Bone creator Jeff Smith reflects on his comic’s legacy and Netflix show

To describe Bone, Jeff Smith’s 55-issue comic series published between 1991 and 2004, as a fantasy series is technically correct, but far from complete.

This dragon-laden story is high fantasy. It’s less Western knights with swords tale, and more Ghibli-esque tale of young girls who have strange destiny and encounter dark creatures in woods. It’s also a comedy adventure in the tradition of Carl Barks’ duck comics, with drinking and gambling thrown in. It’s also a little bit of a talking animal book?

BoneHe defied all classifications, but he was able to hold firm on to success even in countries where American comics were not as successful. Although Smith didn’t intend the comic to be purely kids’ fare, Bone saw its first “overnight” popularity from republication in Disney Adventures magazine through the late ’90s. In 2005, just as Smith had finally put out the story’s conclusion, BoneScholastic was the undisputed king of school book fairs and the original supernova in the YA graphic novels boom. Scholastic published the color version of his novel.

This comic is now adaptable to screen. But when he started out, Smith says, he just wanted to get his work to a place where it was always in print and available — not something that came easy in the world of American comics until, well, Bone The result was shown by the group of comic books that were self-published and wildly imaginative.

To celebrate Bone’s 30th anniversary, Polygon sat down with Smith to talk about his comic’s legacy; his newest book, Tuki: Fight For FireThe rise of comics from back issues to book fairs.

The 30th anniversary of the original issue marks this year. BoneIt was released. Do you feel that it was yesterday, or one million years ago?

Smith: Maybe it doesn’t feel like yesterday, but it doesn’t feel like 30 years. It’s hard to believe that it was all so long. My board was my only tool. I was drawing. The time flew by so fast.

So low were my expectations. Bone. Just hoping to be able enough to afford rent, groceries and other necessities. And it just immediately — well, not immediately, it took a couple of years. But when it started to take off, it moved quite quickly — and I suddenly found myself doing all sorts of things I didn’t expect to, like making t-shirts and pins and lunch boxes. Statues. Signings. Special stories to be published in Wizard magazine as well as Disney Adventures.

I planned to bring up Disney Adventures — you must be accustomed to grown adults telling you that they were very young when they first read Bone. This was my first ever experience with panels. BoneI was looking through Disney Adventures magazine at the check-out aisle in my grocery store.

It was in fact one of my favorite things. [one of the]The best luck I ever had was in my early years. Then, all of a sudden: BoneIt was almost as if a light switch had turned on and it took off. The moment I stepped on the stage, everyone wanted to chat with me. Marv Wolfman was the comics editor for Disney Adventures digest. Heidi MacDonald was also involved. I ran into them at one of the comic book shows up in California, and they were like, “Hey, we want you to do an original eight-page [Bone] story just for Disney.” I was like, “OK, cool.”

So I did that and then they went, “It got a great reaction, now we want to serialize …” I don’t know, the first six issues, “and we’re going to break them up into eight page chunks.” I had to make new pages to start the story up again in the middle and carry it on.

It was around 200,000, I believe. But then? [Disney Adventures]Had a readership in excess of 6 millions. It happened all at once. BoneIt was the comic with the highest number of comics read. That was quite a feat. Most people I talk to, that’s where they saw it the first time.

We’re talking about the 30th anniversary of the first issue of Bone in 1991, but you spent over a decade making it.

I was very interested in it, and worked hard on it. BoneI was involved in its promotion and continued on the road for 13 years. After that I felt done. Scholastic called while I was finishing the last few issues. The wanted to create a graphic novel imprint specifically for young adults. They also wanted it to be launched with. Bone. To make the book different than my black-and white self-published books over all these years, we were going to color it.

Well, suddenly, I’m not moving on from Bone. BoneAll of it starts all over again. It took us about five years to color the whole series and all of a sudden I have a new audience of young kids and I’m going to schools, giving talks. It’s almost like now Bone This is a trend that will not be lost. There’s a new generation in the schools that pick up on it all the time and I feel incredibly lucky. This was definitely not something I had in my plans.

