JEFFSMITH

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 :

Modern Masters Volume 25:

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 ThanksRick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge

and John and Pam Morrow

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-Weathingtonfront cover by Jeff Smith

front cover color by Steve Hamakerall interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

TwoMorrows Publishing10407 Bedfordtown Drive

Raleigh, North Carolina 27614www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

First Printing • February 2011 • Printed in Canada

Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-024-3

Trademarks & CopyrightsAll 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.

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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

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Five:

JEFF SMITH

4

Introduction

eff Smith is an anomaly. That is to say, he has beatenthe odds. He became a success in the comic bookfield long before he drew a single page for DC orMarvel. That is a rarity in this day and age, though

it is becoming somewhat less so—in large part because ofhis success.

Bone was on library shelves before libraries had separatesections for graphic novels. Bone is prominently displayedin major bookstore chains. Bone is even sold at schoolbook fairs.

Just over a year ago, I was giving a lecture on inter-viewing to the eighth grade Language Arts classes at myson’s school. At the end, while taking questions, one ofthe kids wanted to know if I had ever interviewed anyonefamous. I said, “Well, you’ve probably never heard ofmost of the people I’ve interviewed, but I’m going to beinterviewing Jeff Smith soon. How many of you haveread any of the Bone books?” Out of about a hundred 13-year-old kids, over a third of them raised their hands.

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 arereading DC or Marvel comics? Surely not one out ofevery three. That’s not to say one-third of all 13-year-oldsin America have read Bone, but given the wide economicdiversity of the school, I’d wager it’s not all that far fromthe truth.

So what makes Bone so special? There aren’t anysuper-heroes, and the main characters are weird looking.It’s got lots of funny jokes and talking animals. And theart is so cartoony. In other words, it has every ingredientthat typically kills the sales of a comic book in thedirect market. And yet Bone sold quite well in the directmarket.

Again, what makes Bone so special? Was it a matter ofluck or good timing? Perhaps a bit of each was involved,but at the crux of Jeff’s success lies his extraordinary talentas a cartoonist and storyteller.

Jeff was 31 when Bone #1 hit the shelves. Early readersof the series never saw the growing pains of a new artistfinding and developing his style. Jeff had already workedthrough those issues. In fact, he had already spentdecades analyzing the work of his predecessors—not justtheir artwork, but their writing, as well. He had spenthour upon hour, day upon day honing his craft. But mostimportantly, he had come to realize that pretty picturesand clever words were not enough if he truly wanted tomake an impact with his audience.

And so, when Bone #1 finally came to be, readers dis-covered a rich, new world filled with amusing, horrible,wonderful characters and a beautifully drawn story withdepth and meaning that was well worth reading.

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

Eric Nolen-Weathington

J

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

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

MM: Was the movebecause of a job?

JEFF: Yeah, my dad gottransferred to aColumbus plant. Heworked for Borden’s IceCream.

MM: Did your motherwork as well?

JEFF: Part-time. She wasmostly a stay-at-homemom. She’d make a littlemoney doing paintings,though. She would paintlittle plaques with flowers.They were pretty nice. Shewould sell them in localshops. She would pile meand my brother in the caronce a week and drivearound to all these shopsthat were selling them andpick up money for any thatsold and drop more off.

MM: So you were activelyexposed to art at an early age.

JEFF: Yeah. My mom hadpaints, and she encouragedme to draw. She would bringme home markers and things,and I loved that. My grand-parents, especially my grandmothers, were really intocreativity—stories, reading, clay, all sorts of stuff likethat.

MM: Did you see them much? Were they in the area?

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

MM: You said you have a brother. Was he interested inart as well?

JEFF: A little. Not as much asme. In fact, he’s an aeronauti-cal engineer now. He likedairplanes. My dad made icecream, I make comic books,and my brother makes air-planes. We’re all quitehappy. [laughter]

MM: What captured yourimagination first, was it thecomic strips you saw in thenewspaper, comic books,cartoons on TV...?

JEFF: I think it all hap-pened simultaneously,because it just seems likethere was more of it in theculture in the ’60s. TheSunday newspaper comicssection was such a biggerdeal back then than it isnow. Peanuts was cominginto its heyday withSnoopy flying in hisSopwith Camel fightingthe Red Baron. Saturdaymorning cartoons werereally still dominated byreruns of theatricalshorts, like Bugs Bunnyand Heckle & Jeckyl. Thequality was much higher

and they were a little moresophisticated. Both the newspaper strips and the theatri-cal cartoons were aimed not just at kids, but at theadults who were also sitting there.

Even before I could read, my dad would read Madmagazine to me. He loved Mad magazine, and I was a

Part 1: A Cartoonist

in the Making

6

huge fan of Don Martin and “Spy vs. Spy.”I just got into that stuff.

MM: When you first started drawing, wereyou imitating what you were seeing in thecomic strips and cartoons, or were you cre-ating your own characters right away?

JEFF: That’s a good question. I think I wastrying to draw my own characters, but ofcourse I was trying to draw WoodyWoodpecker and Donald Duck andHuckleberry Hound and whatever I waslooking at, trying to figure out things like,“How do you draw an eye?” and under-standing that there’s the white part andthen there’s the black part—the pupil—and that points towards what he’s lookingat. Very obvious stuff, but I rememberbeing three or four and trying to figure outthose little tricks.

MM: Did you ever trace?

JEFF: You know, I really didn’t. And as aresult my drawings weren’t very good.[laughter]

MM: When did you start getting a sense ofthickness of lines and that type of thing?

JEFF: That probably wasn’t until I was inthe fourth grade, about nine years old.That was when I discovered Walt Kellyand Pogo. That really changed everything.That was when I began to see the realquality of artwork and look beyond justthe construction of the drawing. I reallywanted to know the techniques that Walt

Previous Page: Coverart to “The Gem,” oneof Jeff’s first Bone storieswritten and drawn whenhe was ten years old.This homemade comicmeasures about 3" x 5"and was drawn with ablue ballpoint pen. Left: The first two pagesof “The Gem.” Each pageof the 21-page story (!)consists of two half-pagepanels.Below: In this panelfrom page 11 of “TheGem,” Jeff is alreadyexperimenting with lightand shadow.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

7

Kelly was using to make these beautifuldrawings. I’d go to the library and try tofind books that would explain it.

MM: What kind of tools were you using?Did you discover that artists used specialpens and brushes at that point?

JEFF: Yeah, for sure. I have a memory ofgoing to the library to xerox a comic pageI had made, and it didn’t reproduce,because back then you put your dime inand there were no adjustments. The pencilwasn’t dark enough. The librarian cameover to help me and explained to me thatthere’s a process of inking that makes theartwork dark enough to reproduce. I thinkI ended up trying crowquill pens. Thattook a long time to learn how to use.

