As they say on the talk shows, our next guest needs no introduction. If you know just one cartoonist in Columbus, it’s probably Jeff Smith. Jeff is best known for his BONE series, initially released in 1991, the rights of which have recently been purchased by Netflix and will be produced as an animated series. He’s also noted for his books RASL, Tuki Save the Humans, and Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil. Jeff is the winner of eleven Eisner Awards, eleven Harvey Awards and two National Cartoonists Society Comic Book Awards. Jeff is also making a huge impact on Columbus by being a founding member of the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) event held in our city for the last five years.
1. Can you tell us who originally influenced your work growing up?
You bet! I loved reading the Sunday funnies with my dad. Peanuts by Schulz was my favorite. In fact, when my dad was at work, I taught myself to read with the Peanuts collections. Later, I was absolutely obsessed with Pogo by Walt Kelly. I describe my inking style as an attempt to copy Kelly’s style and failing. The visual language of film had a big influence on me as well, especially Spielberg starting with Jaws. Later, I fell in love with John Ford and Kurosawa. To this day, Seven Samurai is my favorite film. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in middle school and I realize in retrospect that it had a profound effect on my art.
2. BONE was originally introduced to the public as a comic strip in Ohio State University’s student-published newspaper “The Lantern”. What effect do you think that experience had on your work?
A really good one. What better way to learn your vocation than to fling it out to 50,000 readers every day! Very quickly I saw what jokes didn’t fly, but more crucially I knew what did work! There aren’t a lot of formal ways to learn about cartooning, and back then there were absolutely none. I learned technical things like how my line work would hold up being reduced and printed on newsprint. I learned the skill of timing. And most importantly, it led me to the new… at that time it was new… cartoon library that was being established by Lucy Shelton Caswell in the Journalism building. There I was exposed to the work and originals of comics masters like Milton Caniff, George Herriman, and E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye.
3. You are known as one of the “rockstars” of the self-publishing era of the early 90’s. Can you give us insight into what that time of comics looked like and why you decided to self-publish? What are your thoughts on how comics and audiences have grown since then and where do you hope they’re going?
Back then, yeah. Well, they’ve grown! Back then you could only get comic books in hobby shops. They weren’t on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble and they weren’t in libraries. These comic book shops were like homing beacons for comic nerds like me. You’d walk in and you’re surrounded by walls and walls of four-color magic! And usually a fat old cat and some tattoo books. It was a little strange that there were no children reading comics. Comic books were mostly for collectors at that time.
Most of the comics were the same as today, dozens of titles featuring Marvel and DC characters, but there was also a new kind of comic; work done by artists who made stories about their own characters. Who owned their own copyrights. I recognized this as big stuff! Comics like Love & Rockets by the Hernandez brothers and Cerebus by Dave Sim and Gerhard. Cerebus was self-published, as was another breakout title called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These titles were all printed in black & white, tying
them to the alternative and underground movements.
When I showed up with BONE, something alchemical happened between Dave Sim and me. The Self-Publishing Movement solidified and between the two of us and all the other talented self-publishers, we stormed the convention circuit and within two years had amassed enough of the overall market that we started wanting to control how our books were sold. For one thing, we wanted our books to stay in print instead of disappearing from the newsstand every month like the latest issue of People Magazine. One answer was graphic novels. If a BONE graphic novel sells out, you can restock it like a normal book. Easy, peezy! It turns out graphic novels are also more durable and have a spine, which allowed librarians to purchase them and put them on the shelves where readers not normally exposed to such material could see it. Around this time, the manga fad hit and the X-Men movies came out. By the late nineties, early 2000s, comic-cons and shops started to fill up with young women readers, and kids were reading them in school libraries. Scholastic, the largest children’s publisher in the world, contacted Vijaya and I about launching a new graphic novel imprint for kids called Graphix with a newly colorized version of BONE. Now every New York publisher has a graphic novel imprint and there is a Graphic Novel Bestsellers List in the New York Times. It’s very different now and very awesome!
4. You seem to have quite an affinity for Ohio. You’ve incorporated work from Columbus restaurants into RASL and scenes from BONE were based from Hocking Hills. Why did you decide to stay in Columbus?