The arc of my life is similar to the one in that comic. The comic was found in a college library, just as Scholastic began publishing colorized books. There are now images of BoneThese images and panels are forever etched in my head. Are there images and panels you just keep writing on your mind? Or is it all just “work that you did”?

No, no. In fact, many of the scenes or moments found in the book had an origin from a drawing I was inspired to create. The Dragon Slayer story was an idea I had. I knew I wanted to do this ridiculous thing where they took a little tiny tree and put like a — what would be the kind of trap you would make for like, a squirrel or something, with a giant rope?

The wall was four feet high. I knew that I wanted to do that, so with certain images, I work backwards and figure out “How do I get to draw that really ridiculous but funny visual that I really want to have?” There are many things like that — like Rock Jaw. The early stuff, like snow falling in one giant blanket. This was something I wanted to do for a long time.

My favorite memory in BoneThis page contains more than 1 000 words: Fone Bone, wandering around the canyon with no dialogue. It’s him in different spots; he’s on top of a very skinny rock and he was leaning down. Like, What is the secret to his success? And in the next panel, he’s somewhere completely different. This page conveys so much in so few words. You’ve said Carl Barks and Disney-style humor are a huge influence, but what else do you feel has taught you to make comics? Because that’s the thing about Bone, people talk about it as a great fantasy comic but it’s also just a great example of comics as a form.

Thank you. You are right. I can bring inspiration from many places. Monty PythonFrom movies, TV shows. And I think the, the page you’re talking about, if we could just focus on that, is sort of like a montage from a movie. I’ve got to show that he’s really going far and into strange places that are weird, and showing him sweating and sitting in the shade of a rock. But then a minute later, he’s finding himself up on that little pointy pinnacle, looking down. So it’s like a montage and I guess that’s not that usual in comics, but it’s very usual in film.

Another thing from film that I got was getting rid of those little “Meanwhile...” boxes. When you cut to a new scene in a comic book, it’s always been very traditional to say, “Meanwhile, at Commissioner Gordon’s,” but in a movie, you wouldn’t do that. You’d just cut to Commissioner Gordon’s office, and you’d just be there, and as an audience, you know what’s going on. You’re in Commissioner Gordon’s office now. I thought I don’t need those little exposition boxes to let people know where they are. These people are visually hip enough to just know how we’ve, basically like in a movie, cut to new scene.

As long as we’re talking about movies, let’s talk about the Bone Netflix series. Which Netflix shows are the best?

It’s a lot better than the previous ones. You know, Paramount and Nickelodeon was our first ever deal. Bone and that was in 1998 — so we’re talking 23 years or something of “not making a movie” with different studios and it’s been just awful. Absolutely terrible.

Warner Brothers had an especially bad experience. When those rights finally reverted back to us — I say “us” because Vijaya is my wife and my business partner — we didn’t want to even tell anybody that we had the rights back. We were like “I don’t care about this. I never want to talk to a studio executive again.” But of course, it only took like a day before we started getting calls from streaming services and stuff, but it was Netflix that understood it and knew what it was.

Here’s basically the problem I had with the studios. It really wasn’t a personal problem. Although all the studios wanted to create a great movie, they were stubborn. It would only be, “They’re going to do the whole movie, in an hour and a half.” A kids’ animated film. All 13 hundred pages and 50 pages of the book. Or whatever else it might be.

I was like, “You can’t do that. Let’s just make the first part of it and then we’ll make it seem like it ends, but then we can make a sequel and we could keep the story going.” And nobody would do that. It was impossible to do the entire thing in one movie, which would have been a waste of 23 years.

Netflix. Scholastic, I thought. Scholastic knew exactly how to manage it. They were aware. “We’re going to treat it like it’s a real book, not stick it up on the Dungeons & DragonsYou can also buy magazines and similar items. We’re going to put it on the bookshelves with kids books, right next to Harry Potter.” Same thing with Netflix.