MM: What were you doing to practiceyour inking, just making comics?

JEFF: Just making comics. I had a realgood friend, Jim Kammerud. We grew uptogether, read comics together, drewcomics together, and Jim was always tryingto find new materials. He would findthings like Rapidographs. He was the firstperson I knew to use a brush. When he didthat... wow! It looked like the Walt Kellyline. “You did it, Jim. You found it.”

MM: It must have been good to have like-minded friends you could share informa-tion with.

JEFF: Oh, absolutely. We were just twofriends and that’s what we were interested

in. We both read science fiction andConan, we rode our bikes around to differ-ent drug stores to find the next issue ofBatman with Neal Adams artwork. That wasjust our thing to do.

MM: So you were paying attention to thecreators at that point.

JEFF: In 1968 or ’69—whenever NealAdams kind of came onto the scene—thatwas a thunderclap in our little brains. Imean, he was drawing in such a dynamicway. No other comic book looked anythinglike that. And there was acting. Neal Adams’characters would squint and wince and besurprised and frown and laugh. And theyhad hairy chests. Prior to that, if Supermanhad his shirt off, he would just be smoothand wouldn’t even have nipples. Here, all ofa sudden, Batman is a man. It was awesome.

MM: Did that inspire you to look foranatomy books, or were you just lookingat comic book anatomy?

JEFF: I did get anatomy books. Of course,the first one I got was the Burne Hogarthbook—another comic book guy. And evenmore over-the-top and dynamic than NealAdams. But I did really want to figure outhow the body works, and those anatomybooks would show you how to do fore-shortening—concepts I was seeing in NealAdams’ pages.

MM: Were you getting any encouragementfrom outside your family? Were there anyteachers that helped you along the way?

Above: Panels frompages 12 and 17 of “TheGem.” In the first panel,Jeff plays with underwaterdistortion. In the second,he shows an early under-standing of perspective.Next Page: When NealAdams burst onto thecomics scene in 1967, hebrought a rarely-before-seen sense of realism tothe artwork, includinghairy chests and nipples.This made quite animpact on Jeff as a young,aspiring cartoonist.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

Batman, Ra’s al Ghul ™ and ©

DC Comics.

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Part 2: A Dream of Syndication,

a Life in Animation

MM: So how did you end up going intoanimation after college rather than comicstrips?

JEFF: My first goal was to do a comic strip.That’s what I really wanted to do, was doBone as a daily comic strip. But I just could-n’t sell it. I got a little encouragement froma couple of the New York syndicates. Iwould try sending them submissions andthey would make suggestions and I’drework them, but nothing happened.

During that time I needed to dosomething to make a living. One of myfriends from when I was young, JimKammerud, was going to school at OSU,too, and he and I took an animationclass. We met a fellow classmate namedMarty Fuller, who was really into anima-tion. He really understood and could doit. He understood intuitively how far tomake the drawings change. He had keysto the camera room; he was trusted bythe university. [laughter] We had a lot offun. We did a couple of student projectstogether.

After that, I think Marty suggested weform a little animation company, becausehe had contacts with some ad agenciesaround town, and he thought we could ekeout a living at it. So that’s what we did. Isaid, “What the heck. Let’s try that while Itry to get my comic strip published.”

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

JEFF: Yeah, just the three of us.

MM: Were you getting enough work to becomfortable?

JEFF: We did it for, like, seven years. In thebeginning it was a little slow, but with onlythe three of us, we could survive on a lotless. By the end we had maybe eight perma-nent people and 30 to 50 people we’d bringin depending on what the project needed.

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Above: Jeff and child-hood friend, JimKammerud—two of thethree co-founders ofCharacter Builders.

© Jeff Smith.

MM: By the end you were working onnational accounts, right, not just localadvertising?

JEFF: We did things for White Castle andMcDonald’s, but a lot of corporate head-quarters are in Columbus—Warner Cable,Wendy’s—so all the major ad agencieshave big branches here. We were alsostarting to do movies. When a studiowould get close to their crunch time, theywould start looking for little studios likeours to do five to ten minutes of film—15minutes if they really trusted you.

MM: Would you be producing full anima-tion or just the keys or...?

JEFF: It would just depend on the job.Sometimes they’d send the storyboardsalready done. Sometimes they’d send thekeys, and we’d just do the in-betweens.Sometimes we’d do the whole thing.

MM: You were still hoping to do some-thing with Bone, so what were you gettingfrom these animation jobs? Obviously, youwere drawing all day.

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JEFF: I don’t think you can underestimate that. I mean,just the sheer amount of drawing is going to improveyour quality level at some point, but also the fact thatit’s animation and you’re drawing in three dimensions inyour mind. The character has to be able to turn aroundand look one way then turn and look the other way, sohis head has to be three-dimensional in your mind. Somy level of construction skills really went up.

MM: You had to think about foreground and background.

JEFF: Yes, you had to think composition the wholetime, especially being a small house like we were. Wewere doing our own stuff. If I was doing a 30-secondcommercial, I was probably designing the characters,but I was also doing the main layout, so I was constantlythinking, “Where is my guy going to be on this back-ground? I’ve got to make sure that it’s not cluttered inhis path.” You’re constantly thinking about compositionand readability and things like that.

MM: During that time, were you getting more analyticalabout the cartoons you were watching? Did you go backand study things like the old Looney Tunes shorts?

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

home for the first time, and we were. I sure wish wehad digital at that time, but we could slow it down andback it up. We could look at them pretty much frameby frame and see exactly what Chuck Jones and FrizFreleng were doing. If Bugs was going to hammersomething—a big, fast movement like that—the ham-mer would be up in the air in one shot, and then themiddle shot would be a huge smear. The hammerwould still be up in the air, but it’s grown and mushesall the way down to where it’s going to end up, so it’slike one giant, curved hammer. Then in the final draw-ing the hammer is down on the ground. That gives itsuch speed and solidity. We were completely takingapart and deconstructing all the cartoons.

MM: Do you have a favorite director?

JEFF: On any given day it might be a different guy. I’m abig Chuck Jones fan, but I like Friz Freleng an awful lot.

MM: Really? That’s not a typical answer. I’m more of aBob Clampett guy, myself.

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

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MM: Chuck Jones really emphasized thedialogue and the timing of the dialogue.That’s something that’s very important inBone, as well.

