“Bone” is easily my favorite comic book. The high fantasy cartoon saga is expertly told, honestly hilarious, truly terrifying, and at times heart wrenching. Therefore, I was particularly elated when Jeff Smith announced a sequel, “Bone: Coda,” to be published this July. I reached out to speak with him over the phone, and we talked about the changing landscape of comics, audiences, storytelling, and more.
This July marks the 25th anniversary of the debut of “Bone”. I never read it in magazines, but I do remember reading some of the shorts in Disney Adventures. When I found the whole one volume edition years later, I was like, “What?! There’s so much more to this!”
Jeff Smith: That’s great. I remember finding an early collection of “Pogo” comics by Walt Kelly in 1967 and I’d never seen such a thick, fat, wonderful book of comics in my life. I thought, “This, this is it.”
So you’re taking us back to the world of the Bones with “Bone: Coda” this July. What can you tell us about the book so far?
JS: Well the book itself is going to be about 120 pages long. It’ll start with this 32-page new comic, a story that takes up right where the “Bone” saga left off: so we see the Bones in their little rickety cow cart with Bartleby in tow trying to get across the desert. And then the rest of the book will be two things: one is the ‘Bone Companion’, by Stephen Weiner. He’s a comics historian and librarian, who’s co-written other books like the Will Eisner Companion and the Hellboy Companion. He published it online originally and he didn’t write it for me or while talking to me so it’s an independent kind of thing, an independent look at the world of “Bone”, the art of the comic, and stuff like that. But it wasn’t illustrated, so we’re going to put it in the book and fully illustrate it with all sorts of comics and whatnot. I think that will be fun with all the pictures. It should be a fun way to look at the comic.
The last part will be basically like a big thank you from me to the readers, the comic book shop owners, and the whole comics community about just how grateful I am that they were open to such a strange little book like this.
Right, because “Bone” was instrumental in the changing of the comics scene in the ’90s. Now that you have “Bone: Coda” coming out in this more graphic novel format and you originally published your current ongoing, “Tüki Save the Humans”, online, what kind of differences have you seen between the Bones’ initial appearance and now?
JS: Oh my goodness. Comics have changed so much. Let’s go back in time. Back — back — before superhero blockbuster movies, before manga, before graphic novels, before the Internet. Back then, comics were really just in comic hobby shops. If you didn’t know about them, you probably wouldn’t even notice them. They were sorta like baseball card shops or cult coin collector shops. The world of comics today is everywhere. You know, you’re part of it, you’re part of the Internet. There’s a crazy nerd culture on YouTube with people in front of microphones discussing movies and the latest releases from Marvel or DC. None of that existed back then. Back then the comic shops were a little messier, a little more head shop like.
Oh man! The other night, I showed my boyfriend the old Simpsons cartoon, “Three Men and a Comic Book”, and that was in 1992 or something, and the comic book store was just chaos. Some stores today are still like that.
JS: There are still a few! A lot of them nowadays do look like a place of retail. They’re well lit. And back then it was a really male audience. Just 20, 30, 35 years old guys reading these comics. And I would have to say that was the biggest change I’ve seen in 25 years: there are lots of women reading and creating comics. There were women reading comics back then, but not as many as there could have been, not as many as now. And there’s lots of kids reading comic book all over the world.
Continued belowAnd the community existed in two magazines. one was The Comics Journal, which came out once a month and it kind of represented the literate art comic side, the alternate comics. And the other trade magazine was called Comic Buyer’s Guide and it was a weekly newspaper that covered more of the traditional comics collecting and Marvel/DC dynamic. It was really fun and you had to read those every week because that was the only way you found out about what was going on. They both had letters columns, too and the whole world that we know now of the Internet — with their snarkiness and their arguments about all sorts of topics — that all used to happen in these print magazines back then. There’d be big arguments that would go on for months between two different artists or something, or an artist and a writer, and they would write letters back and forth. It was just like the Internet, except much slower.
I think that was more of what I was trying to get at saying “Bone” changed the face of comics. Not only was it a great story, it also showed a lot of the wider world — especially when you went through Scholastic for the color versions — that kids were definitely picking this up, that comics could still be for kids. And you look at the sales charts now, like the NY Times, and it’s always dominated by you or Raina Telgemeier or Kazu Kibuishi. Graphix really dominates the comics world.