They’re like, “We’ll do it as an animated serial. We’ll follow the book and it’ll unfold in much the same way that it did in the chapters of the comics.” So I was like, “Well, all right. I guess you do kind of get it.” We’re in the writing process. I will never allow myself to believe it’s really going to happen until it’s actually on TV [laughs]. I’ve been through it too much. So I can’t just say, “Yeah, it’s going to happen.” But it is going to happen. I’m pretty sure this time.

As I was flipping through the books again, I was reminded of the “stupid, stupid Rat Creatures moment.” That seems tough to translate one-to-one to animation because you have to show them actually leaping. It’s funny because there’s a panel break and then they’re there.

Yeah, I wonder how we’re going to figure [that] out. Maybe there’s a way to block it, so you’re close in on Fone Bone when he says “stupid, stupid Rat Creatures,” and then you pull out and they’re already on the branch.

Popeye’s original creator, in the 1930s, inspired the timing of that gag. Thimble Theater Popeye. He was hilarious in his timing. It’s hard to not like the cartoons with Olive Oyl and Bluto at all. He was a rough seadog, a dockrat and would then punch someone so quickly. He should have pulled his arm back, or been swinging towards him in the last panel. But instead, he’s already punched the guy and his teeth are flying. It was hilariously funny because the timing was perfect and it happened so fast. That’s the kind of thing I was going for with that. Don’t waste time watching them jump. You must get them there.

Bone holds a very important place both in the history of self-published comics in the 1990s and also in the YA graphic novel boom of the ’00s. Is it a feeling that you’re constantly searching for ways to publish comics in new formats? Are there cases, such as Scholastic, where you are just right at the right moment to accept the opportunity?

They are both huge and massive, with immense amounts of each. Vijaya, Vijaya, and I always tried to increase our audiences. Once BoneWe felt that it had legs. OK, we’re going to for this, and she actually left her job and became my full time partner and took over all the calls — as she points out, it’s all the unfun stuff, doing legal stuff and tracking the publishing and shipping and distribution — and I focused on the comic and publicizing it. We always felt that there was a missing audience. We felt like there’s an audience beyond the comic book collector. In 1991 when I began, which was 30 years ago now, there weren’t many comic book readers. There were a few kids and women who read comics at that time, but it wasn’t very many. At the time, it was mostly men my age. We could double our readership if we were able to get comics read by women.

Many of us thought that way. Scott McCloud, Neil Gaiman. All of us were thinking. Oh, how wonderful it would be to expand our market!. We were the second generation underground comics. This led to us wanting graphic novels from the comic books stores. We weren’t making rebellious comics. We did drugs and sex just to be able. It was evident that the first generation knew this.

We were all just trying to tell our stories. We were more like authors telling stories about the characters and situations that we owned, but we didn’t want our comics to go into long boxes and never be seen again. These comics should be easily accessible, just like books. That was a big movement in the early to mid ’90s to get comic book stores to stock and restock the graphic novels, and it was a huge struggle. There was so much pushback because that’s the model for a comic book store; you sell the new comics and then you have back issues, which usually increase in value and are a little more profitable. We kept insisting. Yeah, you can make a couple bucks, but if you sell a $12 graphic novel, you’re going to make five bucks every time. It’s not just one dollar or whatever you’re getting.

It was a success that we were able to get retailers to stock graphic novels. In 1998, I was aware that some libraries carried graphic novels. BoneThere were school libraries as well as regular libraries. This was because some librarians were comic book geeks. Moles were out there. For the next two-years, I’d meet comic book show librarians who would share their knowledge. This is the first book we’ve been able to put on the shelf since Maus. And I’m sure that was a bit of an exaggeration, I know there are other books, but in quick succession a couple things happened. Chris Ware was probably the one who did it, and I’m glad he said so. Acme Novelty Library. His book, however, was an important moment in the normalization of comics for libraries and bookstores. The American Library Association hosted a graphic novel day in 2000. [Art]Spiegelman, Neil and Colleen Doran. Then, a few librarians spoke with the librarians.

It was a morning when we all were huddled together. We’re going Okay, now is the time to persuade librarians that we are capable of doing this.. [To convince them] that this is reading because, there were still people — there are still people even now, right? — who still think that [comics are]It’s not reading. That it’s some kind of lazy reading.