JEFF: I think there’s a connection betweenJones and Walt Kelly. They’re very intelli-gent, and they assume you are intelligent.It kind of tickles your imagination thatway. Imagine making a cartoon where thepunchline is “pronoun trouble,” or “acousti-cally perfect.” [laughter] But I got it. Iunderstood it—or if I didn’t I looked it up.

MM: What else did you get from workingin animation that you could adapt to astatic page?

JEFF: One thing is, if you’re storyboard-ing, you have to be very aware of, “Wheredoes your scene begin? What happenedright before your scene? What happens atthe end?” There is a real process of begin-ning, middle, and end, and you do yourwork all at once. You don’t just start at thebeginning and start drawing until you getto the end. You learn to figure out aheadof time what you’re going to do, whereyour guy is going to go, what has to beaccomplished in the scene. You know whatyour first drawing is, you know what yourlast drawing is, and you know what yourmiddle drawing is. Then you keep breaking

it down to the middle. That’s a structuralprocess I brought directly into comics. Ialways approach each scene or each issueof a comic—any given section of thestory—in that way. I want to know whereit begins, what the end is, and what’s in themiddle. Then I’ll break down the first halfthe same way and the second half thesame way, and just keep breaking it downlike that.

Recently, in an interview with JohnCanemaker, I said, “Comics are just likestoryboards.” And I saw somewhere on theweb that, “That was a horrible thing foryou to say. Comics are their own medium,”and how dare I say comics are just story-boards for movies. Of course, that’s not atall what I meant. I meant from an artisticstandpoint, when you do a storyboard, youneed to see the motion or the movementor the story that you are telling, and youneed to pick the moment that is mostexpressive and most important and putthat on the storyboard. And that is verysimilar artistically to what you do whenyou decide what to draw in a panel of acomic. Then there are all sorts of subtledifferences between animation and comics.In comics, there are different kinds of tim-ing that happen between any two givenpanels. It’s much more subtle and rich thanwhat storyboards are, because they are justan outline for a separate, larger thing.

MM: Also, when you’re talking about ani-mation, you have the same format—thesame screen size—for every shot. Did youfind that challenging early on when you

Previous Page:Animation cel from acommercial produced byCharacter Builders.Above and Left: Jeffsculpting and paintingpieces for a commercial.

© Jeff Smith.

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

JEFF: I had a strange epiphany when I didmy first comic. The first comic I ever drewwas Bone #1. Before that I had just beendrawing comic strips, first for The Lanternfor four years, and then for about twoyears I was drawing batches of strips thatI’d send out every month to the syndi-cates—and have them rejected. [laughter]But, again, they were just three or foursimilar sized panels. Once I finally decidedI’d do Bone as a comic book, and I sat downand started to draw, I was surprised at thefreedom I suddenly had. Previously withthe strips, I’d felt very constrained bythose four little regular boxes. There arerules to comics: especially if you have acontinuing story, you have to give up yourfirst panel just to bring the reader back towhat you were talking about yesterday.Then you just have a couple of panels leftto move the story forward.

MM: And your last panel has to set up thenext day’s strip.

JEFF: Yeah, and have something interestinghappen. It’s a good exercise. It really forcesyou to be disciplined, but having done thatfirst and then diving into comics, it waslike going from a wading pool to theocean. I never found it confusing or com-plicated, I just thought it was glorious.[laughter] My pages and panels were very

instinctual. I didn’t pattern them after any-body’s layouts. I just wanted them to bevery clear to make sure the reader couldalways follow the story. I thought the bestthing to do was to keep the panels fairlyregular in order not to lose anybody. If Ido change the size of the panels, it’s for areason. I do it for shock or to change thepace of the action.

MM: As you were trying to sell Bone to thenewspaper syndicates, what kind of feed-back were you getting from them? Whatwere their reasons for rejecting the strip?

JEFF: The main reason I was given wasthat continuity strips were out of vogue. Itold you that I read Thimble Theatre, whichwhile it was funny, there would be verylong adventures. Popeye would go on seavoyages or go rule a country, and it wouldtake months. The same with Dick Tracy—all those strips. I really wanted to do some-thing like that, and I thought thatDoonesbury was the perfect model. It wasfunny every day, it was relevant, the char-acters were really, really strong, and yetthe story progressed. Something wouldhappen. Joanie would get pregnant andhave a baby or whatever. I thought that’swhat I was doing. I thought I was doingthe Doonesbury version of modern continu-ity. But apparently my characters were soweird, it didn’t really make sense. Nobodyreally understood what it was about.

I would get suggestions like, “Whydon’t you get rid of all the dragons andfantasy and humans, and just do the Bonesin Boneville?” That they could get theirheads around. I got all sorts of suggestions.One story I’ve told quite a bit was that aneditor at King Features suggested that Imake the Bones talk in thought balloons,because Garfield was very popular and hetalks in thought balloons. I was like,“Really? You’re the editor of comic stripsand you don’t understand that nobody canhear a thought balloon?” That was verydepressing for me. [laughter]

MM: Did you ever get any useful sugges-tions?

JEFF: No. Except maybe for, “You shouldgo and find something else to do for a liv-ing.” [laughter] Which I did do.

24

Below and Next Page:Jeff created a claymation(stop-motion animationin which clay figures aremoved slightly for eachframe of film) commer-cial promoting WhiteCastle’s kids’ meal.

White Castle logo ™ White

Castle Management Co. Photo

© Jeff Smith.

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

JEFF: Long before I was trying to write stories, I wasfascinated with idea of trying to make a cartoon charac-ter—something like Top Cat or Huckleberry Hound orWoody Woodpecker. I knew that Disney had madeMickey Mouse and Donald Duck, because I saw themevery Sunday night on The Wonderful World of Disney. Iknew that Walter Lantz had made up Woody

Woodpecker, and I knew that Charles Schulz had madeup Snoopy. So I was fascinated with the idea of comingup with a little character of my own.

I was probably about five when I did the very firstdrawing of Fone Bone, and he was really angry. Hismouth was wide open and was as big as the rest of hisentire body. I don’t know what I liked about him, but Ithought it would be fun to figure out what he wouldlook like if that giant mouth was closed. That just caughtmy interest, and I’ve been drawing him ever since.

MM: At what point did you start creating other charac-ters to interact with him?

JEFF: I’m not quite sure. There were always other char-acters around. Snoopy was doing his Red Baron thingaround that time, so I had a pilot Bone. He had the RedBaron’s flying helmet and goggles. There was a mailman

Bone. There was a female Bone. Therewere other characters around, but I don’tremember doing much with them. I doremember that the angry character

started showing up again, and one of mycartooning friends, Mike Brooks, drew a

star on his chest. That was pretty much the momentthat Phoney Bone crystallized as being separate fromFone 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 toguess at it and say he was the Goofy type character.

