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Jeff Smith (cartoonist)
Jeff Smith (born February 27, 1960) is an American cartoonist. He is best known as the creator of the self-published comic book series Bone.
He has received numerous Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards for his work, and in 2026 was nominated for the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.
Smith was born on February 27, 1960, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His parents are William Earl Smith and Barbara Goodsell. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
Smith learned about cartooning through comic strips, comic books, and animated TV shows. The strip he found to be the most entertaining was Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. His father read it to him every Sunday, and it inspired him to learn to read. Smith was also inspired by Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks, whom Smith calls a "natural comic genius" for his ability to move characters effectively from panel to panel, and for their expressiveness. Alluding to the influence of Barks on Bone, Smith commented, "I always wanted Uncle Scrooge to go on a longer adventure. I thought, 'Man, if you could just get a comic book of that quality, the length of say, War and Peace, or The Odyssey or something, that would be something I would love to read, and even as a kid I looked everywhere for that book, that Uncle Scrooge story that was 1,100 pages long." Another seminal influence was the television program The Pogo Special Birthday Special, which Smith saw at age nine. The show was created by Walt Kelly and Chuck Jones, whom Smith later called "two of my most favorite people". The day after that program aired, a girl brought her father's Pogo book to school and gave it to Smith, who says it "changed comics" for him. Smith keeps that book on a table next to his drawing board to this day, and refers to Kelly as his "biggest influence in writing comics".
Smith has cited Moby Dick as his favorite book, citing its multi-layered narrative and symbolism, and placed numerous references to it in Bone. He has also cited Huckleberry Finn as a story after which he attempted to pattern Bone structurally, explaining, "the kinds of stories I’m drawn to, like Huckleberry Finn, are the ones that start off very simple, almost like children’s stories...but as it goes on, it gets a little darker, and the themes become a little more sophisticated and more complex—and those are really the kinds of stories that just get me going." Other influences in this regard include the original Star Wars trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the classic fairy tales and mythologies that inspired those works.
Smith says the earliest forerunner drawings of what later became Bone and his cousins occurred when he was about five, and sitting in his living room drawing, and he drew what looked like an old C-shaped telephone handset receiver, which emerged as a frowning character with its mouth wide open. Elements of that character and its demeanor found their way into the character Phoney Bone, the upset cousin to Bone. His name is derived from Fonebone, the generic surname that Don Martin gave to many of the characters that appeared in his Mad magazine strips. Smith began to create comics with the Bone characters as early as 1970, when he was about 9 years old.
Smith graduated in 1978 from Worthington High School in Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, where he was a classmate of Jim Kammerud. Later on, in 1986, Smith and Kammerud co-founded Character Builders, an animation studio in Columbus where Smith worked until 1992. After high school, Smith attended the Ohio State University, and while there he created a comic strip called Thorn for the student newspaper, The Lantern, which included some of the characters who later featured in the Bone series. He also studied animation.
After graduating from college, Smith and his two friends, Jim Kammerud and Marty Fuller, started an animation studio called Character Builders Inc. Their first paid job was producing a 60-second animated opening for the TV series Super Safari with Jack Hanna. Other jobs followed for clients such as White Castle, sequences in films that the studio was given when other studios fell behind, and a claymation project that they were given following the rise in popularity of The California Raisins. Initial budgets were restrictive for the studio, which required the animators to be resourceful in order to meet their deadlines. Smith sometimes did the voice work as well as the animation on certain projects, and the animators sometimes had family members come in on some evenings to paint animation cells. Though Smith found the projects exciting, he realized that it was not the type of cartooning he wanted to do, which was complicated by periods in which the studio had no work. It was during one of these slow periods that Smith reconsidered his career. Drawn to the idea that he could produce his own animated-type story but in the comics medium, and convinced by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore's Watchmen that a serious comic book with a beginning, middle and end structure was both artistically and commercially viable, Smith decided to produce Bone.
