Jeff Smith (cartoonist) - Career

Career

In 1991, Smith launched his company, Cartoon Books, in order to publish his comic book series Bone. Smith published 55 issues of Bone between 1991 and 2004, blending influences from artists and writers such as Walt Kelly, Carl Barks, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The black and white comic book proved very successful, and has been collected in a number of trade paperback and hardback collections, including a series of nine books that collect all 55 issues, originally published by Cartoon Books in black and white, and more recently reissued in color by the Graphix imprint of Scholastic. In 2004, when Cartoon Books released a "mammoth" one-volume black and white collection of the entire nine-volume series, Time critic Andrew Arnold called Bone "the best all-ages graphic novel yet published."

In 1994 Smith created an original cover for Dan DeBono's Indy - The Independent Comic Guide (issue 13), and was interviewed to help to promote his and other alternative comics.

Two additional volumes, Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails and Rose, collect a number of Bone prequel comics created by Smith, working with collaborators.

In 2003, Smith began work for DC Comics on a miniseries starring Captain Marvel, a superhero character Smith is a fan of. The series, entitled Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, was published in four prestige format issues in 2007, and later collected into a hardcover edition.

In 2007, Fantagraphics Books named Smith as the designer for an upcoming series of books collecting the complete run of Walt Kelly's Pogo. He also designed the cover art for Say Anything's album In Defense of the Genre.

Smith released the first issue of RASL, "a stark, sci-fi series about a dimension-jumping art thief with personal problems", in February, 2008. A six page preview was shown on the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con. Originally intending RASL to be released in an over-sized format, Smith consulted with retailers who unanimously cautioned him against the unconventional size. Smith now self-publishes RASL as a standard-sized, ad-free, black and white comic book. The first trade paperback, titled "The Drift", is in stores in the originally intended oversized format.

Smith's art was featured in a pair of museum shows in Columbus during summer 2008: "Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond" at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and "Jeff Smith: Before Bone" at the Cartoon Research Library of Ohio State University. The exhibits were featured in a segment on the PBS news program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on July 21, 2008.

In 2009, Smith was featured in The Cartoonist, a documentary film on his life and work.

Smith also wrote Little Mouse Gets Ready, a 32-page children's graphic novel aimed at very young "emerging readers." This book was released in September 2009 from Toon Books, the children's book line launched by cartoonist Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly. In a February 2009 Newsarama interview, Smith noted that the book featured another character Smith created in his childhood, "a little gray mouse with a little red vest."