Welcome to OEMED!, a series of monthly interviews with various creators, both writers and artists, mayhaps even an editor or two. If you’re not familiar with my work, look me up on Google, I have enough to type already.

These interviews should be fun and informative; from the POV of one artist/writer getting into the mind of another creator, helping readers get into our mindset. I won’t be asking about specific projects, but about the process behind those projects. I will try and be as honest as possible about myself, and with whom I am interviewing, and I won’t pull any punches if I have them, while at the same time, remaining respectful.

This month, we’ll get to know Jeff Smith. You can check out BONE and his other works at Midtown Comics or your local comics retailer.

Mike: Jeff Smith, what a treat to get to interview you. Every night for a few months, I’d read a few pages from the complete BONE to my son at bedtime. It’s a ritual. It’s his Lord of the Rings.

Jeff: I’ve been looking forward to this, Mike. I like this idea of one cartoonist asking another one questions. The world clamors for more beer-fueled conversations about pen tips.

M: Give us just a bit of your background. What was your childhood like? Early on, mine was kind of screwed up, so I spent a lot of time fantasizing in my skull. I think that’s where a lot of my imagination and storytelling was seeded. How about you? Do you think your earliest years affected your creativity, or did that come later?

J: I liked to sit inside and draw, but I spent a lot of time outside climbing trees and exploring ravines. My parents used to take me to Old Man’s Cave here in Hocking Hills, Ohio, where I could climb rocks and explore the different caves. My folks weren’t rich, but they spent a lot of time with my brother and me, taking us to state parks and historical sites. My mom painted and the family liked joking around and making each other laugh.

M: Wow, that actually sounds a lot like your comics… I remember trying to write a Star Blazers story when I was a kid. I never finished it, though. My ideas were too big for my little head then. What was the first real story you wrote?

J: In the ninth or tenth grade I decided to ask a teacher if I could draw my report on the Trojan War instead of writing it. I had written little stories before, mostly about the Bones chasing each other and falling off cliffs, but this was the first time I did it for real, structuring a story from beginning to end, drawing it with pencil on oversized boards and then inking it. It was the first thing I ever inked, and I smeared my hand in the wet parts, of course, and I sneezed once through the little hole in the nib. That’s what I learned: If you’re going to sneeze, stop inking!

M: Yeah, so for those of you who don’t know, the Bones have been around with Jeff most of his life. What was your introduction to comics? Do you remember the early books; whether they influenced you or not?

J: In the late sixties, it was harder to find comics, because the grocer might not bother to put them out, so hunting down your favorite books was a big job. My main memory of comic books back then was riding bikes with friends all over town trying to find the latest issue of Neal Adams’ Batman. I remember one kid, Mike Brooks, had an unbelievable comic book collection; the first I’d ever seen. His mom let him use a whole wall of shelves in her laundry room for comics. That’s where I saw Uncle Scrooge in Disney’s Comics & Stories for the first time. But the two most exciting things in my preteen years were Pogo and MAD. Pogo and MAD Magazine were the only things that told kids the truth, and they were the best-drawn comics anywhere. I used to read them over and over again.

M: I hadn’t thought of that… MAD really did say the things for kids they couldn’t or weren’t allowed to say. What about your middle years-early teens? What were those years like? Were you drawing then; were you running around with a gang, slicing tires and burning down national monuments?

J: Always drawing. Drawing was almost like breathing. I did it without thinking, especially in class. Even when I lost interest in comics, I still drew naked girls.

M: What experiences from your youth slipped into comics? Any themes you find now that Bone is finished that you realize were somehow from your childhood?

J: Well, Fone Bone seems to share my adolescent, put-‘em-on-a-pedestal fascination with women.

M: What about school? I assume by high school you were known as the kid who could draw?

J: Yeah. I had friends who could draw, and we pushed each other on. Jim Kammerud, who became my partner later when we owned an animation studio, would always discover some new drawing tool. He was the first person I knew who tried to use a Rapid-o-graph. Remember those awful things? They were always getting clogged up. But it was honest to god India ink, and it was easier to use than pen tips! Jim tried inking with a brush before I did, too.

M: Funny, I recently did some cleaning and found my Rapid-o-graph set. It was costly, and had a lot of memories; it was hard to throw out, but I hadn’t seen them in like 10 years! Get many chicks with that drawing ability?

J: Being the guy who can draw isn’t the hottest thing you can be in high school. But I got around all right.

