From: [j r m] at [grove.ufl.edu] (Geoffrey R Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.info
Subject: INTERVIEW: Jeff "Bone" Smith (LONG)
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 96 02:32:36 GMT

Bone Gets a New Image
Jeff Smith Interview
by Jeff Mason

This file is available as: http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/smith.html
LOTS of reviews available: http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/interview.html

This Interview is copyright 1996 Jeff Mason and may not be reprinted
or transmitted without permission, except for fair use snippets and
such.  I am generally pretty agreeable to my interviews being used in
other publications, etc, but talk to me about it first!

This interview appears in Indy Magazine #13, on the stands now at comic
book stores everywhere.  Some folks have mentioned to me that if I
upload the interview here, then nobody will want to go out and buy my
magazine, but heck, I am a member of the lovely internet community and I
am always in favor of adding useful information.  Anyway, there's plenty
of GREAT stuff in Indy Magazine #13 in addition to this interview, such
as:  Sarah "Action Girl" Dyer interview, Hart "Boneyard Press"
interview, Spirits of Independence tour convention reports, comic
reviews, comic news, cool new comix strips, and everything else readers
would need to stay on top of the wonderful world on
alternative/independent comics.  Check out the Indy Magazine WWW page
at: http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/indy.html

Ok, enough of the hyping and plugging, here's the interview...

--------

Last October marked the first issue of Jeff Smith's wildly successful
Bone series that was not self-published by Smith's own Cartoon Books.
Smith's move to Image Comics raises a number of questions about the
state of the comic book industry, especially in terms of
self-publishing.

indy magazine:  Why did you go to Image?
Jeff Smith:  Basically, I looked around the industry and saw the big
players gobbling each other up -- not unlike the real world where
conglomerates are always consolidating -- and as far as I could tell,
the people who were writing the future of our industry were doing it
without the small publisher in mind. No, one of the reasons I got into
self-publishing, as opposed to the reason I got into comics, was to have
control. I was losing control with the way that the distribution system
was turning. In order to maintain some of that control, I joined forces
with the Image guys. They were more than happy to extend to me the
protection that the Image "i" would get in the distributors' catalogs,
while still giving me all of the control I wanted.

indy:  Is that because with Cartoon Books, your self-publishing company,
you only had a tiny industry market share, therefore you had to play by
the distributors' rules?
Smith:  Sure, that is why I felt as if I had no control, because Bone,
which even though it sold as well as it did, it was just one title. One
title does not make a significant market share at any given time.
Whereas Marvel, or any company that puts out multiple titles at any
given moment, they are going to have a more significant market share.

indy:  So even if your one title is outselling the majority of another
company's titles, you are still considered insignificant compared to
them.
Smith:  Yeah, that is pretty much how it works. Bone is too small to
think about when you have a crisis with your bread and butter books, and
yet it's big enough to notice when it comes time to cut costs. I think
I should make it clear here, that Bone is no longer a book that I do by
myself up in my loft. I still write it and draw it, but my wife Vijaya
handles a lot of the publishing duties like invoicing, licensing,
foreign language editions; we have a staff, office space, storage,
equipment, overhead -- all the expenses it takes to run a publishing
company. If our sales dropped, it wouldn't just be a drag, it could put
us out of business!  Image's market share offers a bit of a buffer from
some of the craziness.

indy:  So your only other option to get market share other than to join
another company would be to start putting out a lot of different titles.
Smith:  [Laughs]  Yeah, I could do the swimsuit issues and make every
millionth one a solid gold cover.

indy: Did you see it coming that you were not going to be able to get
what you needed from the distributors?
Smith:  I think it was already starting to happen.

indy:  So how did joining Image happen?  Was Larry Marder a big part of
it?
Smith:  Larry was a huge part of it. As soon as the announcement was
made that Marvel was buying Heroes World, I was pretty much cut off from
the information circuit at the distribution and publishing level. I had
no real information coming to me, and I could not really find out what
was going on. Had it not been for Larry, I do not think I would have
really known what was going on. He was my only source really high up
there. Of course, previously I had felt pretty comfortable talking with
anybody at any of the companies; distributors or publishers. Suddenly it
got a little frosty outside [laugh]. Second, I know Larry because of
Beanworld. We're good friends. He is the one who made me see Image as
not just a smaller Marvel, but as pretty much a co-op of really
successful, huge self-publishers [laugh]. It was important to me,
philosophically, that Image was a creator-owned and creator-controlled
company, as opposed to a company like DC, for example. DC publishes
Sandman, which I think is a really good book, and Batman is one of my
favorite characters, but they are very corporate controlled, and the
creators have little or no say. Except for in the case of Sandman in
which they are giving Neil some say for a couple more issues [laughs].

indy:  Before your deal with Image for them to publish your book in the
United States, you have done this in Germany and France as well?
Smith:  I think Bone is in nine languages now. We are doing very well in
Germany. Vijaya does a lot of  the dealing with the foreign companies.
She sorts through the offers that come in and figures out which
companies are valid, and does the contractual work and that kind of
stuff.

indy:  So how does your current deal with Image differ from what you are
doing in foreign companies?
Smith:  In the other countries, we are licensing the Bone stories I have
already done to other publishers. It is more like the normal book market
in the United States. In Germany it is Carlsen-Verlag, for example. We
just license the properties to them over there.

