby down into the Valley through the minefield of ghost circles. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: Very few people will be completely satisfied with how a long epic ends, because they all have their own ideas of what should happen. After years of emotional investment, people tend to feel some ownership of the story. You saw that recently with the ending of Lost. What kind of feedback were you getting during those last four or five issues? Above: For several issues, the central cast of Bone wandered through an empty wasteland. It was both literally and figuratively one of the darkest moments of the series, and Jeff was worried he might lose some of his readership. Next Page: More worrying for Jeff, though, was the scene in which Thorn flies. Thankfully, his friends convinced him to through with it. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

JEFF: I got a little bit of pushback from readers, not during the last few issues, but during the beginning of the final story arc, where I spent five or six issues in the ghost circles. I had a handful of characters walking through pages and pages of nothing but ash and black. I was a little worried, because people were not getting it. Normally I can pull some humor out of any situation, but this was the darkest moment of the story. And it took a year. But my memory of the feedback during the last push, the last four or five issues, was that it was quite uplifting. People were saying, “Wow, I can’t believe where this is going.” I remember being nervous about the scene where Thorn flies at the end, and almost chickening out and not wanting to do it. “That’s too far.” I called Frank Miller, Paul Pope, and Terry Moore—three people I talked with a lot back then—and they all were very much in favor of her flying. Frank was like, “She’s going to fly, damn it.” [laughter] The key for me was when I realized I 60

could have Bartleby say, “It’s just like a dream.” Then you don’t know. Did she really fly, or did she make people see her as flying with a spell or something?” That was the trick for me, but it went over gangbusters. I felt like I was getting pushed along by everyone, but in a good way. Over the six years since the book ended, I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I wish Fone Bone and Thorn had stayed together,” but I’ve never heard anyone say, “That was a horrible ending. I wish I’d never read it.” MM: 2004 was a really big year for you. Even before the series ended, you worked out the deal with Scholastic. How did that come about? Did they approach you? JEFF: Yes. We got a phone call one day. The publisher at the time was a woman named, Jean Feiwel, who is no longer with the company, and I miss her dearly. She was awesome. She called and asked to talk with Vijaya, and they were on the phone for, like, an hour. The rest of us were outside of her door asking each other, “What’s going on?” Vijaya came out and said, “Wow. We need to talk about this. Scholastic wants to publish Bone, and they get it. I think we should give them a serious shot.” What had happened, I learned later, was that they had been wanting to get into graphic novels, and the consultants they had hired—among whom were Art Spiegelman

and his wife, Françoise Mouly—had told them, “If you’re going to start a graphic novel line for kids, you need to start with Bone.” So that was what they were proposing, to start up a new imprint called Graphix and launch it with Bone. It was pretty cool. The color came about because Art thought it would be best. It took a while to convince me, but he finally talked me into doing it in color, and it definitely was the right call for the Scholastic books. MM: The smaller size, I presume, was done so that it would fit on standard bookstore shelves. JEFF: People think it’s shrunk down to manga size, but it’s just standard book size. But, yeah, it was because that’s how big books generally are; that’s how big Harry Potter is.

MM: Had you already broken into the chain bookstore market? JEFF: We’d been in bookstores since the late ’90s. We’d had the Bone collections in libraries since the mid-’90s. It was around 2002 that the graphic novels really bubbled over. That’s when I recall bookstore and library distributors really starting to get into the business of moving graphic novels. But, like I said, we’d already been there for a while. MM: Did the Scholastic editions make a big difference in your numbers? I have to believe being in the children’s section helped your visibility. JEFF: Scholastic is on a whole different scale. We had only been in the graphic novel section, which was kind of junky. There would be a series of shelves for the Dungeons & Dragons games, and all of the graphic novels would be shoved into one of those shelves. But there weren’t that many then. There’d be a few Marvel, a few DC, Sandman, Bone, and a few Fantagraphics books. 62

One of the things Scholastic talked about doing right from that first conversation, was that they were not going to place it in the graphic novel section. They wanted to shelve it with regular books. That appealed to us, because the graphic novel section always looked messy, like nobody took care of it. People would pull a book off, read through it, and cram it back on the shelf, and the books would get all beaten up. And so that’s what they did. We got shelved in the children’s section alongside Harry Potter, and it was a very popular section of the store. It was very good for us. The numbers are astronomical compared to what we had been selling on our own. MM: Later that year you released the One Volume edition of Bone at San Diego. I was there that year, and there was a huge buzz about it on the con floor. That first day it seemed like I saw copies everywhere I looked. JEFF: That is one of my biggest memories of Bone in general. I finished the comics in May, and then very quickly assembled the material together for the ninth volume, Crown of Horns, and as soon as I got that off to the printer I went through the entire previous eight volumes, and I mapped it all out. My office looked like a war room. I had little xeroxes of all the pages taped up in rows and rows around all four walls. We had a checklist for things like, “On that page I want to change that one word balloon. I want it to be shorter. That arm on Lucius has upset me ever since I drew it, and I’m going to redraw it.” I easily changed 150 to 200 pages, and I added six or seven new pages. I remember reading in Tolkein’s forward to an edition of Lord of the Rings that once he finished the story and before it was published, he then rewrote it backwards. I knew so much more about the story than when I started. In the first two-thirds of the books I would refer to this power the Hooded One has and the danger of the locusts, but I didn’t have the name “ghost circles.” That came after doing it for ten years. So I was able to go back in and drop in the term “ghost circle,” so that it would make for a smoother reading experience.

As you can imagine, everything came down to the last minute. It takes a while to get things printed. I’m sure you’ve gone through this yourself, trying to get a new book delivered to San Diego, sometimes directly to your booth straight from the printer. You might not have a chance to even see it before the show. Well, that’s exactly what our situation was. We cut it pretty close. We got to San Diego, and we were just waiting. Then all these palettes arrived, and they were so much bigger than we had pictured. I think we had 400 copies of the regular edition and 150 copies of the limited hardcover, and they were gigantic. We didn’t know what to do with them. Kathleen said, “I’ll build towers,” and she actually used them like bricks and built these giant, round towers of One Volume editions. This was right before the show started on Wednesday night, and Vijaya and I were both feeling sick to our stomachs. “Oh, my God. We brought way too many of these. We are going to spend so much money shipping these home.” But we sold out of both editions on Thursday. They went fast! It was incredible. And I think it gave rise to a lot of rumors that we had sold out of the entire print run. MM: I heard those rumors myself. JEFF: And the numbers in some of those rumors were phenomenal—up to 200,000 copies sold at the show. MM: I believe the most I heard was 1,000 copies. JEFF: Well, that wasn’t too far off, I guess. MM: And the One Volume won an Eisner the following year for Best Graphic Album Reprint. Plus, it got a write-up in Time magazine. JEFF: It was a great ending.