The Honeymooners was on TV—The Jackie GleasonShow.

MM: You can definitely see a lotof Art Carney in Smiley.

JEFF: I was a big Art Carney fan.I thought his Ed Norton charac-ter was really interesting; he was

kind of a cartoon character.

MM: He was.

JEFF: So Smiley was kind of an Ed Norton, Goofy typecharacter. And later on I added the cigar, which camefrom Albert the Alligator in Pogo.

MM: I want to go back to the female Bone you drew.

Part 3: Entering the

Great Valley

27

29

JEFF: I kind of pictured it to be like theworld of Duckburg, where there wereducks with 1950s hair on the ladies andhats on the men. I thought that’s whatBoneville was, too.

MM: So your female Bone had hair andwore a dress?

JEFF: Yeah, yeah. And, in fact, I just fin-ished a story for Bone: Tall Tales which isabout the early days of the frontier heroBig Johnson Bone. There’s a pie-eatingcontest, and he meets Gobbling Gertie. Sothere’s now a lot of different kinds ofBones—lady Bones, old Bones, shortBones, fat Bones—that you see in thecrowd. But that’s the way it was back thenin my imagination, too.

MM: At what point did you start addinghuman characters to the mix?

JEFF: That was probably from the HeavyMetal influence. That was done for the col-lege strip. I was reading Heavy Metal, andthere were a lot of beautiful women andfantasy stories. Richard Corben was doing“Den.” I was really into Bilal and Moebius.I somehow got this idea of a Heavy Metalfantasy world with monsters and dragonsand my traditional three-fingered, bigfootcartoon characters stumble into it.

MM: Your college strip was called Thorn,so was she the first human character youcreated?

JEFF: By the time I actually drew up somestrips for the school paper, I pretty muchhad the cast and the basic situation figuredout, but the cast grew even while I wasgoing to CCAD. I think at that point I wasdrawing Fone Bone with a broadswordfighting a giant dragon. Somehow thatdragon eventually became the Great RedDragon. At first he was just a monster, buthe developed a personality and worked hisway into the story.

I think Thorn started out as theprincess who was being rescued. Gran’maBen came about because this girl I wasdating in high school had a grandmotherwith a farm up in northern Ohio. Sheraised steer, and she was Gran’ma Ben. As amatter of fact, the father of the girl I was

dating was named Ben. Her father didn’tlike me, and I didn’t really like him verymuch, so I was kind of making fun of himwhen I drew this little old lady with hisface. [laughter] She didn’t look quite as muchlike Popeye back then as she does now.

The characters just filtered in over aperiod of four or five years there betweengoing to CCAD and OSU. I had a lot offriends and roommates, and we had a lotof adventures that filtered in as well.

MM: What was your visual inspirationbehind the Great Red Dragon? He’s cer-tainly not a typical looking dragon withthose tufts on his ears.

JEFF: He was a combination of my big,100-pound Labrador named Commanderand Zonker from Doonesbury. When I wascreating the characters in the mid-’80sbefore I started working on the Thorn strip,I was playing with the characters and theywere evolving, especially the fantasycharacters beyond the three cousins. Andone of those was the Great Red Dragon,who started out in a drawing I was doingjust for fun where Fone Bone was beingchased by a giant dragon with floppy,hairy ears.

Previous Page: Jeff’spencils for a new BigJohnson Bone tale donefor Scholastic’s Bone: TallTales collection, in whichJohnson meets and losesa woman after his ownheart.Above: Part Zonker,part Labrador retriever,all Great Red Dragon.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

30

The way the dragon sat was based on my Labrador,but, as I’ve said, at that time I was completely captivatedby Doonesbury. I loved the subtle acting Trudeau woulddraw—the twitch of an eyebrow, the upturn of a littlesmile. Zonker was this kind of magical character. Hewas the Snoopy, so to speak, of Doonesbury. I starteddrawing the dragon in profile, just like Trudeau drew alot of his characters, and if you look at a picture of thedragon next to one of Zonker, you’ll see it pretty quick-ly. He has the same heavy-lidded eyes, the cigarettehanging out of his mouth. Cigarettes weren’t as alarm-ingly evil in the ’70s and ’80s. [laughter]

MM: Did you have most of the story worked out whenyou started pitching Bone to the syndicates?

JEFF: By that time I’d done the strip on a daily basis forfour years. That was really good training in terms of dis-cipline, making sure you get the work turned in on time,and I learned a lot about the art of moving the charac-ters from one panel to the next. That’s tricky stuff thatnobody can really teach you, and back then nobody waseven trying to teach you.

But the strip was a fish out of water story. It washumorous, yet the storylines would go on for weeks at atime, à là Doonesbury. I didn’t really have an ending inmind; I didn’t really have a story. It was just these threeguys come from Boneville, a modern city with appli-ances and cars and libraries, and they’re stuck in thispre-technological, fairy tale forest with monsters and

dragons and princesses. That’s all it was, and it was fine,but ultimately it really wasn’t going anywhere. When Isent it to the syndicates I got a little bit of interest, butthey were telling me I needed to focus the strip. “Just dothe Bones in Boneville. It’s very distracting to have allthese humans running around. What’s going on? What isit all for?” At least I think that’s what they were trying tosay. They might have been trying to tell me that I justwasn’t very funny. [laughter]

But during the time between doing the comic stripand doing the comic book, I discovered mythology andfairy tales. Going back to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars,they both have a depth to them that at first I didn’tquite understand. I looked at the strips I had done forThe Lantern, which had the same characters that ended upin Bone, but there was just no point to any of it otherthan humor. What made Lord of the Rings and Star Warssuch good stories, as far as I could see, Eric, was thatthey had characters and situations just as strange as whatI had, but you cared about those characters. There was apoint to the stories. So I started reading books aboutTolkein and George Lucas to try to find out what theywere up to and who influenced them. That’s what ledme to mythology and Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Istarted reading the myths—Hindu myths, Greek myths,and Norse myths.

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 col-lege story and what I wanted to do, I saw that you couldset up a book like Huckleberry Finn and give it a begin-ning, a middle, and an end and have a literary structure,but that’s just linear. You have to have depth. You haveto have this other axis, which in Huckleberry Finn is thismoral decision he has to make. That’s so incrediblyimportant. With Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, what gavethem that depth, that other axis, was mythology, motifs,and symbolism.

