It would be nice to say Jeff Smith took the comic-book world by storm when Bone #1 appeared in July 1991. But in fact, the comics world barely noticed that first issue about three little cartoon-like creatures who wound up in a strange valley populated by humans, dragons and other strange beings.

Things have changed.

Aided by a few early enthusiastic reviews, especially in the Comics Buyer's Guide, Bone sales slowly began to grow. Around issue #6 or so, it reached critical mass, becoming a popular success that today includes multiple printings of the first issues, trade-paperback and now hardcover collections of every issue and various paraphernalia from refrigerator magnets to playing cards.

The story centers on three "Bones:" our hero Fone Bone, the greedy and manipulative Phoney Bone and the always-agreeable and rather morally vacuous Smiley Bone. Having been run out of Boneville by a citizenry outraged by Phoney's scams one time too many, the Bones enter the Valley, where they meet the beautiful Thorn, her grandmother Gran'ma Ben, her friend Lucius the tavern-keeper and others. They also meet the nasty but stupid Rat Creatures, ruled by Kingdoc, as well as other evil beings. Begun with humorous vignettes, the story evolved into something larger and more sinister as Gran'ma Ben revealed that Thorn is actually a princess destined to battle the Locust Lord.

Bone didn't jump full-blown from Smith's head onto the comics page. It had an initial four-year run in the Ohio State University daily Lantern, while Smith was a student there beginning in 1982. "I'd always loved Pogo and Doonesbury as comic strips, so in high school I played around with these characters, who'd I'd had in my mind for a long time," he said. "I'd always thought of doing a strip, but I didn't have a vehicle for them or a world for them to inhabit." His OSU strip, Thorn, loosely follows the same plot as the comic books, and it will continue to do so for a while longer, he said. But even with four years of daily strips, he never told the entire story of Bone and Thorn, as he will in the comic book. "The strip wasn't really too good," he said, looking back on it now. "There was some good stuff, and it was popular, but it was really my first attempt at blending Bugs Bunny-style characters with humans and a Lord of the Rings setting." Even so, he got offers to develop the strip for possible syndication from King Features and Tribune Media Services. But he said they disagreed with him about the direction. "They didn't think a continuity strip would sell at all," he said. "They wanted to push the humor side with only the Bone characters. But I was still stuck on the Lord of the Rings stuff."

As he developed his ideas, he went to work as an animator, opening his own shop called Character Builders with two partners. That background helped greatly in developing Bone, he said. "I firmly believe that cartooning is cartooning is cartooning, whether it's political cartoons, comics, strips or whatever," he said. "A lot of people don't agree with that, but I believe the only differences are some of the parameters and skills involved." (Once Bone took off, he sold his studio ownership to his partners. It still operates, having recently done a significant amount of animation for the Michael Jordan movie Space Jam.)

A major boost toward putting Bone into print came from the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? "That gave me a lot of hope for being able to mix human and cartoon characters," he said. "Everyone told me you couldn't do that, and that movie gave me the guts to take another crack at it. And by then, comic books seemed to be the place."

The comic-book market by the late 1980s had expanded to include many black-and-white and self-published comics, he said, offering more options than the Superman-Batman landscape he'd seen back in college. "Comic books offered me the most control over getting the work I wanted to do into print and in front of the market," he said.

The story that comic-book readers see today every other month has been extensively reworked from the college version, Smith said. "The characters were mostly there, the personalities were all there, and the plot was there on a surface level," he said. "But in college, I didn't know why or what I was doing. I had good characters and I could put them into funny situations, but I didn't know why the Bones were in this valley that had humans in it or what they were doing there. As I developed the strip over four years of working on it every day, I got more feeling for the story. I also learned a lot about what I liked to draw and what type of humor I like." Smith has the basic plot for the entire series outlined, but he strays from that as often as he wants. The comic strip made it only through the second part of his three-part epic; the comic book is now part way into part two as well, but it's about to stray. "I was getting the feeling from the readers that all the revelations about Thorn's past and this Lord of Locusts' stuff was a little too dark and gloomy," he said. "People wanted more funny stuff."

As a result, he's going to spend the next six issues (a full year) splitting off Phone Bone, Smiley Bone and the Rat Creature on a separate adventure with a mountain lion named Rockjaw. "I'm going to have some fun with them, and at the end of that, I know where everyone needs to be to continue on with the main plot," he said. "Overall, the story is very tightly plotted, but it's not structured so tightly that if I think of something fun, I can't just go off and do it."

Fun plays a major role in Bone, through both verbal and physical comedy, which Smith describes as "chaotic" humor. "The more out of control things get, the better," he laughed. That is epitomized by the Cow Race sequence in issues #9 and #10. It featured Gran'ma Ben racing a bunch of cows, including Smiley Bone dressed in a cow suit. Along the way, Fone and Smiley ran into a pack of Rat Creatures, and all wound up racing, chasing and running for their lives toward the finishing line in a stampede that scattered everyone to the winds.

"There was no Cow Race in the college strip," he said. "By the time I began working on the comic book, I understood how to pace something out for chaos-and the Cow Race may be the most chaotic thing ever done in comics! It's for things like the Cow Race that I would never go back to doing a comic strip. Comic books are such a superior canvas for pacing a story. Certainly, Al Capp could do things like that with his Sadie Hawkins' Day races, which were similar. But I think it's better to build and build and build for 20 pages until the chaos and tension are just where I want them to go without the constraints of the four little two-inch panel boxes."

