For a time, Jeff Smith’s comics masterpiece Bone was only available in a hefty collected edition numbering a staggering 1,360 pages, and when I started college 17 years ago, every friend, colleague, and professor in my major—not to mention related art majors adjacent to comics—had their own personal copy. For many, Bone was a glorious discovery they tried to convince their less comics-inclined high school friends to pick up before finding themselves in the midst of likeminded art nerds in college and learning that the series was nothing short of a movement: first within the comics world, then even across mainstream readerships.
Upon its 2010 release, Scholastic’s collected edition of Bone was held aloft as a work of staggering patience and a testament to its creator’s mastery of the craft and unwavering discipline. But before Bone, there was Thorn—the “precocious college comic strip” that Smith penned for the Ohio State University paper the Lantern, per PW’s starred review of a new complete collection from Cartoon Books comprising those strips: Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982–1986, and Other Early Drawings. We spoke with Smith about how Thorn led to Bone and how his comics classic found a home at Scholastic, got him to share some excerpts from the new book, and more.
My first experience of Bone was not even reading it, but finding it on every shelf I saw in art school. Every professor, every student, colleague, friend—everybody had a copy of it. I saw it in everybody else's hands, and I was like, Well, I must obviously be missing something. That was 2007. You describe this new book, Thorn, as "proto-Bone." What makes it "proto-Bone" instead of just a prequel? And what can we expect as readers of your characters that we already know so well from Bone?
It's not a prequel because it's not a story that happened before the story of Bone. It was my first attempt at doing a comic with these characters, and I had a lot to learn. At the time, my goal wasn't graphic novels or comic books—the word "graphic novels" didn't even exist yet. In the early 80s, at Ohio State University, I wanted to follow Milton Caniff, who was an OSU graduate and did Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. My two favorite comics of all time were Peanuts and Pogo, and in 1982, I was really hanging onto Doonesbury. Every single book that Garry Trudeau put out I got. I was really in the newspaper comics, so my goal was to just try to do this paper comic strip that was like the ones I just named. Those were the ones that worked for me, and for many other people—they were very popular.
So then I had this run in OSU in the paper, five days a week Monday through Friday, for three years. I wouldn't have thought to put out a collection of the strips. I have to be honest—I didn't really want to put this book out because in my mind, these comics were not good. And I hadn't read them in 40 years, but Bone came out of this strip. There's only five years difference between the two. So I really was able to redo it. My artwork was better, my storytelling was better. Now, Bone is popular and published in 35 languages, and Scholastic launched their graphic novel for young adults, Graphix with Bone. So I didn't feel like I had to prove anything—I thought it was okay now to print these comic strips in a nice volume. I still had to read them. I hadn't read them in 40 years. And I was like "Oh, this is gonna suck."
But then I read them. And I mean, they weren't as good as Bone, but they were way better than I remembered. And this gets back to question about if it’s a prequel or what. I realized that the difference between Thorn the comic strip and Bone the comic book is that the Bone was a novel—it was a fantasy novel that had a beginning and a middle and an end, and it had rules to follow. I don't follow those rules in the comic strip. It was less like a novel and more like a Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour–style variety show where one minute there's a little bit of the story and the next minute there's political satire. There would even be characters climbing out of the strip and sitting on the edge of my desk and talk to me.
How do you think Thorn contributed to your wider work? Not just in Bone, but potentially in other works of yours, like RASL?
I learned how to do comics that were suspenseful. I learned what kind of humor worked. We'd get a reaction in college—there was a lot of people would be like, "Oh, you do that strip. How come? It's not funny." Now that I've read it, I realized that the reason I thought they were terrible is because when I was submitting them to newspaper syndicates to get it into the newspaper, I got awful rejection letters: "This is dumb. This doesn't work. Good luck. Try somewhere else." They convinced me that this was a dumb idea. But I knew it wasn't a dumb idea. I believe in the characters. I believe in the characters more than the comic strip. And so I just decided, “Well that's not the format for me," and I just I cut off all attempts to sell it to the newspapers.
Luckily, almost at the same time, in the weekend magazine section of my hometown college newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, there was a two- or three-page story in full color on a comic book called Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This is 1986. I never saw anything like it. I never saw a newspaper talking about comic book before! I'm looking at the art and it was new, it was different—different styles, a different way of coloring. And I got excited.