Previous Page: This layout for the final page of Bone was sketched out a year before it was actually drawn. Obviously, Jeff reworked the scene, but the last bit of dialogue remained pretty true to the original idea. Below: The limited edition hardcover version of the Bone One Volume edition. Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Part 5:

The Magic of Words and Scientific Theory worked out the script, but I had given myself carpal tunnel syndrome as I finished up Bone. I was pulling allnighters, and my arm was getting so tired and numb. I would have to wrap my arm in two or three Ace bandages starting at my shoulder and armpit and going down to my fingers and thumb in order to finish. There was a point during the very last issue when I couldn’t close my hand enough to hold a pencil. I found a tennis ball and jammed a pencil through it, because I could hold the tennis ball, and I finished up like that. That’s when I said, “What am I doing?” and I went to see a doctor. He told me I couldn’t draw for eight months. We did tests—he had needles in my arm from my neck down to my wrist. He said, “It looks like you haven’t caused any nerve damage; it’s just muscular. I want you to put a brace on your arm and not draw for eight months.” When I was out on tour, I was barely able to sign books, but that was it. I did recover, but I have to be careful. Now whenever I draw or do signings, I wear a brace on my hand.

MM: In 2005 you did some touring to promote the Scholastic editions. Is that right? JEFF: I went on a tour in February of 2005 to promote the first book from Scholastic, which was weird, because that was my first real author’s tour. I didn’t like it at all. It wasn’t like comics where you go into a city and the guys who own the comic book store are comic book fans and want to go out to dinner with you and you have a great time. In the bookstore world, they’re just teenagers making hourly wages, and they just want to shut the store down and get out of there. They don’t want to go out to dinner. So you just go back to your room at the Holiday Inn at the airport. MM: How long did you tour? How many stops did you make? JEFF: It was about a month—two two-week periods. It was probably close to 20 stops. I don’t really remember, because some of them were visits to schools where I’d talk to a gymnasium full of kids, and others were in a Barnes & Noble or something. We did some on the East Coast, some in the Chicago area, and then we ended up out West. The last one was in San Francisco, and I did two or three appearances there.

MM: It sounds like you started working on Shazam! pretty much right after you finished Bone. Were you looking to do something for DC or Marvel, or did DC come to you? JEFF: It was the week before 9/11 that I got a message on my answering machine from Mike Carlin, who was the editor-in-chief of DC then. It said something like, “We know you’re getting near the end of Bone. Do you have any interest in drawing a super-hero?” Then 9/11 happened and a few weeks went by, but eventually I called him up. I couldn’t see myself drawing Batman or Superman, but when he suggested Captain Marvel, something clicked. I was like, “Hey, that’s not bad.” One of the reasons it clicked for me was

MM: Were you working on any projects during that time, or did you set everything aside for the tour? JEFF: I think I was working on Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil by then. I had 64

that back in 2000 I’d started thinking of a science-fiction story I wanted to do, which became RASL. Part of the story in RASL was that he was going to be from another dimension, but from a few months in the future. He would be trying to warn New York City that religious fundamentalists were going to blow up buildings, but nobody would believe he was from another dimension. When that really happened, there didn’t seem to be much point to that story. It would just be weird. So suddenly I didn’t have the next story I was going to work on. DC’s offer was well timed, and Captain Marvel seemed to be a good thing to work on after twelve years on Bone. I thought it would be a nice change to work for a couple of years on a clearly defined character. MM: Did they let you do pretty much whatever you wanted to do? JEFF: I’d have to say so. It was pretty clear that nothing was happening with Captain Marvel and hadn’t for a long time—not since Jerry Ordway’s Power of Shazam! series. Everybody in comics pretty much knew my stuff and knew I wouldn’t do anything crazy and that it was a good match. My idea was, “Let me come up with a story and how I want to handle it, and if you guys like it, we’ll do it. If you don’t like it, then we’ll just part ways. Nobody’s hurt.” And that’s how we did it. MM: The way the comics were presented with all the editorial material—the title, the credits, and so on—only on the inside covers, it really looked like the focus was on it being one book. Was DC looking at the project as a way to break into the children’s market? JEFF: Maybe. I never asked them about it, but I’ve always thought they were kind of hoping to get that presence in the bookstore market that I had begun to stake out. That makes some kind of sense. Their original idea, though, was to relaunch it as a comic book. They wanted me to do it as a monthly. But I said, “You don’t want me to do a monthly comic. That would be bad.” [laughter] So I suggested that I do a prestige format mini-series, and that way it would have a beginning, a middle, and an end, which I like more anyway.

MM: What kind of preparation did you do before getting started? Did you read the original Golden Age Monster Society story? JEFF: Yeah, I did. I called up my friend, Rory Root, who owns Comic Relief in Berkeley, and put him on the job. “See if you can find me one of those.” I knew there was a giant, oversized collection, and he found it for me. I read that while I was on the road at some comic book shows, and I bought a couple of Golden Age Captain Marvels. I also watched the Republic movie serial, Adventures of Captain Marvel. It’s well regarded, and generally thought to be the best serial ever made. From all those sources I picked up something that I thought was a little more magical than what I had seen in the comics, which seemed to portray Billy Batson as a young teenager who turns into an adult super-hero but retains his teenage mind—sort of like Tom Hanks’ Big crossed with Superman. When I read the early Whiz comics, he looks much younger. I thought it would be a bigger change if he was a younger kid and then become an adult with a different personality. That was really how he was portrayed in the Golden Age comics. MM: There was some debate amongst the fans about that aspect, because when DC brought him back they went in the other direction and that’s the Captain Marvel most of them knew. 65

Previous Page and Above: Design sketches of the Big Red Cheese done in preparation for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil. Drawn in late 2001, these early sketches harkened back to C.C. Beck’s Golden Age work for Fawcett’s various Captain Marvel series. Captain Marvel ™ and © DC Comics.

