Bringing Home the BONE, Part 1

Creator Jeff Smith brings his celebrated fantasy saga to an end

By Arnold T. Blumberg     September 04, 2002

Talk about BONE to most people, and they might look at you as if you were nuts. If you mention "stupid, stupid rat creatures," they might even haul you off to the funny farm. But for a select group of comic book enthusiasts who have been fortunate enough to discover Jeff Smith's delightful fantasy adventure series about three traveling brothers - Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone - and their many adventures, asking them if they're getting enough Bone will not be taken the wrong way. Unfortunately, their answer might soon be "no," because Smith is about to end his long-running saga. No more BONE? Say it isn't so!

"When I started out, I knew I wanted to tell one complete story," says Smith, whose Cartoon Books has been publishing BONE since July 1991 (apart from a brief sojourn with Image). "Before I even started the first issue, I sat down and I wrote the last three issues. [BONE is] probably the first comic that was planned to be a complete book. Even [the creators of] SANDMAN and CEREBUS didn't decide to end their runs until they'd been into the storyline for a while."

BONE is a fantasy/adventure hybrid that blends the cartoon sensibilities of Walt Kelly's Pogo with the epic grandeur of a Tolkien-esque journey.

"It's a little bit like turning loose Uncle Scrooge and Bugs Bunny in THE LORD OF THE RINGS," says Smith.

It's an odd mix, but it works like a charm, and the inspiration goes all the way back to just before Smith's senior year of high school.

"To this day I don't know what I was thinking," jokes Smith. "1977 was the summer before my senior year. I read LORD OF THE RINGS, saw STAR WARS, and that same summer, [SF comic magazine] HEAVY METAL came out. I went ballistic. It was good fantasy too - none of this DUNGEONS & DRAGONS bad sword and sorcery."

In college, Smith began to experiment with a cast of characters that would one day form the foundation for BONE.

"I'd done a dry run on BONE in my college newspaper every day for four years," says Smith. "I knew as a kid I enjoyed Uncle Scrooge and Pogo - cartoony characters - [and] I just thought it seemed natural to put traditional American cartoon characters into that world. I figured there would be other people like me who would enjoy it, and I was right."

While the comic book industry tends to focus an inordinate amount of energy on the superhero genre, Smith's series took elements of high fantasy, 'funny animal' books and cartoon strips and created a unique saga that could not be easily labeled. Indeed, Smith resists any labeling.

"The 'all ages' label has definitely stuck itself to me whether I like it or not," says Smith. "Now there's a lot of attention coming from the librarians, who are putting a new label on it - 'young adult.' Neither is accurate to me. I chafe at labeling."

For Smith, BONE is simply the story he's wanted to read since he was 10 years old.

"I'm writing this for me," says Smith. "In some sense I guess I'm writing it for 10-year-old boys, but on the other hand I put a lot of things in the book that would not necessarily interest a kid, [like] philosophy [and] mythology. That being said, I don't put mythology and symbolism in that any reader - adult or child - will notice. It's in there like a skeleton to hold up the rest of the story."

"Some of what we consider the lowest level children's stuff, like fairy tales, are really creepy dark," says Smith. "Man, that is some strange stuff - a lot of people getting eaten and it's pretty horrible. That's good stuff for adults and for kids, because the world is really dark and oppressive. It's good to get a little software, because that's what it is - software for the kids to download so they have some preparation for life, which can be a pretty rough, sorrowful affair."

Next time, we'll see how BONE stacks up against the superhero genre, and we'll learn some secrets of the big 50th issue!

TO BE CONTINUED