JS: Oh yeah. Raina’s a rockstar when she goes to see groups of kids at schools and stuff.
You’ve mentioned that you never made “Bone” specifically for kids, that it was originally for yourself and your friends, things to entertain you. You had pulled a lot of its lifeblood from Carl Barks and Walt Kelly.
JSL: Well, the other influence on “Bone” was “Heavy Metal”.
Really!
JS: Yeah! Because “Heavy Metal” came out in 1977, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. It was originally this self-published magazine in France that featured Moebius — he was one of the owners and editors, too, I think — and [Enki] Bilal and all these brilliant guys doing grown up fantasy comics with art that was untouchable. Just magnificent. And I saw those early issues of “Heavy Metal” when I was 17 and was like, “Wow. If I could take my love of Carl Barks and Walt Kelly and traditional American cartoon characters and put them in this ‘Heavy Metal’ world, that would be a blast.” I don’t know why I thought anybody else would think it would be a good idea but [laughs], I couldn’t wait to do it. I thought it would be really fun.
For “Bone: Coda”, knowing that you have such a huge younger audience, did that change the way you approached working on “Bone”, or is it more: this is what I like and it’s great you like it too!
JS: It was actually fun doing this story. It came about because I was working on something completely different about a year ago. I sat down to write and suddenly this story came out. I ended up writing this story instead. I didn’t really know what was going to happen even as I was going. I just kept thinking, could I still even draw them? Will their voices come back? It did. It was remarkably easy. It just started happening immediately and these ridiculous things started happening and they were arguing and falling off cliffs and I was home again.
I was originally working on “Tüki Save the Humans”, but that slowed down in the spring, right after Christmas because my arm was starting to be sore and tired and I wanted to give it a rest. At the same time Vijaya [Iyer, Smith’s wife and President of Cartoon Books] and I were going out of town to Key West for two-and-a-half months. Our staff — Kathleen Glosan and Tom Gaadt — came down with us to help set up because we wanted it to be a working vacation. We just wanted to get the hell out of Columbus, Ohio because we were not looking forward to another polar vortex. We started talking about what we were going to do for the 25th anniversary of “Bone” and we came up with some ideas we thought were good. I like to call a handful of retailers who I really like to hear what they have to say and bounce my ideas off them. So I gave them a call and they didn’t like any of them. And I had this story, I told you I wrote it, I didn’t know if I was going to do it or not, which became “Bone: Coda”. When I talked to these handful of retailers and no one was digging any of the other ones, I said, “You know I had this other idea and I don’t know what it’s going to be called but it’ll be a new ‘Bone’ chapter,’ and all the stuff we kinda talked about. That, the retailers said, they could sell a hatful of.
Continued below
You’re drawing “Bone: Coda” for black and white again?
JS: Right.
Is there going to be a color version later?
JS: There could be. If Scholastic wants to publish it in some way, we’ll definitely color it.
“Tüki Save the Humans”, though, was originally drawn for full color…? Do you see any differences in approaching a book in full color versus for black-and-white?
JS: Yeah. I don’t draw it any differently. It could be fine in black-and-white but I wanted to do it in color because it was on the Internet and I thought you’ve got that option there.
I just don’t think that about it very much. I draw it the way I draw it. It’s gotta look good in black-and-white to my eye and color should just sit behind the lineart and fill it out. “RASL” was a piece I thought would be always in black-and-white. Only at the very end, as we were beginning to collect it into the one volume edition, Steve Hamaker said he wanted to color it. He’s like, “I really want to color this,” and I was like, “It was a noir-ish kind of tale. Sci-fi hardboiled story. It works in black-and-white.” He came up with a color palette really at the eleventh hour that just knocked my socks off. It doesn’t detract from the line art in any way and it just brings the right things forward and brought this really rich dark smokiness to the whole story and it was like BOOM! let’s do it. Of course he had to color like 500 pages in three months or something. It was crazy.
I have both the oversized black-and-white versions of “RASL” and the color version as well and I do like how they play differently. Reading the black-and-white was like watching The Maltese Falcon while the color version was like Chinatown to me.