I’m from here. Grew up in Worthington and we’ve lived in German Village for twenty-five years. Drew most of BONE in my current studio. RASL, too. RASL is a noir crime thriller and there were going to be bars in it. As reference, I used a mashup of my favorite German Village hangouts, Club 185, G. Michael’s Bistro, and Lindey’s. When we were in our twenties, Vijaya and I moved around a lot, but we always wanted to end up one day in German Village. Vijaya had a software job in Silicon Valley in the early nineties where we lived while I was starting up BONE. Then the book took off. Suddenly we had the means to buy a house! Maybe not in the Bay Area, but that house in German Village was looking pretty good! Besides, back in Ohio were all our friends and family. We were happily surprised by the changes that had taken place in Columbus while we were on the west coast. The Short North! Chef driven restaurants, eating local, and Jeni’s. It was the beginning of the path this city has been on ever since. This is a fantastic place to live. That’s why we started CXC, the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival, to share our love of it.
5. The story of Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) starts with a conversation between you, your wife, Vijaya Iyer, and Lucy Shelton Caswell, who is best known for her work with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and organizing OSU’s Tri-Annual Festival of Cartoon Art in Columbus. Can you tell us a bit about going from that conversation to where it is today completing its fifth successful year?
Absolutely. I used to attend the OSU Cartoon Festival back when I was doing the comic strip in the school paper and loved it. It had an academic, very collegial vibe. I met everyone from Art Spiegelman, Sergio Aragones, Bill Watterson and Jim Davis to Will Eisner and more there. I met Allison Bechdel at the final festival. I learned so much and made a lot of life long connections. Lucy is more to me than just the founder of the Billy, she is my mentor. One night at dinner, she told Vijaya and I that she was going to retire soon and that the festival would probably be retired as well unless we had an idea to keep it going. First of all, we wanted her to stay involved. We brainstormed a concept that would blend euro style comic festivals…meaning an expo and events at multiple venues around the city… with her more academic, professional style. We approached the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Billy, the Columbus Museum of Art and others, all of which were already inviting world famous cartoonist to their institutions, to join us for four days in the fall for a citywide destination event. And we did it! Every Fall we have visitors and guests from all over the country from all levels and disciplines of cartooning visiting our city. We showcase animation, editorial cartoons, comic strips and, of course, comic books and graphic novels.
6. Can you tell us about your particular process as a cartoonist that both writes and draws? Do you start with a script or layouts?
Well, comics are both visual and literary, so my approach to writing involves doing both at the same time. My scripts don’t look like screenplays as much as very fast and loose comics. I try to write what the characters are saying simultaneously with a sketch of their expression and position within the frame. Even though I have a plan when I start, the process can be quite spontaneous and stream of consciousness. Later, as I go through the many stages of penciling and inking, more studied thought can go into finalizing the work before it goes to press.
7. You have completed a “Shazam” graphic novel which is a DC property. How did working with one of the Big Two compare to doing your own work? What was that experience like?
I had a wonderful time. Shazam came at a perfect moment for me. Having just completed thirteen years on BONE, I was having difficulty transitioning to a new project. RASL has a very different tone than BONE, so when DC’s executive editor Mike Carlin called to see if I was interested in the job, I said yes! I was given wide latitude to create any story I wanted, with their ultimate approval of course. It was fun to see when the movie came out a few of my touches were there, like the colored lights outside the subway train or the outfit Billy Batson wears.
8. Tuki is your book about the first human to leave Africa. Can you tell us what kind of tale you hope to unfold and when we can expect it to be released?
This is a story that takes place two million years ago about the ancient ancestors of our ancient ancestors. It chronicles a true period in our species history that we don’t hear much about in school when climate change, crucial encounters, and pivotal discoveries in Africa itself made us who we are today.
I’m an evolution buff and the approach I’m taking is an epic fantasy tale in the vein of Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Boroughs. I published the first 80 pages or so between 2013 and 2015, but then put the story on hiatus while I worked with Vijaya, Lucy Caswell and Tom Spurgeon to get CXC up and running – which I should point out was a full time job for about 5 years! During that period I reworked TUKI into a 200 page graphic novel that is 90% done, but there are no release plans yet.
9. It was announced that Netflix will be producing an animated version of BONE. You’ve had many ups and downs with getting this work produced into a film. What has changed with this momentous turn of events?
The biggest change is it won’t be a film. It will be an animated series which should work much better. The comic was serialized by chapters and the show allows us to develop the story in the same way. The main problem we encountered over and over again with the film studios was trying to cram a 1400 page epic into an hour and a half animated movie.
10. You’ve done quite a few interviews. In fact, there’s a book on Amazon collecting interviews with you from 1999-2017. What is one question you’ve always wished someone would ask?
Umm…what’s my favorite ice cream? No, wait. Scholastic asked me that in their BONE Handbook. The answer is Jeni’s Salty Caramel by the way!