JEFF: There was some debate, but I don’t care. [laughter] DC asked me to make him corny and go back to the Golden Age concept, and I had a blast doing just that. MM: Well, you didn’t go to far into the cornier aspects. You played Talky Tawny fairly straight. He’s a tiger who can literally transform into a man. He doesn’t stand upright and wear human clothes when he’s in tiger form. JEFF: Well, there was another element to my research I forgot to mention. I kept thinking, “What is this super-hero? He’s a magic word.” I started looking up magic words, and I came across “alakazam,” which is what “Shazam” is evoking in sound. I started looking at Aladdin and genies, and I found these ifrits, which are genie-type spirits that can change back and forth between man and animal. As soon as I saw that, I said, “That’s my explanation for Talky Tawny. It ties him into Captain Marvel’s magic.” In my mind Captain Marvel is sort of like Billy Batson’s genie that he can pull out of a bottle by saying, “Shazam.” MM: Was it your idea to use the secret codes at the end of each issue? JEFF: Yeah, I saw that they had done that in the reprint book. Someone showed me their Captain Marvel membership card

that had the code on it, which was really cool. I just wanted to play with, “What made Captain Marvel so much fun in the ’40s that he outsold Superman and Mickey Mouse on the newsstands?” I went for all the fun stuff I could find and just had a ball. MM: Your Sivana was very short and looked like a little goblin. But the biggest change was that you made him the Attorney General instead of a mad scientist. JEFF: When DC first called me, Lex Luthor was their President of the United States. By the time I started working on the book, 9/11 had happened, and I obviously didn’t like our Attorney General of the United States. [laughter] So I thought, “Maybe Lex Luthor hired his buddy to be Attorney General.” It let me get a little laugh in there on the side. MM: Why did you bring Mary into the book and make her so young? In the original stories, Billy has been Captain Marvel for some time before he finds out he has a sister. JEFF: I didn’t want to straight-up regurgitate what had been done. I think what DC wanted from me was to somehow update it or give it a new twist. It didn’t 67

Previous Page: Partially inked pencils for page 7 of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #1. At this point Talky Tawny has yet to reveal his wilder side. Above: Another early design sketch for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil. Left: This unused sketch was for a scene in Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #4. Captain Marvel and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

just pop into my head; it wasn’t that calculated. Things just evolved. Like, with Sivana being short, I thought he was short in the comic. Below: With this sketch of Mary Marvel, Jeff hit the spark for his story: Family. Also shown is Jeff’s pencils for page 1 of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #2. Next Page: The opening page of the Paul Pope/ Jeff Smith collaboration, “PanFried Girl,” for Dark Horse Presents 100 #5. Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. PanFried Girl © Paul Pope.

MM: Well he was, but he wasn’t exactly a dwarf, either. JEFF: Yes, everybody’s told me that I made him really short. [laughter] In my mind I guess I thought he could be Billy’s size. I didn’t do that on purpose, though. The same with how I spelled Talky Tawny’s name. I just made a mistake. [Ed. note: It should be Tawky rather than Talky.] I read it, but it just stuck in my head as Talky Tawny, because he talks, right? [laughter] After the first issue came out and readers corrected me, I asked the editor, “Why didn’t you tell me?” He knew. He said, “I just thought that was your take on it.” Well, it was my take on it, but not on purpose.

Mary came about when I was just sketching out ideas on how I was going to draw everyone. I have a couple of pages in a notebook of scribbles where I was trying to work out how to draw Captain Marvel. There’s a drawing of Billy Batson somewhere where he looks like a humanized Fone Bone. He has big, funny feet and he’s walking like a duck, just like Fone Bone. Then I hit on this drawing of Mary where she was younger than I was really thinking, and something just clicked. At that same moment all the pieces of the puzzle kind of fell together, too. It was like, “Oh, wait.

I get it. That’s my story. Billy starts off, he’s an orphan living alone on the street in an abandoned building, and throughout the story he slowly gains a family—the Marvel family.” He gets the wise grandfather figure with the wizard, and I created a Lois Lanetype mother figure named Helen Fidelity. The drive of the story is that he’s looking for his sister. It all came together right then, and it all evolved around Mary. MM: You hadn’t really drawn young children before. Thorn was young, but certainly a teenager. JEFF: Are you making fun of the way I draw kids? [laughter] MM: No, I actually like when kids are drawn at kid sizes and proportions. Obviously as a cartoonist you’re going to exaggerate that a bit, but— JEFF: Some cartoonists make kids just look like tiny adults, yeah. MM: Did you have to go through a process of sketching kids to get the feel for it? JEFF: Yes, and I’m not 100% happy with the way I drew them. In some drawings they look pretty good, but when I look at that project, what I see is me struggling with having to relearn how to draw. I was having to learn how to draw with the brace on, and it was very difficult. That’s mostly what I think of when I look at Shazam!. MM: Looking back, how was the work-forhire experience for you? Is it something you’d try again at some point? It sounds like they were pretty hands-off with you.

JEFF: Yes. At one time Paul and I wanted to do a giant anthology called Big Big, which would be sort of like a science fiction, Heavy Metal type of thing with just our stuff in it. I was going to do “RASL,” and he a couple of different things going on. One of them was “La Chica Bionica,” about a woman with a crazy bionic arm. [laughter] It was a great story. At one point Frank Miller wanted to get in on it, too, but the three of us had crazy schedules. Bone took longer to finish than I thought, Frank went to Hollywood, and Paul was designing clothes. We never quite were able to synch our schedules up. We still would hang out and have fun, but eventually I said, “I’m ready to do this story. I’m just going to do it.”

JEFF: Yeah, they were great. I couldn’t have been happier. It seemed to do very well, and they were very happy. After the second issue came out I got a letter from Paul Levitz, the publisher, that was very nice. So, yeah, I had a great time. They poured lavish attention into the final collected books. The hardcover they did was absolutely gorgeous. They went over the top, and it was their idea to do the reversible dust jacket. Absolutely first rate. They made it very clear that if I ever wanted to do another one that I was welcome, and that makes me feel good. MM: You mentioned the idea for RASL going back to 2000. Didn’t that begin with a project you were planning to do with Paul Pope?