indy:  Do you have a say in how the books are translated?
Smith:  Sort of. They send them to me for my approval, but I cant read
German, so... [laughs]  Germany was the first translation we did. Vijaya
now takes the translations and sends them to another person. There is a
service that we work with that will read the translations and tell us if
they think that it has been done pretty well. Almost one hundred percent
of the time they say that these translations are some of the best they
have ever seen. Occasionally, they will have some nit-pick thing like
the German translation may be too formal in one instance. Something that
you would not really think of. Now the difference between those deals
and the one with Image is that we are actually still producing books. We
are not licensing the Bone characters to Image at all.

indy:  What was it like to be part of the giant Image display area at
the San Diego Comic-Con last year?
Smith:  That was actually kind of fun. We did not actually have an
official "i" logo on our booth, but we were in the Image area, so we
tacked up an Image t-shirt so that there would be an "i" up there. There
were some people who came by who had never heard of Bone, but they saw
the Image "i" so they took a look. And of course once they got a good
look at the book, they really could not fathom how we got into the Image
section [laughs]. I think they started calling for Security [laughs]. I
would have to say that it was a lot of fun. You can't deny that the
Image guys have brought a lot of excitement into the industry, and a lot
of that excitement takes place at conventions. We got to be a little
part of that. I liked it. The reaction to our move was overwhelmingly
positive.

indy:  Speaking of San Diego. You received three more Eisner awards at
the convention this year. Did you expect it?
Smith:  I did not expect it. I figured that there is a lot of timing
involved for these things. I remember that Bone was getting a lot of
good word of mouth right about the time that ballots were being mailed
out in 1994. Taking home so many awards in 1994 was really overwhelming,
but I figured that this is it, that everybody went "Oh my god, well if I
had known he was going to win all of these awards, I never would have
voted for him!"  But, no, to get three of them again, and especially the
ones that I got, it was pretty overwhelming.

indy:  "Best Humor Publication," "Best Writer/Artist, Humor," and what
was the third?
Smith:  "Best Continuing Comic Book."  That's a pretty big one right
there. I was quite surprised.

indy:  Does this mean that you are not just the flavor of the month,
that you are the real deal?
Smith:  Well, it is comforting to me in that respect, yes, a little bit.
I do not think it necessarily means all that much in the long haul, we
will have to wait and see about that. But, yeah, it is a little
comforting.

indy:  Speaking of the long haul, you just came out with issue #21. How
do you see the story progressing now, as compared to a year or two ago?
Smith:  I am into the second section of the story. I remember I was
talking with Gary Groth, when I did an interview with The Comics
Journal. We were talking about some gripes someone had about my book. I
was saying then that I hadn't gotten very far into the story, that
there was more to the story than the humor part. And of course everyone
who had read Bone knew that there was this underlying darker part, this
fairytale type side. Now we are into it. Bone #21 is the scariest one to
date. It isn't fun.

indy:  Do you think that Bone is still suitable for readers of all ages?
Smith:  Yeah, I do. I think that fairytales are very scary. I do not
show a lot of blood and gore. I think that scary stuff is good for kids,
and I think that kids enjoy it.

indy:  What percentage of each book is completely planned out ahead of
time and what percentage is made up on the fly?
Smith:  I would imagine that within an issue about twenty percent comes
out while I am actually physically making the book. For example, in Bone
#21, for a long time I have known that this was going to be a
confrontation between Gran'ma Ben and the rat creatures. I also knew
that Kingdok was going to come up and meet them. While I was writing the
story I had it planned a certain way. The whole time Gran'ma Ben was
holding her sword during her confrontation with Kingdok. I always
thought that he was just going to decide to fade away into the woods, to
step backwards, almost like a Cheshire cat. As he got farther back, you
would just see his eyes and his grin, and he was just taunting her, as
if her time would come. Kind of to leave it on pins and needles there.
She could have been killed, but it was just his whim that she was not.
Well, then when I was actually drawing this story, for some reason, I
had Gran'ma Ben hand off the sword to Thorn. All of the sudden, while
Kingdok was trying to kill Gran'ma Ben, Thorn comes out of nowhere and
cuts his arm off!  Man, I did not plan that!  That was not in any of the
outlines. It was never in any of the plans. It was never in my head to
have Kingdok lose an arm. His arm comes off, and he has a hallucination.
All of that was completely on the fly. It was when I was actually
drawing the panels that it all just came out.

indy:  What do you think of the idea of self-publishing as a community?
Smith:  I like the idea of solidarity. Nothing happens in a vacuum. When
I was starting out I got a lot of help from guys like Jim Valentino,
Larry, and Dave Sim. I try to repay the favor by plugging comics that I
like in my book. I run ads free of charge for stuff I really, really
like. And I think that as long as we all get together at shows and share
tips and talk about the pitfalls, the community will flourish. I dont
buy into the "us" against "them" philosophy. Like it's a war of the
self-publishers against the rest of the comic books. I am a little
troubled when I look around and see the clique-ishness that the movement
has taken; where the emphasis is more on the technicality of
self-publishing, rather than on the artists who have decided to
self-publish. The importance of self-publishing is that it remains one
of the strongest tools an artist has to bring his or her own creation to
market without corporate interference. But again, to my mind, the
emphasis should be on the work. The real revolution is to try and get
the marketplace to accept different kinds of comics; and on that front
we are making real progress. Think back just two or three years -- can
you imagine books like Bone, or Stray Bullets, or Strangers in Paradise
getting the kind of attention they do now?

--
Geoffrey R. Mason		  |	[j r m] at [grove.ufl.edu]
Editor - indy Magazine		  |	611 NW 34th Drive
College of Law - Univ of Florida  |	Gainesville, Florida 32607-2429
--
URL = http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/index.html