Suddenly all my memories spent watching slides in adark room during my History of Art class came flooding

back and I remembered all the talk aboutsymbolism and cultural references. All of asudden I got excited. “Okay, I have thecharacters. I like my characters. I like thesituation. Now I need to put symbolism and

motifs into it. I need to give it a mytholo-gy.” That changed everything.

MM: Where did you start? Did youstart with your mapping out the hero’s

journey? Did you start with the backstory? How muchof it did you plan out, and how much did you leave tofill in later as you got further into the story?

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JEFF: I think it was all of that. By thetime I got to the comic book, I knew thecharacters inside and out, so I had thebasics. “Here’s this doofy outsider whostumbles into this situation and falls in lovewith a girl.” The story had sort of uncov-ered itself by accident as I did the stripsfor four years. I did the Roque Ja bit in thecollege strip, and he had talked about acoming war and having to pick one side orthe other. And the Hooded One wasthere; she had revealed herself to beGran’ma’s jealous sister. So I had some ofthese ideas come out without any real planor structure.

When you start reading mythology,you see the jealous sibling stories, and youcan use that and start making plans andputting it all together. I think it reallycame together when I figured out what theending was. I decided it had to be a big,mythological battle of good versus evil asthe heroes make their stand. But I had todecide, “Are the Bones going to stay? Arethey going to leave and then return? Whatkind of changes are the characters going togo through?” Figuring out the ending wasthe key. Then I decided to put the RoqueJa story smack dab in the middle, and wingit from there.

MM: What made you decide to self-pub-lish? Was it because of the negative experi-ence with the syndicates?

JEFF: Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure I ana-lyzed it very deeply. I had just had themiserable two-year experience with thesyndicates where they just didn’t under-stand my comic, and as far as I could tellthey 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 landat first. I didn’t know who the differentpublishers were or anything. I think thefirst comic I saw where a light bulb wenton in my head was The Tick. That was pub-lished by New England Comics, whichwas the name of a comic book store. It waskind of like it was self-published. It was inblack-&-white, written and drawn by thisguy named Ben Edlund, and it was veryfunny. I could tell from the whole packagethat he was having a blast doing it, and itwas kind of successful.

I kept getting it as it came out, and atsome point I said, “Okay, if King Featuresisn’t going to publish Bone, I can’t imaginethat Marvel would. I need to go thisunderground route. If I can make enoughmoney to pay for the printing and justifymy doing it, that’ll be fine, and I can keepdoing animation.”

MM: This was after the black-&-whiteboom and bust, but indies were starting tocome back a bit. You mentioned The Tick,but there were a few other titles that weredoing well.

Previous Page: TheBones flee Boneville inthis frontis piece fromthe first volume of TheComplete Bone Adventures.Above: It’s a familyreunion, but not a happyone. Stories of jealoussiblings run rampantthroughout mythologicaland religious texts, goingall the way back to Cainand Abel.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

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MM: You mentioned the variant covers you had whenyou came back to Bone, but you also reprinted issue #1,this time in color, which came packaged with a smallFone Bone PVC figure.

JEFF: That was for the tenth anniversary of Bone #1,which we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary nextyear. I can’t believe it. I’ll have to color something elseand get a new figure. [laughter]

We wanted to do something fun to celebrate, so wedecided to color the issue, and we put some fun thingsin it. We flew R.C. Harvey into town, and he sat downand did a little interview with me which we included inthe book. And we included the little figurine, which wasa hard thing to run through the distribution system.

MM: Steve Hamaker did the coloring and designed thefigurine.

JEFF: Yeah, he worked with themodel makers and the factory inHong Kong. He did every-thing.

MM: How did you meet him,and what led him to becomepart of the team?

JEFF: In 1999, toys were really sweepingthe comic book stores. McFarlane’s toys wereblowing people’s minds; they were the mosthigh-quality, beautifully sculpted action figuresanyone had ever seen. A company calledReSaurus started up in Columbus that was thefirst company to rival McFarlane in terms ofquality. They caught everyone off-guard.Duke Nukem was a video game characterthey started with. Then they did StreetFighter figures. I was surprised to findthey were in Columbus.

They were trying to figure outwhat their next toy would be, andsomebody said, “Well, JeffSmith is right here in town.Let’s call him.” They cameover and gave me a presen-tation and I was veryimpressed with all the little

details in their design drawings. Fone Bone would have abackpack, and in the backpack would be a copy of Moby-Dick 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 theproject was Steve Hamaker.

Then they got very involved in merchandising anddoing toys for the American Godzilla movie. They endedup having to buy a lot of those toys back. At some point Igot a call from Steve saying, “Oh, my God, they’re layingeverybody off.” So I said, “Put all your stuff in a box andcome over here, and we’ll hire you.” He came straight overfrom the office, and he’s worked with us for ten years now.

MM: You did a second series of Bonefigures, too.

JEFF: We did. But that was just toodifficult for a little company like ours

to keep up. We didn’t lose money,but we didn’t make any moneyeither. It was just a nightmare, andwe gave that up after a year.

But Steve turned out to havesome great coloring and designskills, which we didn’t know about

when we hired him. BecauseCartoon Books is only five people

including me and Vijaya, everybody hasto do a little of everything. Steve ended up

designing the toy packages, and I wasreally surprised at how good all hisdesigns were. He would find images from

our archives, scan them in andmanipulate them, and they lookedfantastic.

At some point Steve said,“Let me take a shot at color-

ing some of the covers.”Once he did that, westarted talking about thetenth anniversary issue,

which he colored. Thesedays he does every art job for

Cartoon Books except for theactual comics. I still write anddraw the comics by hand.

Part 4: And Now Back to

Our Story

MM: Is he in charge of pagination, aswell?

JEFF: We have somebody else who handlesthat: Tom Gaadt. He does all our digitallayout and pre-prep and all that. He alsodoes the web page and deals with the letterspages.

MM: You had the basic ending for Boneworked out very early on. At what pointdid you know how you were going to getthere?

JEFF: As you say, I had the basic idea forthe ending in mind before I started, butduring the one-year hiatus in 2000 when Iwas working on the Bone screenplay, I wasalso thinking about the ending. Originally,I had thought that the Bone cousins andThorn would enter the ghost circles andwork their way down to Atheia, get there,and then have to mount a journey back upthrough the valley to near Gran’ma Ben’scabin and have the final battle there. But Irealized that the stand had to be inAtheia—that all the evil characters wouldfollow them to Atheia and trap them there.So it was just before I started work on thelast arc that I could really see the endingand it was making sense. I knew, “From thispoint on, I’m just working towards theend.” Before that it was always kind ofmagical. “What new branch of the roadwill crop up that I can follow?”