MM: You had worked with Paul on a short story for Dark Horse Presents a few years before that, right? 69

JEFF: Paul is actually from Ohio, and spent time on the OSU campus for a while. We knew each other from that and from the road. You get to know other cartoonists as you travel to the same shows every year and hang out. So I’d known Paul for a long time. Once he moved to New York, I knew Frank, and I kind of got them together. For a few years there—from about 2001 to 2006 or so—we’d all hang out together three or four times a year. MM: Were you looking to do something as far from Bone as possible? JEFF: No, I just had this idea that was starting to percolate. I was watching a lot of noir films late at night while I was inking Bone. The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep—I love those movies. I had this idea to do a noir science-fiction story. MM: Where did the Tesla angle come from? JEFF: That came right before I started working on the book. It was right around the time I announced RASL and began to show artwork. I had a lot of the story—the plot itself—figured out and I was playing around with the noirish concept of the love triangle. I just needed a hook—a sciencefiction element for the story to revolve around. I was describing it to a friend of mine named Jennifer Gwynne Oliver, who was a Disney clean-up artist for many, many years. I was telling her about the story and explaining his T-suits that allowed him to bend space and step across into a parallel universe, which was based on string theory and modifications of M-theory. I said, “I have it all more or less down pat, but there’s something missing— some element of the story.” She said, “You need to look up Nikola Tesla and the Philadelphia Experiment and check all that out.” I started researching that around the same time I went out to the desert for a couple of weeks to get my head together. “What is the story?” I took my laptop, and I went in to Nikola Tesla land, which if you’ve ever been there, it’s a dark, conspiracy-drenched place. [laughter] I had a blast. That was it. That’s what was missing. Everyone is after the missing journals of Nikola Tesla, and Rasl’s got them. That’s

how he built his technology. It was sort of like that moment I described where discovering Mary Marvel made the whole Shazam! story roll together. It was the same thing with RASL once I had Tesla’s journals. That’s why when you open up the cover to RASL you’ll see that it’s dedicated to Jennifer Gwynne Oliver. MM: So you did a lot of research for this book. JEFF: Oh, Eric. I’m a cartoonist. I know nothing about math or physics. [laughter] Having said that, I am a comic book guy, and I am somewhat of a geek. I do like science. I like to watch Nova and shows about different breakthroughs in scientific history. I love all that stuff, and I think conspiracy theories are a blast. So it was fun to do all this, but it was hard on my brain, let me tell you. MM: You have a couple of issues where half the issue is talking about scientific theory and Tesla’s background. JEFF: I dedicated two years to research for RASL. A lot of it was real science. I mean, I 71

Previous Page: Layout sketch for the alternate cover of RASL #1. Above: Panel from RASL #3, where some of the backstory begins to be revealed. RASL ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Above: In RASL #6, Jeff drops some historical knowledge about Nikola Tesla. The background elements of real history and science give the series depth and weight. Next Page: Frontis piece art for RASL: The Drift, the first volume of the series. RASL ™ and © Jeff Smith.

read books on string theory, books by Brian Greene. I read Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. I read a lot of books on physics and theory. I read a lot of history. After I got all that down, there was so much to learn about the way scientists think and see things. If they see a beautiful mathematical equation, they’re more willing to look for what the math proves rather than the other way around. That’s why in M-theory they have come to the conclusion that there are parallel universes, because some of the math doesn’t work if there’s just one universe. Is that crazy? [laughter] But that’s what it is. To any science student, they’ll go, “Of course,” but for me as a cartoonist, that was a leap. But once I opened that door and went in, it was a real joy. I’ve always been an amateur astronomer. MM: You mentioned going out to the desert. Is that where the Native American angle crept into the story, with the Man in the Maze? 72

JEFF: Yeah, that is where that happened. I knew I wanted it to be set in the desert, because there are large military companies out there, like Raytheon and Hughes Aircraft, and the desert is a good setting for a noir type of story. One of the elements of noir is that man is alone in a very primal situation, and the desert was good for me. So I went out there to get a feel for what it’s like, and that’s where I stumbled onto all the Indian folklore that’s around there. All of the tribes there have the Man in the Maze. It’s part of their emergence stories. Man started inside the earth and came up to this level. We are now in the Fourth World, by the way. The last emergence brought man from the Third World into the Fourth World. I like that because of the Jack Kirby connection. MM: When you premiered RASL in San Diego, you had the first issue preview in an oversized format. You always seem to find a way to attract people to your booth. Did that work well for you?

JEFF: Yeah, that’s been part of the fun of the journey, to figure out ways to get people to the booth.

display it.... But I said, “I still want to do the collections oversized.” For some reason they said, “Oh, that’s okay.”

MM: Had you already planned to collect the issues in oversized trades?

MM: It seems like you’re using more fine linework in RASL? Are you still doing it all with brush, or are you using a pen sometimes?

JEFF: I wanted to do the issues oversized, as well, but when I showed up in San Diego with the oversized preview, all the retailers I talked to—and later I called several more—said, “Don’t do that. That’s bad news in the comic-book world.” Some of my favorite stuff is oversized, but I was told by all the retailers whose opinions I really trust that it would be a bad idea. So I said, “Okay, I’ll do the comics normal sized.”

JEFF: I’m still using the same #1 sable hair brush. MM: Since you’re working towards the oversized collections, are you working at a larger size than normal? JEFF: I’m working at the same size I’ve always worked. The collections are almost the size of my original, but not quite.

MM: Trust me, as someone who does books at magazine size, which is much smaller than what your preview was, a lot of stores just won’t carry anything that’s not standard comic book size.

MM: Do you have a set length in mind for the story, or is that still in flux? JEFF: No, I’m doing it the same way I did Bone, but it’s a much shorter story than Bone. I imagine we’re well into the meat of Act II now. There are two collections so far and there will probably be two more or maybe one big, fat one.