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Jeff Smith (cartoonist)
Jeff Smith (born February 27, 1960) is an American cartoonist. He is best known as the creator of the self-published comic book series Bone.
He has received numerous Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards for his work, and in 2026 was nominated for the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.
Smith was born on February 27, 1960, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. His parents are William Earl Smith and Barbara Goodsell. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
Smith learned about cartooning through comic strips, comic books, and animated TV shows. The strip he found to be the most entertaining was Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. His father read it to him every Sunday, and it inspired him to learn to read. Smith was also inspired by Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks, whom Smith calls a "natural comic genius" for his ability to move characters effectively from panel to panel, and for their expressiveness. Alluding to the influence of Barks on Bone, Smith commented, "I always wanted Uncle Scrooge to go on a longer adventure. I thought, 'Man, if you could just get a comic book of that quality, the length of say, War and Peace, or The Odyssey or something, that would be something I would love to read, and even as a kid I looked everywhere for that book, that Uncle Scrooge story that was 1,100 pages long." Another seminal influence was the television program The Pogo Special Birthday Special, which Smith saw at age nine. The show was created by Walt Kelly and Chuck Jones, whom Smith later called "two of my most favorite people". The day after that program aired, a girl brought her father's Pogo book to school and gave it to Smith, who says it "changed comics" for him. Smith keeps that book on a table next to his drawing board to this day, and refers to Kelly as his "biggest influence in writing comics".
Smith has cited Moby Dick as his favorite book, citing its multi-layered narrative and symbolism, and placed numerous references to it in Bone. He has also cited Huckleberry Finn as a story after which he attempted to pattern Bone structurally, explaining, "the kinds of stories I’m drawn to, like Huckleberry Finn, are the ones that start off very simple, almost like children’s stories...but as it goes on, it gets a little darker, and the themes become a little more sophisticated and more complex—and those are really the kinds of stories that just get me going." Other influences in this regard include the original Star Wars trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the classic fairy tales and mythologies that inspired those works.
Smith says the earliest forerunner drawings of what later became Bone and his cousins occurred when he was about five, and sitting in his living room drawing, and he drew what looked like an old C-shaped telephone handset receiver, which emerged as a frowning character with its mouth wide open. Elements of that character and its demeanor found their way into the character Phoney Bone, the upset cousin to Bone. His name is derived from Fonebone, the generic surname that Don Martin gave to many of the characters that appeared in his Mad magazine strips. Smith began to create comics with the Bone characters as early as 1970, when he was about 9 years old.
Smith graduated in 1978 from Worthington High School in Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, where he was a classmate of Jim Kammerud. Later on, in 1986, Smith and Kammerud co-founded Character Builders, an animation studio in Columbus where Smith worked until 1992. After high school, Smith attended the Ohio State University, and while there he created a comic strip called Thorn for the student newspaper, The Lantern, which included some of the characters who later featured in the Bone series. He also studied animation.
After graduating from college, Smith and his two friends, Jim Kammerud and Marty Fuller, started an animation studio called Character Builders Inc. Their first paid job was producing a 60-second animated opening for the TV series Super Safari with Jack Hanna. Other jobs followed for clients such as White Castle, sequences in films that the studio was given when other studios fell behind, and a claymation project that they were given following the rise in popularity of The California Raisins. Initial budgets were restrictive for the studio, which required the animators to be resourceful in order to meet their deadlines. Smith sometimes did the voice work as well as the animation on certain projects, and the animators sometimes had family members come in on some evenings to paint animation cells. Though Smith found the projects exciting, he realized that it was not the type of cartooning he wanted to do, which was complicated by periods in which the studio had no work. It was during one of these slow periods that Smith reconsidered his career. Drawn to the idea that he could produce his own animated-type story but in the comics medium, and convinced by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore's Watchmen that a serious comic book with a beginning, middle and end structure was both artistically and commercially viable, Smith decided to produce Bone.