M: After high school, did you go to art college?

J: I got some scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design, a good school with a national reputation. Unfortunately, I didn’t fit in. In the late ‘70s, there were only two kinds of artists you could study to be: a fine artist or a commercial artist. A cartoonist is neither and both. I clashed with the staff and quit before Christmas. I ended up going across town to Ohio State where they had a daily student newspaper I could draw cartoons for. The only thing I really liked about college was Art History. The history of Western Art is the history of Western Civilization. It was eye-opening. We don’t move forward without art.

M: What do you mean by that exactly?

J: Artists make art about what’s true. The real truth; not the politically twisted truths of the moment.

M: What were you doing before BONE? You studied animation, right?

J: No, I just played around with animation for the fun of it. So did my pal, Jim. We took some film classes at OSU, and we met another student named Marty Fuller who was studying animation, and the three of us thought we could pool our resources and start a company to work on commercial animation projects, which we did with varying degrees of success for years, before I left to start my comic book.

M: How did Bone first start to form in your mind, and how did you get it to paper?

J: I had been working on the idea of the Bone cousins being lost in a fairy tale land for a while. A fish out of water kind of thing, pitting the modern cousins against the quaint ways of the local people. This was a combination of my childhood loves of Uncle Scrooge and Pogo, with the late seventies fantasy stuff like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Heavy Metal Magazine. The really interesting thing about the Bone college strip was that it made me ask, what’s the point? The characters were pretty solid and the strip was funny, but why? Why were the Bones lost, and why should we care what happens to anybody in this story? I drew the Bone characters every day for four years getting by on college level humor and small bits of continuity, and by the time I finished, a story began to take shape in my mind. A story that I thought would be worth telling.

M: I know the story has been told a million times, but tell me about how Bone started out; self-publishing it and all.

J: The key was finding out that comic book stores existed… after that I just did a little research, drew a comic and there you go. Pure luck, really. I got friendly with some of the local shop owners and started tagging along with them to industry events, and because of that, most of my first contacts in the field were with comics shop retailers. I would go to the Diamond Retailer sales conference, and since I didn’t know anybody I would hang out in the lounge with Jim Hanley, Rory Root, Joe Field, Chuck Rosanski, and all those kinds of guys. My first year or so in comics was like that. Later on, I started to meet other artists like Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess, and Dave Sim. Also in the lounge, I might add.

M: Reading Bone, I loved the arc in theme as well as characters. Reading the Complete Bone was really the best way to read this. Clearly, you had all these character arcs planned out from the start. Did you have a tight outline on hand, or was it in your head?

J: Writing a story is an organic experience, no matter how carefully planned it is. With BONE, I had the main ideas written down, and I knew the Bone cousins would leave the valley and go home. I also knew Thorn would rule the Kingdom without a king, that was important to me — I didn’t want her to need a Prince Charming. But even with charts and complicated outlines, the story grew and changed as it went, just like real life does. In fact, the tale unfolded in a pretty naturalistic, living way that felt real while I was writing it, and I hope it rings true for readers as well.

M: It sure has. It’s real for my son. We go hiking in the woods and he’ll always make a comment like “Look, I’m Fone Bone!” It used to be Frodo, so pat yourself on the back about that one… What about Lord of the Rings? Is it me or was that an influence on your work as much Pogo and such?

J: The Lord of the Rings was instrumental in showing me the way a fully formed world could be brought into existence. Thinking of the world as if it had real geography and each of its people having their own culture.

M: I really dig how it starts out as a cute “funny book” and then gets so big and deep. Did you find that a problem with marketing; while your fans grew, do you think you lost a few that didn’t want the book to get so dark?

J: Some people complained, I suppose, because they thought Bone was going to be an endless comic like Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge. But in the end, I was sure readers would like the idea of a single story that had a true beginning, middle, and end. Besides, it was too late to stop. And I knew the one volume edition would drive comic book fans nuts. No one can resist a five-pound comic!

M: What about marketing the book? I can imagine Disney or some video game company coming to you early on wanting Bone, thinking it’s this cute little book; then you lay it on them how deep it is. Was that actually a problem for you?

J: Yes, but not the way you would think. It’s the opposite problem. The “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father” aspect of Thorn’s story is something Hollywood execs can see right away. The tricky part seems to be shoehorning both Thorn’s epic story in with the Bone’s seemingly smaller story. Bone’s story is ultimately the more important of the two, but Thorn’s is more conventional in many ways, and it tends to take over in an 80-minute screenplay.