JEFF: That was it. People don’t have the boxes to store it in, the stores don’t have the right kind of shelves to 74

MM: With your covers for RASL you’re taking a more unified, graphic approach. They’re pretty stark. I guess that goes back to the noir nature of the story. There’s a lot of black on the covers, and the colors you use tend to have a lot of black in them as well. What was your idea behind this approach? JEFF: It was just an attempt to do something different than what I’d done before. Bone had fairly normal covers for the most part—very standard tableau type covers of action sequences from the story. Although, for the last few issues of Bone I started doing these giant drawings of the characters. There would be a giant Fone Bone or a giant Phoney Bone. Graphically, they were kind of appealing to me, and I think that sort of led me to think, “I’m going to try to do a big, graphically powerful image for each cover.” I got a very good reaction from the first cover of RASL, which is just his face.

JEFF: Well, besides doing the oversized collections the way I like, over the summer we tested in the comic book market a more conventional sized paperback collection. It collects the first seven issues. We haven’t gotten the results of that test yet, but we’re looking to see what works, what people are interested in. It’s like with anything I do, I try to find a package that will appeal to someone. I did the same thing with Bone: It’s a comic, it’s a collection, it’s a hardback collection, it’s a color collection. I have a lot of people come up and say, “I bought your entire series three times.” I tell them, “Hang on, I’m still going to do the pop-up version.” [laughter]

MM: That first cover is definitely the most graphic of the series so far. JEFF: You know, in the beginning I was picturing the entire comic being a little more graphic, but once you get in there and start drawing, you just draw what you draw. [laughter] MM: What kind of process did you go through with the character designs? JEFF: The very early designs, when I was doing it as my section of Big Big, were much more cartoony, much more manga-like. But as I kept drawing him he started looking more like Kamandi. As I kept doodling, it struck me that that was a good look. As I said, I wanted him to be this primal man struggling against nature and science and technology, and giving him a slightly caveman type of face seemed to work. MM: Obviously, you’re going to have a very different audience reading RASL than read Bone. There will be a lot of carry-over certainly, but RASL isn’t going to be shelved in the children’s section of the bookstore. Are you having to think differently in terms of marketing and selling RASL? 75

Previous Page: This penciled panel for RASL #7 —which was flipped to face the other direction for publication—is shown here at the actual drawn size. Below: Jeff’s bold, graphic cover for the first issue of RASL. RASL ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Right: Pencils for a page of Little Mouse Gets Ready. Below: Little Mouse is all ready in this detail from Little Mouse Gets Ready. Next Page: Cover rough for Quest for the Spark, Book One, the first Bone novel. Bone, Little Mouse, and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: That’s funny, but it would probably be pretty cool, actually. Some amazing pop-up books have come out in the past few years. [laughter] Switching gears, how did Little Mouse Gets Ready come about? JEFF: I’ve been friends with Art Spiegleman and Françoise Mouly for many years, and they wanted to start up Toon Books—a line of graphic novels aimed

specifically at emerging readers. So they wanted comics that could be read by fouror five-year-olds. They’d done this kind of thing before with Little Lit, but this was a much more specific idea. They just called up and asked if I wanted to do one. I cannot tell you why, Eric, but as soon as Françoise asked me, an idea popped into my head about this little mouse who gets dressed just like you would when you were a little kid, and who finds out at the end that mice don’t wear clothes. The mouse is based on a little character I used to draw when I was a kid. He was called Little Mouse and had a red vest. It was very easy; it just came to me. MM: Did they suggest the horizontal format or was that your idea? JEFF: They sent me the first batch of Toon Books, which included a couple of different formats. Art’s Jack and the Box was in a horizontal format, and there were others that were vertical and a little more comic book-y. But my idea was aimed at a much younger audience. If the idea is to teach them to read comics, you can’t really mess it up if there are only one or two panels on a page. MM: Right. They don’t have to figure out the Z pattern. It’s simply left to right.

it can’t be a comic. I don’t want this to be a sequel. “It can be a prose book, and I’ll do some illustrations.” And Tom is very fun to work with. I think kids are going to love this.

JEFF: Yeah, that was what I was thinking. I was doing something at the level of a kid trying to button his shirt. MM: It looked like you had fun with it. Is there a chance of you doing more of them?

MM: You do have Smiley and Bartleby in the framing sequences of Tall Tales.

JEFF: I had a blast. They want more, but I don’t think that’s the kind of thing I want to push, but I told Françoise, “If I have another idea, I will do it.”

JEFF: That’s slightly different. The prose books are not official canon.

MM: You’ve recently come back to the world of Bone. There was the Bone Handbook, Bone: Tall Tales has some new material in it, and there’s the upcoming novel, Quest for the Spark, that Tom is writing that will be illustrated by you.

MM: Even though some of the old characters like Thorn and Gran’ma Ben are going to appear in them? JEFF: Well, that’s one of the reasons I feel ambivalent about it. “What was I thinking? Of course it’s a sequel.”

JEFF: And that will be the first of three novels. MM: Did it come down to Scholastic saying, “We really want more Bone product on the shelves”? JEFF: [laughter] I often get asked, “Do you miss Bone?” or I’ll be on a panel at a comic convention called “Ending Your Epic.” [laughter] It’s still going on. I’m spending almost as much time on Bone now that it’s done as I was before. I have slightly ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, I surely love to draw those characters. I couldn’t be happier. On the other hand, it does take a lot of time away from RASL, which is where my head and heart are at right now. MM: Tom is handling all the writing for the Bone novels, though. JEFF: Yeah, it was Tom’s idea. He really wanted to do it. He’d been pitching this idea for years, and Scholastic really wanted more Bone stuff, so those two forces came together, and I thought, “Well, go ahead.” My only rules for the project is that the three cousins—Fone Bone, Phoney, and Smiley—can’t be in it, and 77

Below: Rough pencils for the back cover of Quest for the Spark, featuring several new characters. Next Page: Jeff’s script/ layout for the first page of Wizard Presents Bone #13-1/2. Bone and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

But what can I do? It’s happening. I consider Tall Tales the coda. It’s the final Bone book; it’s “real.” Some of those stories I did during the Bone run, and it’s really nice to have them back in the canon. MM: Is there a specific age group the prose books are aimed at? Are they going to be classified as 8-12 or young adult? JEFF: I don’t really know. I would guess young adult.