MM: Once you figured out the path youneeded to take, did it become difficult tokeep up your enthusiasm? Most creativepeople get more enjoyment from coming upwith 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 forten years, and it was working. That’s themost amazing thing to me is that the storywas working and I was able to keep myaudience and entertain them with a singlestory for twelve years. So I was not losingany enthusiasm for the project at all. It was,however, becoming technically more difficultto write, because once you start trying to tieall the story threads together, well, you haveto tie all the story threads together. [laughter]It would have been very easy to have doneit in a cheap, easy way, but it wouldn’t havefelt real. It was a lot of work at the end.

MM: It sounds like you were tweaking thestoryline as you went along all the way tothe last issue.

JEFF: Oh, very much. For example, when Isaid they were going to go back up to thetop in the original storyline, the queen ofthe dragons was going to be immobile—agiant, stone mountain. That had to changewhen I decided to have all the evil crea-tures follow them South. Suddenly, Mimbecame animated again, which was farmore exciting and interesting.

Previous Page: Thisdetail from Bone #4 wasused as the design forthe PVC figure that wasincluded with the 10thanniversary color editionof Bone #1.Above: Thorn leads theBones, Gran’ma Ben, andBartleby down into theValley through the mine-field of ghost circles.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

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MM: Very few people will be completelysatisfied with how a long epic ends,because they all have their own ideas ofwhat should happen. After years of emo-tional investment, people tend to feel someownership of the story. You saw thatrecently with the ending of Lost. Whatkind of feedback were you getting duringthose last four or five issues?

JEFF: I got a little bit of pushback fromreaders, not during the last few issues, butduring the beginning of the final story arc,where I spent five or six issues in the ghostcircles. I had a handful of characters walk-ing through pages and pages of nothingbut ash and black. I was a little worried,because people were not getting it.Normally I can pull some humor out of anysituation, but this was the darkest momentof the story. And it took a year.

But my memory of the feedback duringthe last push, the last four or five issues, wasthat it was quite uplifting. People were say-ing, “Wow, I can’t believe where this isgoing.” I remember being nervous about thescene where Thorn flies at the end, andalmost chickening out and not wanting todo it. “That’s too far.” I called Frank Miller,Paul Pope, and Terry Moore—three peopleI talked with a lot back then—and they allwere very much in favor of her flying. Frankwas like, “She’s going to fly, damn it.” [laugh-ter] The key for me was when I realized I

could have Bartleby say, “It’s just like adream.” Then you don’t know. Did she real-ly fly, or did she make people see her as fly-ing with a spell or something?” That wasthe trick for me, but it went over gang-busters. I felt like I was getting pushedalong by everyone, but in a good way.

Over the six years since the book ended,I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I wish FoneBone and Thorn had stayed together,” butI’ve never heard anyone say, “That was ahorrible ending. I wish I’d never read it.”

MM: 2004 was a really big year for you.Even before the series ended, you workedout the deal with Scholastic. How did thatcome about? Did they approach you?

JEFF: Yes. We got a phone call one day.The publisher at the time was a womannamed, Jean Feiwel, who is no longer withthe company, and I miss her dearly. She wasawesome. She called and asked to talk withVijaya, and they were on the phone for,like, an hour. The rest of us were outsideof her door asking each other, “What’s goingon?” Vijaya came out and said, “Wow. Weneed to talk about this. Scholastic wants topublish Bone, and they get it. I think weshould give them a serious shot.”

What had happened, I learned later,was that they had been wanting to get intographic novels, and the consultants they hadhired—among whom were Art Spiegelman

Above: For severalissues, the central cast ofBone wandered throughan empty wasteland. Itwas both literally and figuratively one of thedarkest moments of theseries, and Jeff wasworried he might losesome of his readership.Next Page: More worrying for Jeff, though,was the scene in whichThorn flies. Thankfully,his friends convinced himto through with it.

Bone ™ and © Jeff Smith.

MM: In 2005 you did some touring to promote theScholastic editions. Is that right?

JEFF: I went on a tour in February of 2005 to promotethe first book from Scholastic, which was weird, becausethat 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 theguys who own the comic book store are comic bookfans and want to go out to dinner with you and youhave a great time. In the bookstore world, they’re justteenagers making hourly wages, and they justwant to shut the store down and get out ofthere. They don’t want to go out to dinner.So you just go back to your room at theHoliday Inn at the airport.

MM: How long did youtour? How many stops didyou make?

JEFF: It was about amonth—two two-weekperiods. It was probablyclose to 20 stops. I don’treally remember,because some of themwere visits to schoolswhere I’d talk to a gym-nasium full of kids, andothers were in a Barnes& Noble or something.We did some on the EastCoast, some in the Chicagoarea, and then we ended up outWest. The last one was in SanFrancisco, and I did two orthree appearances there.

MM: Were you workingon any projects duringthat time, or did you seteverything aside for thetour?

JEFF: I think I wasworking on Shazam!:The Monster Society ofEvil by then. I had

worked out the script, but I had given myself carpal tun-nel syndrome as I finished up Bone. I was pulling all-nighters, and my arm was getting so tired and numb. Iwould have to wrap my arm in two or three Ace band-ages starting at my shoulder and armpit and going downto my fingers and thumb in order to finish.

There was a point during the very last issue when Icouldn’t close my hand enough to hold a pencil. I founda tennis ball and jammed a pencil through it, because Icould 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 eightmonths. We did tests—he had needles in my arm

from my neck down to my wrist. He said, “Itlooks like you haven’t caused any nervedamage; it’s just muscular. I want you to puta brace on your arm and not draw for

eight months.” When I was out ontour, I was barely able to sign

books, but that was it. I didrecover, but I have to be care-

ful. Now whenever I draw ordo signings, I wear a

brace on my hand.

MM: It sounds likeyou started work-ing on Shazam!pretty muchright after youfinished Bone.

Were you lookingto do something

for DC or Marvel, ordid DC come to you?

JEFF: It was the week before 9/11 that I got a messageon my answering machine from Mike Carlin, whowas the editor-in-chief of DC then. It said somethinglike, “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, buteventually I called him up. I couldn’t see myself drawing

Batman or Superman, but when he suggestedCaptain Marvel, something clicked. I was like,“Hey, that’s not bad.”

One of the reasons it clicked for me was

Part 5: The Magic of Words

and Scientific Theory

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Previous Page andAbove: Design sketchesof the Big Red Cheesedone in preparation forShazam!: The MonsterSociety of Evil. Drawn inlate 2001, these earlysketches harkened backto C.C. Beck’s GoldenAge work for Fawcett’svarious Captain Marvelseries.

Captain Marvel ™ and © DC

Comics.

