The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

Interview: Jeff Smith

46 Interview —JEFF SMITH To date, Jeff Smith’s commercial success and critical attention has concentrated on his black-and-white bimonthly series Bone, published by Cartoon Books. Bone narrates the adventures of the three Bone cousins, who are slowly drawn into the political machinations and history of a valley filled with humans, dragons, rat creatures, talking bugs, and other fantastical beings. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Cartoon Books is an example of the creator-owned comics companies the self-publishing movement of the early 1990s was based on (Smith established Cartoon Books in July 1991, and his wife Vijaya Iyer is credited as publisher of Smith’s comics). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Bone’s success as a self-published comic was unprecedented and unmatched in the 1990s. Further, that success took place in an industry experiencing profound economic uncertainty. In 1993, American comics sales peaked at $1 billion, but from 1995 onwards sales fell dramatically; inflation, the evaporation of comic book speculation purchases by investors, and Marvel’s ill-judged acquisition of various comic- and non-comicrelated assets were some of the reasons later cited (Wright 2003, 283). In 1995 Smith decided to publish Bone through Image Comics to safeguard and extend his book’s ability to be distributed to comics shops. Image had been established in 1993 as a partnership between various creators who left Marvel in order to publish their own comics featuring characters they created and owned. Smith’s tenure at Image was a short one, however, and according to former Image Executive Director Larry Marder, Smith returned to publishing Bone solely through Cartoon Books when it was clear that his production costs as a self-publisher were less than the fixed production costs incurred by publishing through Image (Dean 2000). From 1993 onwards, the Bone comics have been reprinted in various formats: as a graphic narrative in its entirety, as a series of graphic novels collecting each of the nine chapters constituting the Bone narrative, and in smaller-sized, full-color books published by Scholastic, to name but three INTERVIEW: JEFF SMITH 47 of its versions (it was first published in collected editions under the rubric The Complete Bone Adventures). Since Bone’s conclusion Smith’s projects have included a miniseries featuring the original Captain Marvel, co-editing Fantagraphics ’s new series of Pogo collections (Walt Kelly’s seminal mid-twentieth -century comic strip), and in March 2008 the release of Smith’s RASL, an ongoing bimonthly self-published black-and-white comic from Cartoon Books, featuring a dimension-jumping fine art thief. The following is a summary of an interview conducted by telephone on December 4, 2007. Initially the interviewer asserted how The Rise of the American Comics Artist was exploring a transformation in the perception of comics in the press, in universities, and in the wider reading public since the late 1980s, before mentioning some of the writers discussed in this collection, such as Chris Ware and Jim Woodring. Jeff Smith: What happened in the last twenty years was down to a lot of the people you named, who were outside the mainstream at the time, but doing what basically became graphic novels. Will Eisner and a few others were trying to get people to call them graphic novels, but even in the early 1990s we were more likely to call them collections or trade paperbacks. Paul Williams: You raise the issue of graphic novels: Bone’s been available in a few different formats: the Complete Bone Adventures, and then you had the nine books [publishing each chapter of the story together]. JS: OK, well, from the beginning I saw Bone as a 1,300-page novel: Huckleberry Finn meets Moby Dick. I knew the story would have to be tight, and have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but in a marketplace driven by pamphlets—monthly or bimonthly chapter books—the story also had to be exciting and accessible for the reader. The question I asked myself was “How do I keep this story available for the reader?” If this is a single, giant story, how do you keep the first chapter available for new readers? At that time there was not really a trade paperback or graphic novel market. There was a back issue market, which was a big part of the economy of that time for comic stores. But with back issues, once they are sold, they’re gone. You can’t buy...