MM: How many illustrations are you doing for each book? JEFF: I’m doing 20 to 25. MM: You’ve done that type of work before. There was a short story in Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle that you did a couple of illustrations for. JEFF: That was fun. It’s just like doing a bunch of covers. It’s a lot of work, but at least I don’t have to make each drawing work with the other drawings. MM: Since these are mostly new characters, you had to take the time to come up with the designs. JEFF: Yeah. I talked it over with Tom. I think my role in the process was to make sure it ran on the rules of the Bone universe—that the Dreaming worked and the dragons worked and that kind of thing. I can’t remember if Tom came up with them or I, but there are three new Bone characters: a professor and his twin niece and nephew. It’s a cute little premise. The Bone cousins we’re familiar with return home and become celebrities— they go on late night television shows and write books or whatever. But the Boneville Explorer Society can’t find the valley, even with satellites, and they say they’re frauds. The professor and these two kids worship the Bone cousins— they think they’re heroes— so they want to find the valley and prove that it’s real. And they do. Tom did a great job. He really captured the rat creatures, especially. They’re horrible, scary, and funny all at the same time.

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: You keep a fairly strict schedule for the most part, right?

or character studies. I’m a little jealous, but everything I draw goes into the books.

JEFF: Well, I work every day, yeah. I consider it a job. Cartoon Books is made up of five people: Vijaya and I; our production manager who runs the office, Kathleen Glosan; my art assistant, Steve Hamaker, who does the coloring and everything else we need done in terms of artwork that isn’t the actual comics; and Tom Gaadt, who runs the web page, goes to all the shows, and handles all the mail orders. We pretty much run from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. What they do during the day, I have no idea. [laughter] I have a little studio over my garage, which is where I do a lot of my writing and drawing. I go to the studio around 10:00 and usually try to write in the morning. In the afternoon, I’ll go over to the office to do things like this, talk on the telephone, do interviews, have meetings about what’s coming up—stuff like that.

MM: I suppose you don’t experiment with other mediums then—paint, for instance? JEFF: Not since college. MM: When you sit down to write, what are you actually doing? You’re doing thumbnails and sketching out ideas more than coming up with dialogue? JEFF: I might jot down a quick list of four things that I want to have happen, and then I might add one of those ideas from my notebook. “Oh, that’s a neat moment. I want to get that in there.” I write down how I want to begin and how I want to end, and then I write an outline

MM: How much of your day is actually spent at the drawing board? JEFF: I’d say a good three hours most days, until it gets into the deadline period, then it could be 20 hours a day for a week or two at a stretch. MM: Ideas can come to you at any given time. Do you carry a notebook or sketchbook around with you? JEFF: Yeah, I do. I carry a little notebook in my back pocket, so if I have an idea or think of something funny or interesting I can work with, I can jot it down. I didn’t used to. In fact, just the opposite. In the early days of working on Bone, I believed that if I had an idea, if it was good enough then I would remember it the next day. And that worked for years and years, but now I don’t remember things that I know are good ideas. I have to wear glasses when I draw now, too. MM: Do you draw outside of work? Will you draw something just for fun? JEFF: No, not really—not since I started the comic books. I look at other artists who have these fantastic notebooks, and they’re just filled with wonderful drawings of places they’ve been 79

with a guestimate of how many pages each thing will take. Then I’ll start working out the comic on 8-1/2" x 11" sheets of paper, writing and drawing at the same time.

MM: Since you work with the collection in mind more than many creators, do you worry much if an individual issue doesn’t have a big cliffhanger at the end?

MM: At this stage are you just doing gesture drawings, or are you drawing more detailed images than that?

JEFF: Usually that’s part of the overall plan. I do worry if there’s a cliffhanger or not. I think that’s an intrinsic and enjoyable part of our little artform of comic books. I tried during Bone to keep in mind that it was all going to be together in the end, but, of course, that was a fairly novel approach at the time. Only Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim were thinking that way while they were doing their books. But I always try to have a cliffhanger, because I really want you to come back. That’s a tried and true convention of comic strips and comic books. You’ve got to come back. And I like that; that’s a fun element for me. But I don’t want to overdo it, because I think it can get a little trite after a while.

JEFF: Just gesture drawings. It’s almost not enough for anyone but me to understand. I write and draw almost simultaneously. It’s enough that if somebody really looked at it they could follow it. MM: Are you worried about composition at all at this stage, or just the broad action? JEFF: I move organically as I write. I can see the scene and the picture as I’m going, and that’s what I’m drawing. I’m trying to lock in what I can see in terms of the composition—where someone is standing, what their expression is. I want enough of a drawing that I can tell those things, and then I write out the dialogue.

MM: Do you prefer to finish the writing of an issue before you start drawing on the boards?

MM: Do you look at composition more in terms of individual panels or whole pages?

JEFF: It depends. That’s more often the case with RASL than it was with Bone. RASL is a much scarier process for me. I know where the story ends, and I kind of have the third act mapped out, but see, that’s exactly it, Eric. I think I have something mapped out, and when I get there [laughs] it’s never what I think. Even within an issue, I’ll think this is what I’m doing. Then I start writing it and I’m like, “Oh, my God. Where is—? What? Oh, no.” There is physics and consequences and parallel universe paradoxes. Holy crap! [laughter] So RASL has been a much more fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants than Bone was— even though it’s planned.

JEFF: I’m doing both at the same time. Sometimes I work straight ahead, but sometimes I’ll work on a couple of scenes out of order knowing I have, say, a page and a half to get this idea across. I have a limited amount of panels to convey this idea, so I’ll have to work a little harder to edit the idea and make sure it’s clean. MM: But for the most part you work from the beginning of an issue straight through to the end. JEFF: Pretty much, because I want the comic to read as if it’s happening in front of the reader. I want the reader to experience everything as the character experiences it. If there are surprises, I want it to appear on the page as I’m writing it. That way I don’t forget to have my characters react to it.

MM: Once you’ve finished the writing, you’ve also got a layout. Do you lightbox those layouts or are they just a reference for you? 80

JEFF: Once I have the pages done—and, again, they’re just rough, sketched comics—I enlarge them a couple of times on the copier until they’re 10" x 15"—the size I draw at. I have a light table, and I’ll quickly trace off those fast suggestions of compositions. It doesn’t take any time at all, maybe five minutes a page, to do. Now I have my panels set up, and I just have to clean them up and draw. The tracings give me an idea of where to start, and it works out pretty well. That fast, get-it-down shape of a gesture drawing really conveys a lot of energy and emotion. What I’m doing when I’m enlarging my tiny, fast scripts is I’m saving that energy. In the early issues I would try to painstakingly recapture that energy I could feel in my script, but I’d draw it and it would feel stiff. That’s when I started tracing them up, and now a lot of that emotion and energy stays on the page.