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that back in 2000 I’d started thinking of ascience-fiction story I wanted to do, whichbecame RASL. Part of the story in RASLwas that he was going to be from anotherdimension, but from a few months in thefuture. He would be trying to warn NewYork City that religious fundamentalists weregoing to blow up buildings, but nobodywould believe he was from another dimen-sion. When that really happened, theredidn’t seem to be much point to that story.It would just be weird. So suddenly I didn’thave the next story I was going to workon. DC’s offer was well timed, and CaptainMarvel seemed to be a good thing to workon after twelve years on Bone. I thought itwould be a nice change to work for a coupleof years on a clearly defined character.

MM: Did they let you do pretty muchwhatever you wanted to do?

JEFF: I’d have to say so. It was pretty clearthat nothing was happening with CaptainMarvel and hadn’t for a long time—notsince Jerry Ordway’s Power of Shazam! series.Everybody in comics pretty much knewmy stuff and knew I wouldn’t do anythingcrazy and that it was a good match.

My idea was, “Let me come up with astory and how I want to handle it, and ifyou guys like it, we’ll do it. If you don’tlike it, then we’ll just part ways. Nobody’shurt.” And that’s how we did it.

MM: The way the comics were presentedwith all the editorial material—the title,the credits, and so on—only on the insidecovers, it really looked like the focus was onit being one book. Was DC looking at theproject as a way to break into the children’smarket?

JEFF: Maybe. I never asked them about it,but I’ve always thought they were kind ofhoping to get that presence in the book-store market that I had begun to stake out.That makes some kind of sense.

Their original idea, though, was torelaunch it as a comic book. They wantedme to do it as a monthly. But I said, “Youdon’t want me to do a monthly comic. Thatwould be bad.” [laughter] So I suggested thatI do a prestige format mini-series, and thatway it would have a beginning, a middle,and an end, which I like more anyway.

MM: What kind of preparation did youdo before getting started? Did you readthe original Golden Age Monster Societystory?

JEFF: Yeah, I did. I called up my friend,Rory Root, who owns Comic Relief inBerkeley, and put him on the job. “See ifyou can find me one of those.” I knewthere was a giant, oversized collection, andhe found it for me. I read that while I wason the road at some comic book shows,and I bought a couple of Golden AgeCaptain Marvels. I also watched theRepublic movie serial, Adventures of CaptainMarvel. It’s well regarded, and generallythought to be the best serial ever made.

From all those sources I picked upsomething that I thought was a little moremagical than what I had seen in thecomics, which seemed to portray BillyBatson as a young teenager who turns intoan adult super-hero but retains his teenagemind—sort of like Tom Hanks’ Big crossedwith Superman. When I read the earlyWhiz comics, he looks much younger. Ithought it would be a bigger change if hewas a younger kid and then become anadult with a different personality. That wasreally how he was portrayed in the GoldenAge comics.

MM: There was some debate amongst thefans about that aspect, because when DCbrought him back they went in the otherdirection and that’s the Captain Marvelmost of them knew.

66

JEFF: There was some debate, but I don’tcare. [laughter] DC asked me to make himcorny and go back to the Golden Ageconcept, and I had a blast doing just that.

MM: Well, you didn’t go to far into thecornier aspects. You played Talky Tawnyfairly straight. He’s a tiger who can literal-ly transform into a man. He doesn’t standupright and wear human clothes when he’sin tiger form.

JEFF: Well, there was another element tomy research I forgot to mention. I keptthinking, “What is this super-hero? He’s amagic word.” I started looking up magicwords, and I came across “alakazam,” whichis what “Shazam” is evoking in sound. Istarted looking at Aladdin and genies, andI found these ifrits, which are genie-typespirits that can change back and forthbetween man and animal. As soon as I sawthat, I said, “That’s my explanation for TalkyTawny. It ties him into Captain Marvel’smagic.” In my mind Captain Marvel is sortof like Billy Batson’s genie that he can pullout of a bottle by saying, “Shazam.”

MM: Was it your idea to use the secretcodes at the end of each issue?

JEFF: Yeah, I saw that they had done thatin the reprint book. Someone showed metheir Captain Marvel membership card

that had the code on it, which was reallycool. I just wanted to play with, “Whatmade Captain Marvel so much fun in the’40s that he outsold Superman and MickeyMouse on the newsstands?” I went for allthe fun stuff I could find and just had a ball.

MM: Your Sivana was very short andlooked like a little goblin. But the biggestchange was that you made him theAttorney General instead of a mad scientist.

JEFF: When DC first called me, LexLuthor was their President of the United

States. By the time I started working onthe book, 9/11 had happened, and Iobviously didn’t like our AttorneyGeneral of the United States. [laughter]So I thought, “Maybe Lex Luthor hired

his buddy to be Attorney General.” It letme get a little laugh in there on the side.

MM: Why did you bring Mary intothe book and make her so young?

In the original stories, Billy hasbeen Captain Marvel for

some time before he findsout he has a sister.

JEFF: I didn’t want tostraight-up regurgitate what

had been done. I thinkwhat DC wanted fromme was to somehowupdate it or give it anew twist. It didn’t

Previous Page: Partiallyinked pencils for page 7of Shazam!: The MonsterSociety of Evil #1. At thispoint Talky Tawny hasyet to reveal his wilderside.Above: Another earlydesign sketch forShazam!: The MonsterSociety of Evil.Left: This unused sketchwas for a scene inShazam!: The MonsterSociety of Evil #4.

Captain Marvel and all related

characters ™ and © DC

Comics.

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Part 6: Storytelling and

the Creative Process

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

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, KathleenGlosan; my art assistant, Steve Hamaker, who does thecoloring and everything else we need done in terms ofartwork that isn’t the actual comics; and Tom Gaadt,who runs the web page, goes to all the shows, and han-dles all the mail orders. We pretty much run from 10:00a.m. to 6:00 p.m. What they do during the day, I haveno idea. [laughter] I have a little studio over my garage,which is where I do a lot of my writing and drawing. Igo to the studio around 10:00 and usually try to write inthe morning. In the afternoon, I’ll go over to the officeto do things like this, talk on the telephone, do inter-views, have meetings about what’s coming up—stufflike that.

MM: How much of your day is actually spent at thedrawing board?

JEFF: I’d say a good three hours most days, until itgets into the deadline period, then it could be 20hours a day for a week or two at a stretch.

MM: Ideas can come to you at any given time. Doyou carry a notebook or sketchbook around with you?