Smith paces his stories systematically, relying extensively on a three-tiered, six-panel page. He uses each same-sized panel as his camera, inside which he directs the action. "I use that format to set up a certain rhythm for the story that the reader comes to expect, sometimes subconsciously," he explained. "That way I know that when I change it, the readers will get the feeling that something big is about to happen, without me having to say it clearly."

That pacing may come fast or slow, however. His basic storytelling approach is to do a quick outline, maybe eight or nine sentences in all, that describe the basic plot points. This may include a few character sketches or expressions to aid in conveying what he has in mind. "I think very visually," he said. "And since I'm doing the writing and drawing, I don't have to explain it to another person, as often happens with comics."

Then he paces his story with thumbnail pages-literally. Each is only slightly bigger than your thumbnail, measuring about 3/4-inch by 114-inch."Some of these will just contain a few words or a quick picture, because they're pretty clear in my head," he said. "I just need to block out how many panels they'll take." With each page blocked out, he draws his "script," concentrating on camera angles, rough dialogue, and other elements in little quick sketches panel by panel.

"Once I get going, I play-act it out, picturing each character and hearing them talk their parts out, just like a movie." He scribbles and doodles down this script as fast as he can to ensure it flows smoothly, then transfers that basic hand-drawn script to the final Bristol boards. "I do the script as fast as I can, to get it all down and remember the expressions just right," he said. "And more and more, I'm finding that I commit to that doodle when I do the final pencil."

He used to redraw and fine-tune the characters' positions from the script, he said, but he wasn't satisfied. "I find that when I redraw it and fix it up, the drawing sometimes gets stiff and loses its spontaneity. There's a lot of magic in that original doodle, so I try to replicate that doodle that I first put down on paper. I think it taps into something that I don't want to lose. Once I get away from that creative energy to concentrate on my drawing skills, I still have to stay connected to that original energy flow."

That includes going "off model," an animation term for not exactly matching the character's style sheet. "Sometimes in my script, I get these magical expressions, especially for Thorn-who I have a little less control over," he said. "When I draw it on the page so it's 'anatomically correct,' I lose the great expression that the doodle had. So I go back and change it until it looks right. It's not Thorn 'on model,' but I like it, and it communicates the inner thought I want to keep. She's 'on model' about 90 percent of the time, but I'll change her if I need to get what I want and it doesn't stop the reader."
Bone first saw print as Thorn, in the Ohio State University Lantern between 1982 and 1986. Although both the strip and the current comic book loosely are following the same plot, Smith says he enjoys the freedom of the comic page too much to consider doing a comic strip again. He seldom finds he needs a different camera angle than his initial instinct led him to, but he sometimes has to change the pacing by moving actions to the next page or condensing down his original plan. "I try to change the pacing as little as possible, but I'm working on #27 right now, and I'm having to make a lot of those little decisions. It's really a slow process when you change them, because it breaks up the flow," especially within a fairly rigid six-panel grid.

"I very seldom will conclude a scene with a standard panel," he said. "If I use just a regular panel, there's no clue to the reader that something has changed. And I would never end a scene in the middle of a page. I've seen people do that in comics, and I never can make that work. It's a puzzle, to break down everything and control the speed of moving from panel to panel. Sometimes when I read it back, the flow is too fast or too slow to be realistic for the characters, and I have to change things around. You know," he laughed, "I wonder if readers ever think about the number of steps and the amount of work that have to go into a comic to make it work?"

Smith lays his balloons on the page first, using a computerized font he developed, and then pencils the action. "I thought I did pretty tight pencils," he laughs. "But Steve Bissette (creator of Tyrant) was at my house one day, and he couldn't believe how loose my pencils were. He said, 'You could never give these to an inker!' I said, 'You're kidding! What the hell does an inker do?' "

He commits to a layout and a line in the pencil, he said, "But inking is definitely part of the drawing for me. It's what the reader sees, so it's extremely important. I consider inking to be the actual art, especially after I've spotted my blacks. I like to layer the blacks and use them to make things look closer or farther away and achieve other effects." He looks to Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Frank Miller (Sin City), his two favorite current cartoonists, for inspiration in achieving that mood.

He began inking Bone with a crow quill pen, but now he uses a brush. "I tried a brush after I finished inking #1 with a pen," he laughs. "And I'm never going back! I inked with a pen for 30 years before trying a brush, and it was magic. I get way more control and I can ink three times as fast!"

Although he tries to commit to his pencil line, he admits that's not an absolute. "I consider the whole project 'live' until it leaves for the printer," he said. "With me, unfortunately, it's still possible to make changes at any point in the process, so I like to keep all the boards visible, laid out on the floor or up on the wall, so I can constantly reread them and make sure I like the flow and design."

Since he's the plotter, scripter, letterer, penciler, and inker all rolled into one, does he have one favorite part? "My favorite part of the whole process," he said, "is pulling it out of the box from the printer. I love to look at it and hold it in my hands and see all those elements come together with the color cover and the logos and everything. Reading it in the book is different than reading the original pages, even when I have it all done. It becomes this new animal. Something comes alive when it's printed."