M: How did you plan Bone from issue to issue? What was your writing process like on it, and how has it changed?

J: Well, in the early days, with the open road stretched out in front of you, planning was easy. You just wrote what worked and was funny without worrying if all the plot points had been made. If you didn’t have room for some idea, it could wait for the next issue, or even the one after that. Toward the end, when I was trying to bring this speeding, billion-ton tanker to a halt, the planning became a nightmare. There were so many threads to tie up, and so much information that still had to go in, the final issues took months to write. I had so many charts and complicated graphs that sometimes I would forget to look at the right one and have to start over.

M: Well it paid off, bro. You tied it up nice. I remember the shock reading Bone to my son when I saw the Giant Balloon! I often look back at those scary days; the early days of my career, when I really didn’t know if I was going to make it. Some dark days there, buddy. How about you; what do you feel when you look back on the early days of Bone, both professionally and personally?

J: Dude, I’m still worried I’m not going to make it.

M: Do you find your life finding its way into your writing?

J: Always. What else do you write about? You just have to disguise it bit, so people won’t recognize the argument you’re writing between two hairy monsters is really just a fight you had with your wife the night before.

M: I love it when I write bits of my life, or my friends into a story, and don’t realize that until much later. Has that happened to you?

J: One day someone told me that Thorn looks just like Vijaya, my wife. I hadn’t thought I was drawing her, but suddenly I could see it! The way Thorn leans forward to listen, the way she brushes her hair behind her ears; it’s Vijaya.

M: Bone had a sense of world, part of which was a spiritual world. Do you have a religious background, and did you find any of those themes working into Bone or your other works?

J: There’s religion in BONE, but no religious message. There’s obviously more to our existence than what we can see, and people are always trying to come to grips with it. People all over the globe struggle to understand the Mystery, and that is what I was trying to portray in BONE by giving the characters a belief system. It adds another level of reality to that sense of world.

M: I’m a huge mythology fan. I can tell you are, too. Have you ever read the works of Joseph Campbell?

J: I have. I read Campbell’s most famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces while writing The Great Cow Race. What Campbell does is compare the world’s religions and folk tales, looking for what they have in common. I thought, “That’s interesting!” Most people would have focused on what was different. From there, I not only read everything of his I could get my hands on, I started reading mythology on my own. Hindu, Greek, Nordic, American Indian. The Dreaming from Australia really caught my eye. The key thing for me in Campbell’s books is the discussion on symbolism. He shows that the symbols in mythology are the same as the ones Carl Jung cataloged in our dreams. In other words, some symbols are hardwired into us! I love symbolism, anyway. You can use this stuff in your art. It all dovetails nicely with the symbolism I learned in Art History. What I discovered from a storytelling perspective is that a structure, like through-lines and turning points, can give your story a horizontal line from beginning to end, but mythology gives it a vertical one; gives it depth.

M: I have several of his speeches on CD, including a great one with Bill Moyers that’s like SIX discs. I highly recommend them. Right now, I’m comparing JOB with the ODYSSEY… We’ll have to have a talk about that stuff over some beers… What kind of symbology made its way into Bone?

J: I use water a lot. Fone Bone falls off waterfalls, and meets Thorn in a hot spring. The dragon pops up out of a well. Water is important to us, and it’s a very traditional storytelling symbol. King Arthur was given his sword, Excalibur, by the Lady of the Lake, and whenever the Knights of the Roundtable come across a fountain surrounded by virgins in the middle of nowhere, you know an adventure is about to happen.

M: When you started Bone, did you have a family? Or were you a single cat about the town?

J: My cattin’ days were behind me. In fact, it was when I met Vijaya that I started to take my cartoons seriously.

M: How about now?

J: No kids. I mean, I love kids, I just prefer to visit somebody else’s, get them riled up just before bedtime, then leave. Makes you want to invite me over, doesn’t it?

M: Don’t get my boy riled up; he might put a hurting on you. Ask David Mack. I have to tell you, doing what we do and having kids is hard, at least for me, because I find my work incredibly selfish. For me, it’s very time-consuming and solitary; I’m always second-guessing how much time I’m working and how much is family time… I work at home, it’s great, I love it, but I think I work too much. Sometimes my studio becomes a weird time warp and I can’t get out; the outside world becomes my enemy. Do you work at home or have a studio?