But we got up there and started talking and we didn’t have to convince the librarians of anything. The librarians knew that it was reading. The librarians were telling them that there were fewer activities or check outs on every shelf. Graphic novels were the exception. So we weren’t there to convince them. They just wanted to know what’s going on. Do we plan to create more books? What are the best ways to make graphic novels more popular? That was the tipping point. It was the tipping point.

The shift from comics being disposable to comics always being available is something that I am very conscious of. It was not that long ago, nearly nothing was collected. You had to search actual back issues to discover what happened. It makes me feel like I’m going As a child, it was 15 miles to get comics from the Nonfiction Section next to How to Draw.

I’ll walk to school both ways up hill for you. When I was a kid riding my Sting-Ray bike around, we used to have to go to a drugstore and they’d have a spinner rack. You wanted the next Neal Adams Batman issue, but it didn’t come up. Two issues in a row might not show up and then you’d get one. It was really crazy to be a collector back in those days. Your bike was your best friend as you rode all around town looking for the Uncle Scrooge tale by Carl Barks.

Let’s talk a little bit about TukiYour two-volume series, titled ‘The Peleolithic Age. This comic started as a Webcomic. After revamping it, you funded the Kickstarter campaign to publish a revised print version. You published BoneYou can now publish your company through Image after you’ve used it for a few months. You want to launch a Kickstarter.

For a number of reasons. It just has always turned out — in fact, my wife Vijaya says this — Nobody will publish your stuff. You have to publish it yourself first. We attempted to sell BoneWe tried to sell it to newspaper syndicates, and everyone looked at it as a comic book. What? Is there a difference between cartoon and human characters?We just made that public. That worked well. Then we did RASL [Smith’s first post-Bone work, RASL was a hard-boiled scifi yarn that followed an art thief who could hop between parallel earths]. It’s true, Scholastic was a wonderful friend of mine. But, that book wasn’t Scholastic.

Image by Jeff Smith and Tom Gaadt, Carton Books

I got the same type of feedback from Tuki. So first I did the webcomic, and then I tried to collect the webcomic comic books, and it just didn’t go over very well. That’s what I did. Okay. There’s some things I know I need to redo here.

Especially, all of a sudden, there’s these kids that come into the story, these three lost children, and they just throw their lot in with Tuki and I realized, Oh. You can read this book.. This book is about my family, and I have to start from scratch.. So I set it aside, and I’ve worked on it ever since then, but I’ve been distracted by things and it finally just came together.

So really it’s not the same book. The webcomic had two key moments that I retained. One is where Tuki fights a giant god. That scene was kept, and then I added a few more. But basically, it’s brand new. It went from maybe 60 pages that I’d put up on the web, let’s see, almost 250 pages. Actually, I had enough material to create two graphic novels. That’s what I did. I actually drew them out during 2020, I didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do, so I actually put together two separate books. I finished the first one and I’ve 90 percent finished the second one.

And then I was just going to self publish them — I guess my answer is starting to feel really long to me — but I was about to self publish it, and I happened to talk to some guys I knew from back in the self publishing days, Billy Tucci and his wife, Deborah, and Francisca Pulido and Brian Pulido, who, they do Lady DeathAnd [Billy and Deborah]Do Shi. These are my self published comics back when I was self publishing.

Anyway, they’re doing Kickstarter and they were like, you’ve got to check this out. They said, People know you and they’re going to go crazy and they’ll support you. They convinced me to do it. Vijaya & I were interested in it. And I’m really glad we did, because it’s really more about marketing than — I mean, we could have self published it the old way. It was more about having a conversation with the readers or people interested in comics than trying to reach the distributor or retailers. There’s just no gatekeeper involved in the Kickstarter and as a proof of concept, it was pretty successful. Two books have already been funded. The first one is at the printer and it’s actually printed and they’re saying it’s going to be bound within a week. So we will have that first book in a week and we’ll start sending them out, if they really come in a week; there were supply chain issues.