MM: I assume then that you are doing most of your actual drawing in the inks and that you don’t tighten up your pencils. JEFF: Yeah, that’s one of the luxuries of inking yourself, I suppose. MM: As you pencil over these loose gesture drawings, do you make many changes? JEFF: I have to make changes; things are not always in proportion, and sometimes they’re a little too cartoony, especially for RASL. I have to sit there and draw a real drawing on top, but it still has the flavor and energy. You can control it, you just have to do some construction around it. That’s a fun part of the job. I enjoy that quite a bit. MM: Do you have to warm up before you start penciling? 81

Previous Page and Above: Thumbnails, pencils, and partial inks for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #4, page 41. As you can see, Jeff’s pencils are fairly loose, and he pastes in the lettering before he begins inking. When inking, he starts with the faces, where most of the acting is shown, and goes from there. Captain Marvel and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

actually start drawing them, they’ll slow down, because your eye has more to look at. But I still want them to read fast, so I have to make adjustments. That’s why I think comics that are written and drawn by the same person are more fun to read or are better, because that same vision is in control from start to finish.

JEFF: I’ve seen that recently popping up in places. I don’t know if people have always done that. Somebody did that huge drawing of Galactus. Apparently he just did a little bit every day just to warm up. That is awesome! What a terrific idea. I know Paul Pope does warm-up drawings, and they are delightful. One was Kamandi on top of Klik-Klak, the giant grasshopper. Man, I loved that. But, no, as I said earlier everything I draw goes into a book. My warm-up drawing is picking a drawing that’s already started that I like—one of the drawings I can’t wait to draw. I’ll pick one of those and take my time with it to get going.

MM: I know you used some photo reference for Bone— trees and rock formations and such. Are you using much with RASL? JEFF: Tons. I don’t even know how I did Bone before Google Image. [laughter] How did anybody do a comic before Google Image? When I went out to the desert, I took a lot of my own reference photos. I have a lot of photos of rocks and cactus and stuff. And I have tons of photo reference for jeeps; Rasl likes to drive a jeep. And downtown Tuscon—I took a lot of photos driving around there, and I use that a lot.

MM: Will you pencil an entire issue before starting to ink, or do you like to go back and forth between the penciling and the inking? JEFF: Sometimes I’ll just lay all 22 pages out on the floor. If you picture that in your mind and move forward like you’re watching a time-lapse camera, you’d see a little bit happening on all 22 pages. All the faces would be penciled, then all the faces would be inked. I slowly build the whole thing up at the same time. That way I can do some last-minute writing. I can see if everything is still working. Because things change as I solidify the comic. Scenes you thought would go fast, once you

MM: How do you incorporate the photo reference? Do you study a picture and then draw from memory? JEFF: With most of it I look at it as I try to draw it. With the Tesla segment, which was very intense, I would actually find the photo I wanted of Thomas Edison, print it out, put it upside down on a light table, 82

and draw Edison on the back of the photograph. I would change the expression, too. Like, if I wanted him to look jealous, I would furrow his brow and change the shadows. Then I would trace that onto the board, or scan it and transfer it to the board, and do the final drawing.

the building anymore. In the early days of Bone, I drew the comic, packed up the boards in a FedEx box, and shipped them off to the printer. I did that all the way up until the eighth volume. That was the last time I had to rush to get to the FedEx box before nine o’clock. After that FTP came in.

MM: Do you use a computer much during your process?

MM: As you scan in the artwork for pagination, do you do any touch-up work on the computer?

JEFF: Most of my drawings are pretty old school drawings: Two-ply Bristol, light blue pencil, and India ink with a brush. But if I didn’t have a computer, I could not do what I do. It is so much a part of publishing, communication, Google Image.

JEFF: A little bit, yeah. Actually, a lot.

MM: Do you like the new Google Image set-up? JEFF: It’s weird. I’m not quite used to it yet. In some ways I like it. It’s a lot faster. I haven’t used it enough yet. But so much of publishing is done on the computer. Creation of the covers is all done in Quark. I do the original artwork— there’s still a piece of paper somewhere— but it comes to life on the computer. And my original artwork doesn’t leave

Previous Page: Before starting RASL, Jeff went to Arizona to gather lots of photo reference of Tuscon and the desert surrounding it. Below: Jeff’s pencils and the finished inks for the cover of RASL #8. RASL ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: What else do you do in your process? Once you’ve compiled all the finished pages, do you go back through everything again?

MM: Is it mostly just erasing stray marks, or are you doing some drawing as well? JEFF: Usually I’ll be changing word balloons. That’s the main thing. Occasionally there will be an eyeball I just couldn’t get right, like the pupil won’t be in the right spot. If you fix that on the page you have to white it out and then ink over the white-out, and it’s hard. But with the computer I can just grab Steve and say, “Move that pupil just a bit to the left.” Above: This photo of Jeff and Vijaya with an overlay of much of the cast of Bone appeared in Ohio State University’s alumni magazine in 2001. Next Page: Cover art for Bone #3. Bone and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: Are you still lettering on the board or do you have a computer font?

JEFF: There’s a process of getting the book done, which involves the outline and structure and actual drawing of the comic, which usually ends up in a horrific twoweek session of almost all-nighters, which is a nightmare. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, and I cannot seem to teach myself how to do it on time. But then the book is handed over to Cartoon Books, where Vijaya takes over. She and Steve and Tom Gaadt scan everything and lay them into the Quark documents and get it to the printer. The cover is always done months ahead of time in order to get it into the catalog. And Kathleen is sweating it out the whole time wondering if I’m going to get done on time. MM: Do you have time to read much these days? JEFF: Oh, yeah. I’m a voracious reader. I love books, but I mostly read non-fiction now. Right now I have three or four books on Indian mythology, science, and Tesla all around my desk. But when I was a kid I loved fiction. I read everything from Doc Savage and Tarzan to The Iliad and The Odyssey and Moby-Dick.