JS: [Laughs] Yeah, okay. I’ll take it. Those are two really good movies.
With “Bone”, I still like the black and white better. In contrast to “RASL”, I think the color hardcover version is way better than the black-and-white. It really filled out the world and just gave it a place and time and depth to it that I was not expecting. And I hope you read the color version because we added a ton of pages to it. Fixed up the story quite well.
I like how you’re always pushing the form of the medium. With “Bone,” you made this long sustained epic and there was a lot of old school cartooning, with “RASL,” it was a lot more widescreen and darker. What are the different approaches you take to the story, and what kind of things do you find yourself applying now that you didn’t back in 1991?
JS: My approach to comics storytelling — literal mechanics of any two given panels working together — hasn’t really changed. In the beginning, I had this idea that comics don’t really tell the story quite clearly enough. I always thought there needed to be a slightly more complete version of sequences for a lot of things. Depending on what kind of action’s going on. I’ve stuck to that approach pretty much all the way through “RASL” to “”Tüki Save the Humans”. I did try something different when I went to “Bone: Coda”: it starts off pretty much how you remember because I still like the nine-panel frame. Then, there’s a moment where I open it up and there’s two big giant panels on the page for a big sequence, just to make that different from the rest of it. And that’s not something I probably would have done back then, having experimented with “RASL”, where I was doing a lot of landscape panels and “Tüki Save the Humans”, where I switched back and forth the sizes of panels. It will still look and feel like a “Bone” story.
I do like how “Tüki Save the Humans” reads in the print version too. When you have it held up it’s like a Sunday newspaper page.
JS: Well I was doing it for the web, so I thought I would give it that more letterbox type shape, like the screen on the computer and try to use it. Early on, when I was thinking it through, trying to design it, I was visiting the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum here in Columbus at the OSU [Ohio State University] campus. It happened to have a few Hal Foster “Prince Valiant” pages out, which are huge. I was just looking at them and going, that’s what I want to do. I want to use some big frames and get that epic feel like what I’m looking at right here. They look like Sunday funnies like from when I was a kid.
Continued belowYou’ve moved away from doing “Tüki Save the Humans” on the Internet though?
JS: It’s temporarily on hold.
We were down in Key West and we came up with idea to do the “Bone: Coda”, and that just meant to put a hold on “Tüki Save the Humans”. But the whole time I’ve been thinking about Tüki. Most of my influence for it comes from my own love of paleontology and the history of human evolution. I’ve followed that stuff for years. And I’ve been showing it around. Like all my stories, I write the ending first and I like this ending. But as I was doing it on the web I was starting to fall in love with these characters and really like them. All the sudden I realized what the story was. I go, “Oh, I thought I knew what the story was, but now I know what the story is.” As long as it’s on hold I have the chance to rethink it and give it a relaunch. I’m hoping to do that in December or early next year.
What kind of motifs and themes do you notice yourself coming back to in your work?
JS: Probably themes of loyalty and friendship. Those are big. There’s almost always some unseeable force, a world that we cannot see that’s always in action. In “Bone”, it’s the Dreaming; “RASL” parallel universes and physics. And in “Tüki Save the Humans”, it’s the spirit world. And we’ll find out how real that is or not.
In “Shazam,” it must have been the DC editorial board. Anyway, what was your reaction when “Bone” was announced as one of the most challenged books in schools and libraries a couple years back? With all those themes, it’s pretty obvious why kids have claimed it.
JS: I’m not quite sure why “Bone” was challenged. I’m not privvy to what specific complaints people would have. In order to get on the radar on the American Library Association so they know a book has been challenged or banned, a written complaint has to be made first and then a library board or school administrator or parent is whose behind it. They just report that somebody complained there was, I dunno, beer, alcohol, tabacco–
Political influence….
JS: I can’t remember what they all were. It got banned because somebody said it was racist. I’m not quite sure what it was. Part of it is “Bone” was a book that’s in every school library and every kid brings it home, so it’s something people see. I think the nature of comics lends itself to being glanced at across the room and taken out of context. You see something and not really understand it or get what’s happening. And again, being one of the first books to be in so many kids’ hands, I just got a little extra scrutiny. I can’t honestly see anything in there that’s that bad.