These books are also sold in bookstores.

Yeah. There’s going to be a slight gap, I can’t remember exactly. But the people who did the Kickstarter will get it as soon as we get the books and then they’ll go into bookstores in the fall, probably October, I think.

TukiThis takes place during the Paleolithic period, when multiple branches of the evolutionary tree of hominids were simultaneously present and interacted with one another. You’ve said that you were inspired by visiting Olduvai GorgeHe was inspired to dive deep into paleoanthropology by the article. Is there anything about paleoanthropology which just grabbed your attention and inspired you to tell a story.

I mean, it’s the big question. What is our origin story? What brought us here? And when I realized that there was this particular moment two million years ago that was a fulcrum moment — I don’t know if that’s the right word. This was all that came out of me. A crossroads in the planet’s history when, two million years ago there were multiple branches of early humans that were still around at the same time when our direct ancestor, Homo erectusAnd he appears with fire for the first and only time.

[Homo erectus]Can control firewood and light firewood, cooks are skilled in using fire. This was 2 million years ago. It is also the first occasion we went hairless. They were all still covered in fur. Through genetics, lice can be seen and they are able to tell when lice were on our heads. They also know the date and time it happened. So there’s, all these things happened. Our first true ancestor, and fire, and I just think that’s just an amazing thing.

To me, it’s the extended family members. [for them] to not follow our lead with the fire — I thought, what’s that story? Perhaps they are afraid of it, or think it is blasphemous or similar. That’s where I got into all that.

There is a sense of holiness or wonder or magic in “the ancient” that flows throughout BoneAdd your Shazam! miniseries — The Rock of Eternity as a place that you need to take your shoes off before you go in because it is a special place, because it is very old. TukiAlso, there is the idea of the holy in oldness that can be connected to the real supernatural. Is that where you got this idea from?

True, I’m fascinated by forces we can’t see. I mean, there’s obviously so much, just in science, we know there’s gravity. You can’t see gravity. Magnetism. You can’t see that, but how does that happen? I’m fascinated by that, and beyond that, there must be so much more than what we can see or detect with our senses. That is my favorite part of storytelling. It’s where I like to go.

BoneThis was the notion that our dreams can somehow link us all at a fundamentally primitive level. And then, of course, I take it to a story step where someone can actually use that connection to move between people’s dreams. You are here RASLPhysics was the literal definition of it. It was all about physics and parallel universes and things we can’t see. It was all about physics and parallel universes, as well as things we can’t see. Shazam!It was known as the Rock of Eternity. That was a place beyond space and time and it is — I went to the Taj Mahal one time, and then you take your shoes off when you go into the Taj Mahal, and I remember that. And then, of course, in Tuki, there’s a similar hidden world where there are forces that live there that Tuki is contending with, because the old forces do not really like the direction that Tuki is going in.

I’ve always loved that quality in Bone. Maybe mysticism is the word, but there’s clearly a real fascination and love with the invisible and not knowing. There doesn’t have to be a logic to the supernatural parts of the story. They are what they are.

Yes. It’s a mystery. There’s a mystery out there and it’s fun to explore. I mean, people give it different names, but it’s for sure out there. It fascinates me.

Bone, The Complete Cartoon Epic In One Volume

These prices were correct at the time of publication.

Winner of 41 National & International Awards, 10 Eisner Awards, and 11 Harvey Awards.

Three misfits are running out of Boneville when they find themselves in an uncharted desert. Meet Fone Bone (phoney bone), Smiley Bone (smiley bone), and their Bone cousins Phoney Bone, Phoney Bone, and phoney bone. They find themselves in a forested valley full of terrifying, beautiful creatures. With the help of the mysterious Thorn, her tough-as-nails Gran’ma Ben and the Great Red Dragon, the boys do their best to survive in the middle of brewing trouble between the valley’s denizens. It will be the longest — but funniest — year of their lives!

Originally serialized in black & white comic books and graphic novels, the award-winning novel was presented complete and unabridged for the first time in this impressive 1300-page tome preserving the original black & white artwork.