So I went and found a comic book store called Monkeys Retreat. At this point I'm 26 years old, and I'm loving this store. This is my store, man. I wanted to find that Batman, and I did, so I got like the first two issues in the four-issue miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. But I also discovered comics that were the continuation of the underground scene. This is the year Maus came out by Art Spiegelman, the same year that Watchmen came out by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. So this in the world of comics was was a thunderclap. It was huge.
I wasn’t giving up on Bones and Thorn—I figured there was something I could do with it. And I just had to just hope that something would turn up and there it was, right in front of me: independent comics. And it wasn't just Dark Knight Returns. It was Love and Rockets. It was Dan Clowes doing Eight-Ball. Charles Burns. The Tick was coming out by Ben Edlund. I was just like, what is happening here? No one knows about this. This is like this is a new golden age of comics, but it's only in comic bookstores. So I found these in '86, and about five years later I launched Bone.
Can you talk a bit about finding a home for Bone at Scholastic?
They're great over at Scholastic! They called us. We had actually flown out a couple years earlier and shown Bone to Scholastic because we were thinking, "This is pretty popular, and we think this could make it to the mainstream." But they didn't know what to do with it. Two years later, they called us and said, “We want to publish it.” And my wife, who is my best friend and my business partner, was like, "Why? We were just there two years ago and you didn't really see it." They said, "The librarians called us all the libraries all over the country are telling us we have to publish this book." So we worked that out with them.
One of the most fun parts of it for me was that Art Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly, who's the art director for the New Yorker, were consulting with Scholastic about helping them start up this new graphic novels for young adults imprint called Graphix. It was their idea. I've heard that Scholastic was already thinking about starting the imprint with Bone, but Art says that he told them that Art Spiegelman told them to start with Bone. In any case, doesn't matter to me, because either way it’s great.
Art called me after we agreed to go with Graphix, and he said, "This is what you got to do is you got to color it." And I said "Color it?! What's it need color for?” At that time, it was already in 11, 12 foreign languages, and it seems pretty popular. So I said, "Why, Art? Maus is a black and white. It's one of my favorite books—it was one of the three books in 1986 that made me want to do comics and graphic novels. Why should Bone be in color?" And his answer was: "You know, Maus is about the war and the Holocaust. It should be in black and white. Bone is about life. And it won't be finished until it's in color."
What are your earliest memories of comics?
My really earliest memories are the Sunday funnies. My dad would read them to me: Peanuts, Scamp, Milton Caniff, Marmaduke—everything! I also remember going with my dad to the barbershop in the '60s to get my hair cut. There were magazines there for all the men, but then there was a pile of comic books. Mostly Our Army at War, starring Sergeant Rock. I fell in love with the art style of the main artist Joe Kubert and his ability to do these drawings that would pull you in and then take you from panel to panel. These panel transitions were magical to me. They worked. A lot of comic books are done by people that should have been doing advertising or something. But there's those ones that really got it.
Was there ever a point where you questioned whether or not you wanted to stay course in art and comics?
No, never. I got a scholarship to Columbus College of Art Design, which is a very good school, but I got no love from any of my professors. My favorite professor taught live drawing with models and stuff, and he says to me, "Why are you taking this class?" I said, "Because I want to draw comics. And it's this really teaching me a lot about how to draw bodies and anatomy." And he was like "Comics! Comics are the bastard child of art and journalism." Basically, without saying it, he was telling me to get out. So I got out, went across town to OSU, where they at least have a newspaper where I can put a comic strip. And that's where we're back to Thorn!
Was there someone in particular who was really encouraging about the whole process?
I had a lot of good teachers, but the one person that really became my mentor, actually for life, was the librarian in charge of the cartoon research library [at OSU], Lucy Shelton Caswell. When Milton Caniff donated his papers and a bunch of his artwork, nobody really knew what to do with it. And Lucy Shelton Caswell was the one who said, "I think this actually is an art form. It's literature, and it's art, and I think that I can make a library out of that." And nobody else wanted to, so they gave it to her, and she has built it up. At that point, she was already making waves in the world of cartooning and knew tons of stuff about comics. That same library that grew and expanded over the next 25 years and became the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. It is astonishing.
Much later, when I was doing doing the Bone comics, I met Charles Shultz; he was really kind to me. He got that I got him. And I was very good friends with Will Eisner; I feel like I'm very good friends with Art Spiegelman in Françoise Mouly. I love comics. I love the people in comics, and I got a lot of help from.