JEFF: Yeah, I do. I carry a little notebook in my backpocket, so if I have an idea or think of somethingfunny or interesting I can work with, I can jot itdown. I didn’t used to. In fact, just the opposite. Inthe early days of working on Bone, I believed that ifI had an idea, if it was good enough then I wouldremember it the next day. And that worked foryears and years, but now I don’t remember thingsthat I know are good ideas. I have to wear glasseswhen I draw now, too.

MM: Do you draw outside of work? Will youdraw something just for fun?

JEFF: No, not really—not since I started thecomic books. I look at other artists who havethese fantastic notebooks, and they’re just filledwith wonderful drawings of places they’ve been

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

MM: I suppose you don’t experiment with other medi-ums then—paint, for instance?

JEFF: Not since college.

MM: When you sit down to write, what are you actual-ly doing? You’re doing thumbnails and sketching outideas more than coming up with dialogue?

JEFF: I might jot down a quick list of four things that Iwant to have happen, and then I might add one of thoseideas from my notebook. “Oh, that’s a neat moment. Iwant to get that in there.” I write down how I want tobegin and how I want to end, and then I write an outline

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

JEFF: Just gesture drawings. It’s almost not enough foranyone but me to understand. I write and draw almostsimultaneously. It’s enough that if somebody reallylooked at it they could follow it.

MM: Are you worriedabout composition atall at this stage, or justthe broad action?

JEFF: I move organicallyas I write. I can see thescene and the pictureas I’m going, and that’swhat I’m drawing. I’mtrying to lock in what Ican see in terms of thecomposition—wheresomeone is standing,what their expressionis. I want enough of adrawing that I can tellthose things, and thenI write out the dialogue.

MM: Do you look atcomposition more interms of individualpanels or whole pages?

JEFF: I’m doing both atthe same time.Sometimes I workstraight ahead, butsometimes I’ll work ona couple of scenes outof order knowing I have,say, a page and a half to get this idea across. I have a limitedamount of panels to convey this idea, so I’ll have to worka little harder to edit the idea and make sure it’s clean.

MM: But for the most part you work from the beginningof an issue straight through to the end.

JEFF: Pretty much, because I want the comic to read asif it’s happening in front of the reader. I want the readerto experience everything as the character experiences it.If there are surprises, I want it to appear on the page asI’m writing it. That way I don’t forget to have my char-acters react to it.

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

JEFF: Usually that’s part of the overall plan. I do worryif there’s a cliffhanger or not. I think that’s an intrinsicand enjoyable part of our little artform of comic books. Itried during Bone to keep in mind that it was all going tobe together in the end, but, of course, that was a fairlynovel approach at the time. Only Neil Gaiman and

Dave Sim were think-ing that way whilethey were doing theirbooks. But I always tryto have a cliffhanger,because I really wantyou to come back.That’s a tried and trueconvention of comicstrips and comicbooks. You’ve got tocome back. And I likethat; that’s a fun ele-ment for me. But Idon’t want to overdoit, because I think itcan get a little triteafter a while.

MM: Do you prefer tofinish the writing of anissue before you startdrawing on theboards?

JEFF: It depends.That’s more often thecase with RASL than itwas with Bone. RASL isa much scarier processfor me. I know wherethe story ends, and Ikind of have the third

act mapped out, but see, that’s exactly it, Eric. I think Ihave something mapped out, and when I get there[laughs] it’s never what I think. Even within an issue, I’llthink this is what I’m doing. Then I start writing it andI’m like, “Oh, my God. Where is—? What? Oh, no.”There is physics and consequences and parallel universeparadoxes. Holy crap! [laughter] So RASL has been amuch more fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants than Bone was—even though it’s planned.

MM: Once you’ve finished the writing, you’ve also got alayout. Do you lightbox those layouts or are they just areference for you?

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JEFF: Once I have the pages done—and,again, they’re just rough, sketched comics—Ienlarge them a couple of times on the copieruntil they’re 10" x 15"—the size I draw at.I have a light table, and I’ll quickly traceoff those fast suggestions of compositions.It doesn’t take any time at all, maybe fiveminutes a page, to do. Now I have my panelsset up, and I just have to clean them upand draw. The tracings give me an idea ofwhere to start, and it works out pretty well.

That fast, get-it-down shape of a ges-ture drawing really conveys a lot of energyand emotion. What I’m doing when I’menlarging my tiny, fast scripts is I’m savingthat energy. In the early issues I would tryto painstakingly recapture that energy Icould feel in my script, but I’d draw it andit would feel stiff. That’s when I startedtracing them up, and now a lot of thatemotion and energy stays on the page.

MM: I assume then that you are doingmost of your actual drawing in the inksand that you don’t tighten up your pencils.

JEFF: Yeah, that’s one of the luxuries ofinking yourself, I suppose.

MM: As you pencil over these loose ges-ture drawings, do you make manychanges?

JEFF: I have to make changes; things arenot always in proportion, and sometimesthey’re a little too cartoony, especially forRASL. I have to sit there and draw a realdrawing on top, but it still has the flavorand energy. You can control it, you justhave to do some construction around it.That’s a fun part of the job. I enjoy thatquite a bit.

MM: Do you have to warm up before youstart penciling?

Previous Page andAbove: Thumbnails,pencils, and partial inksfor Shazam!: The MonsterSociety of Evil #4, page41. As you can see, Jeff’spencils are fairly loose,and he pastes in the lettering before he beginsinking. When inking, hestarts with the faces,where most of the actingis shown, and goes fromthere.

Captain Marvel and all related

characters ™ and © DC Comics.

Jeff Smith

Art Gallery

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Previous Page and Below: Illustrations done for The CompleteBone Adventures Vol. 1. These images appeared between the first andsecond issues and served to show the passage of time in the story.

Bone and all related characters ™ and © Jeff Smith.

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All characters TM & ©2011 their respective owners.

MODERNMASTERS: JEFF

SMITHAt the age of five, Jeff Smithdreamt up a cute, little characterhe named Fone Bone. More than adecade later, Bone became anovernight success, rocketing Smithto a level few independent car-toonists achieve. Published world-wide and winner of countlessawards, Bone would seemingly bea career unto itself, but Jeff Smithisn’t one to rest on his laurels. DC’sShazam: Monster Society of Eviland his newest creator-ownedseries RASL are proof that he is stillone of the best cartoonists in the business. Now, Eric Nolen-Weathingtonexplores the career of Jeff Smith, a true Modern Master, through a career-spanning interview with the artist, a discussion of his creative process, andmountains of rare and unseen art, including a huge gallery of commissionedpieces, plus 8 pages of full color work.

(120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $15.95ISBN: 9781605490243

Diamond Order Code: DEC101098http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=855

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