J: Yeah, Holidays are rough. I always forget and think, “Oh, I have another week to work on this — oh no I don’t, it’s Christmas! Fuck!” Once you get wound up and the deadline clock is on, you lose proportion. Everything is big, and nothing is small. I scream and rip my hair out every time an issue goes to press. It’s ugly, and I hope nobody ever sees it. When I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I rented a separate little A-frame cottage in the middle of the Redwoods. Everything there was geared toward making comics. I had no phone, no TV. Just paper, brushes, books, and music. Now that I’m back in Ohio, I have a private studio as well as an office at Cartoon Books where Vijaya works with Steve and Kathleen. And I still go nuts when I work.

M: Tell me more about your little working family; your wife (like, how do you pronounce her name), and Steve and Kathleen.

J: It’s pronounced Vee-JAY-ah. Vijaya is my partner here at Cartoon Books. The basic breakdown is she handles the business and licensing, while I take care of promotion and creating the books. That’s too simple of course. We work together, but that’s the gist. Kathleen Glosan is our production manager. Steve Hamaker is my art assistant, working on all artwork that isn’t my actual comic. Right now Steve is coloring the BONE saga for Scholastic, and he just started coloring the mini-series I’m doing for DC.

M: Some days the work takes over my mind and anything that’s not that work grinds on me. Have you ever been overwhelmed by your work? Not how much you have, but the ideas, the force of the work; has it ever overcome you?

J: I worked on Bone for 12 or 18 hours a day, usually starting at 5 am. Deadlines used to make me insane, and I never seemed to be able to get out in front of them for even a moment. I wanted everything perfect, and it takes forever. When you’re putting that much effort — that much emotional power and energy into something, it makes it difficult to keep space available for anything else. Pay the bills, or take out the trash; how could you even ask? When I would stop working for something important, like say, Thanksgiving, it would only be because I had to. And if I’m interrupted in the middle of working, I swear, it’s like emerging from a dream or something. I can see Kathleen or Steve’s mouth moving, but it takes a second before I can hear the words.

M: Oh my God, you are my soul brother. No shit; it’s crazy if I’m broken out of my work, or if I fall into the ideas when I’m out. It’s like I’m Homer Simpson thinking about hamburgers while people are yapping at me. I love driving; stories really flow for me then, but usually I miss my exits and stuff; my son constantly mocks me for it. It’s easy enough for the life to fall apart being that deep into the work, thank god for our families to run our lives for us!

How do you see your work objectively? I find it too easy to be in my own head and I think the work can suffer for that; at least my writing. How do you know you are conveying your story clearly and that your pacing is right?

J: For some reason, I can view my own work critically. I can look at it and see right away if it’s shit or not. At each step of the process, when the panels are penciled, and then again when they’re inked, I read and reread any given sequence to feel it moving. I learned that the timing changes as the panels become more finished. Inking and background details give your eye more things to linger over and can slow you down. The trick is first to figure out what needs to be done to fix it, and then to be willing to start over if that’s what it takes. And I’ve done that. My words and drawings aren’t precious; if a sequence isn’t reading, then I need to make it work.

M: Enough of work, what do you do outside of drawing and writing? Are you involved in any covert CIA operations? Mark Millar said you do “wet works.”

J: I have a pit bull named Preston that I like to run with. I love to travel, eat good food and drink good wine. I love to visit New York and play with my cartoonist pals. And I read comics. I’m re-reading Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, one of the most perfectly constructed graphic novels of the last few years; and I’m on book three of Tezuka’s Buddha. I’m exploring web comics. Web comics are fascinating because there are no market forces. These artists do whatever their muses tell them. And they use color. My generation of do-it-yourselfers had to print booklets in black & white, but this group is free to use digital pallets of infinite complexity. There are a bunch of artists who post at the FLIGHT forum, and the links take you to sites that look like old school Disney. You know, Mike, I’m a big fan of yours. I love that booklet you have at shows with drawings of nymphs and fairies. If you ever want to do that short story we talked about, Naked Fairy Wars, let me know.

M: My son, who loves Bone, has asked me to ask you if you will ever do more Bone, and if he will ever drive a racecar?

J: The answers are Yes, and Yes.

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Check out more Jeff Smith at www.boneville.com.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming @ aol.com.