JEFF: I’ve been using a computer font since ’92. It’s based on my own lettering, though. I’m not putting anyone out of a job except me. [laughter]

MM: Have you ever thought about writing prose—maybe something you could do illustrations with?

MM: But you’re still hand-drawing the word balloons?

JEFF: It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not a writer. I’m a cartoonist. This little adventure with Tom is about as far as I’m going to go in that direction.

JEFF: Oh, yeah. I paste the lettering down first, so I know how much of the panel it gobbles up. Then I finish the drawings around them. I have a pretty good idea of how much room they’ll take up when I write my script, having done it for so many years. MM: So you’re actually pasting a print out of the text onto the board, rather than doing it digitally after scanning in the finished artwork. JEFF: Pretty much everyone else does it digitally, but for some reason I can’t do that. 84

MM: Do you have ideas for the next series? JEFF: Of course. There are little ideas dripping off the top of my skull into the pool of my subconscious. I’m already starting to figure out what the next project will be. I figure RASL will take about two more years. The characters for the next book are starting to appear in my head and I’m starting to make some decisions.

Jeff Smith

Art Gallery

Previous Page and Below: Illustrations done for The Complete Bone Adventures Vol. 1. These images appeared between the first and second issues and served to show the passage of time in the story. Bone and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Previous Page and Below: Artwork for various Cartoon Books Christmas cards throughout the years. Next Two Pages: Script/rough layouts and final inks for Bone #1, page 1 and Wizard Presents Bone #13-1/2, page 1, along with illustrations from The Complete Bone Adventures Vol. 2. Bone and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Below: Early sketch of Billy Batson and Mary Marvel. Next Page: Cover pencils for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #2. Captain Marvel and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

Above and Right: Jeff’s script/layouts for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #2, pages 13 and 18. Next Page: Cover sketch for Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #3. Captain Marvel and all related characters ™ and © DC Comics.

Page 98: Cover art for Bone #13. Color by David Reed. Page 99: Cover art for Bone #20. Color by David Reed

Below: Cover art for Fantagraphic’s Walt Kelly’s Our Gang, Vol. 3. Page 97: Cover art for the first edition of the Bone: One Volume trade paperback. Color by Steve Hamaker.

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Previous Page and Above: Concept art boards made during the production of the abandoned Bone animated film. Right: Mock movie poster for the Bone animated film. Page 102-103: Cover art for the first two volumes of Walt Kelly’s Our Gang, which collects the stories written and drawn by Walt Kelly for the Our Gang comic during the early to mid-1940s. Our Gang was originally a series of theatrical shorts, but these days it is best known by its television moniker, The Little Rascals. Color by Steve Hamaker. Page 104: Artwork for the Bone: Quest for the Spark novel. Page 105: Pin-up art which appeared in Sin City: That Yellow Bastard #3. Page 106: Pencils for the cover of the Scholastic edition of Treasure Hunters, the eighth volume of Bone. Page 107: Pencils with lettering for the opening page of Bone: Tall Tales. Smiley and Bartleby appear in a framing sequence throughout the book. Pages 108-109: Pencils for Little Mouse Gets Ready. Bone, Little Mouse, and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith. Marv, Sin City ™ and © Frank Miller.

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Previous Page and Below: Early design sketches of Rasl tended towards more of a manga look and feel. RASL ™ and © Jeff Smith.

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Left: Cover art for RASL #2. Below: Pencils for the final page of RASL #7. Next Page: Cover art for RASL #3. Pages 114-115: For the cover of RASL #4, Jeff sketched four different layouts before settling on the final image. Page 116: Pencils for page 1 of RASL #5. Page 117: Frontis piece from RASL: The Fire of St. George, the second collection of the series. RASL and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

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COMICS’ FAST & FURIOUS ARTIST

THE ART OF GLAMOUR

Shines a light on the life and career of the artistic and publishing visionary of DC Comics!

Explores the life and career of one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable and dependable artists!

Biography of the talented master of 1940s “Good Girl” art, complete with color story reprints!

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(176-page trade paperback with COLOR) $26.95

(192-page hardcover with COLOR) $39.95

QUALITY COMPANION

BATCAVE COMPANION

FLASH COMPANION

The first dedicated book about the Golden Age publisher that spawned the modern-day “Freedom Fighters”, Plastic Man, and the Blackhawks!

Unlocks the secrets of Batman’s Silver and Bronze Ages, following the Dark Knight’s progression from 1960s camp to 1970s creature of the night!

Details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics' "Fastest Man Alive"!

(256-page trade paperback with COLOR) $31.95

(240-page trade paperback) $26.95

(224-page trade paperback) $26.95

(280-page trade paperback) $34.95

MARVEL COMICS

AGE OF TV HEROES

EXTRAORDINARY WORKS OF ALAN MOORE: INDISPENSABLE EDITION

HOW TO CREATE COMICS

Covers how Stan Lee went from writer to publisher, Jack Kirby left (and returned), Roy Thomas rose as editor, and a new wave of writers and artists came in!

Examining the history of the live-action television adventures of everyone’s favorite comic book heroes, featuring the in-depth stories of the shows’ actors and behind-the-scenes players!

Definitive biography of the Watchmen writer, in a new, expanded edition!

(224-page trade paperback) $27.95

(192-page full-color hardcover) $39.95

Shows step-by-step how to develop a new comic, from script and art, to printing and distribution!

(240-page trade paperback) $29.95

(108-page trade paperback) $15.95

IN THE 1970s

IMAGE COMICS

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE An unprecedented look at the company that sold comics in the millions, and their celebrity artists!

FROM SCRIPT TO PRINT

FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows. Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

JEFF SMITH At the age of five, Jeff Smith dreamt up a cute, little character he eventually named Fone Bone. More than two decades later, Bone became an “overnight” sensation, rocketing Smith to a level few independent cartoonists achieve. Published world-wide and the winner of countless awards, Bone would seemingly be a career unto itself, but Jeff Smith isn’t one to rest on his laurels. DC’s Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil and his newest creator-owned series, RASL, show him to be a creator full of ideas to match his talent as a writer and artist. Talent that makes him a Modern Master! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1605490243 ISBN-10: 1605490245

$15.95

51595

In The US ISBN

978-1-60549-024-3

9 781605 490243