>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Good evening.
This is it.
So, this is wrapping up as some
of you weren't here
before this is history,
this is the first ever
graphic novel night
for the National Book Festival.
We're filming.
You guys are a part of history.
[Applause] And Jeff is
a headliner for part
of this history as he should be.
Just to go over things you might
not know my name is Michael Cavna,
graphic novel reviewer, columnist,
cartoonist for the Washington Post.
You can find all of this
is the Comic Riffs blog.
Twitter handle is Comic Riffs
and you'll find future stuff
about this festival on that site.
Back in the spring, well, my
history with Jeff goes back
to I think it was over
bourbon, you know,
the history of graphic novels
being part of this is over alcohol
because for years they
didn't have graphic novels
and it was local journalists who
took the programmers out for beer
and I think they got them liquored
up and said now you're going
to say yes to graphic novels.
It was Mr. Jeff Smith who,
another journalist, said, hey,
I want some of your time and
he's so amazing that, you know,
after a little bourbon I guess what
I'm saying is you get journalists
invitation with alcohol weird and
interesting things will happen
and this is what's happening now.
So back in the spring
the festival came to me
and said we need a rock
star who will come to DC.
I said well Bono seems to be
in DC every other week
can't we make that happen?
They said, no, we need someone
with a rock star person whose
life is, you know, it's comical.
I said, well, Justin
Bieber is available.
[Laughter] They said, no, we need
a cartoonist who will bring people
to this event and I
said I'm available
and they said we won't
have to pay people to come.
[Laughter] I thought of one man
first, this guy, Mr. Jeff Smith.
He's, you know, the short history
he's won nearly a dozen Eisner
Awards at San Diego Comic Con,
I believe about 10 Harvey Awards
of Baltimore Comic Con, he went
from in 20 years self-publishing,
we'll go over this,
self-publishing, talking his wife
out of a lucrative job in Silicon
Valley -- that's persuasive --
to help him manage his
business, to get publishers
to become scholastics first book
imprinted with Bone and this epic.
He's one of our greatest graphic
novelists walking the planet he
really is because Bone
came fully formed.
He had studied Carl Bark's
Donald Duck, he had studied Pogo,
he had studied Peanuts,
he had studied Jack Kirby
and it came, it's just
a masterpiece.
Plus he had studied a whole
lot of Herman Melville
so he was sneaking Moby
Dick in to get us to read.
He, Forward Review said of him,
"Jeff Smith is perhaps the
most accomplished cartoonist
and storyteller of his generation."
No small praise for an artist whose
contemporaries include the likes
of Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware.
RASL, his new one, offers
universe spanning adventure.
It even explores a tender
and terrible territories
within the human heart.
So he will take us to places because
this man can draw the human heart.
Mr. Jeff Smith.
[ Applause ]
Thank you so much for being
here and for saying yes to this.
>> Thank you for inviting me.
>> Being part of history.
So we'll have --
>> -- I'll have to be
able to see my monitor.
>> We'll look over to see the
monitor, but you know, what you
and I talked about is a little
bit about your origin and story.
You talked about staring at a phone
receiver when you were 5 years old
and drawing it and that being
sort of primordial Bone.
>> Yeah, in fact I have, I think
I have a picture of that in here.
>> Okay. Is it a little bit away?
>> It's a little in.
>> It's a little in.
Okay.
>> How do you want to do this?
We planned this so well.
>> I know.
[Laughter] It's the damn bourbon.
So I think we can go off of Bone.
Do you want to say anything
as we'll looking at the cover.
>> What we're looking
at is the cover
of the Scholastic version of Bone.
>> Yes.
>> Which was originally my wife and
I, Vijaya, published Bone ourselves
out of our garage basically,
and we did it as a comic book,
but from the very beginning Vijaya
and I wrote this business plan.
This is in like 1990.
>> Yeah.
>> Where we were going
to collect, you know,
the previous year's comic
books into graphic novels,
which the term graphic novel
existed but it was barely used.
Like in our business plan we
actually put quotation marks
around graphic novel.
>> You can auction that somebody.
It'll be worth something.
>> But our plan was, you
know, if you're going
to do a giant story that's as long
as Moby Dick, it could take years
and we needed people to be
able to buy the early chapters
to know what the story
was going to be.
>> Sure.
>> And back then comic book
stores didn't sell graphic novels.
In fact, they didn't sell
any comic book that was older
than a month unless you went and
bought it in like the long boxes
and those little collectible
plastic envelopes
and they were usually
marked up a little bit.
So, we were part of a wave of
a generation of cartoonists
that were trying to change
the way comics are sold
and the way they're perceived
because we wanted our work
to always be available
just like you can go
and buy any Beatles album right now.
>> Yeah.
>> And the way comic books
were sold in the 1990s it was
as if you could not go
buy the White album.
You had to go on eBay and pay
$10,000 for it or something.
>> So it's a leap of faith to talk
your wife out of his job and say,
well, you manage me, I have
this vision for Bone, this epic.
Did you already have it
envisioned as an epic?
>> I think by the time I
was talking to her seriously
about quitting her job and
me quitting my job, yeah,
by then I had thought of the
story and she knew the story,
I told it to her and she likes
cartoons and she's a geek, you know,
she's in the audience I
have to say nice things too.
>> Should we point her out?
>> She's very beautiful.
She's hiding back there.
>> Oh, okay.
[Laughter]
>> But by the time, yeah, she liked
the story and she encouraged me.
So, it was hard, the actual moment
when I sold my animation studio
and she was working as a software
developer in Silicon Valley
and I talked her into quitting
her job, yeah, it was scary,
but on the other hand
somehow it just felt right
and we took the jump.
>> Yeah, and never had to look back.
So, shall we check out the --
>> -- yeah, let's see what
else we've got going here.
That's good.
[Laughter]
>> [inaudible].
>> Huh? Hit the bottom one?
>> [inaudible]
>> All right.
So, what's that?
Got it?
>> Those are your personal
travel photos aren't they?
>> I don't know what's going on.
So this is a different cover
for the one volume edition.
Once Bone was completed,
it took 12 years to tell
that entire novel to do it.
>> Yeah.
>> When it was done, part
of our plan, we didn't know
if we would ever get to this or not,
it was to publish the whole thing
in one big honking book
so the people would know it really
was a single story that started
on the first page and
someone is holding up a copy.
>> Nice.
>> Everybody hold up their
copy of their one volume.
There you go.
>> Wow.
>> I see different
versions of the covers,
but the cover that you're seeing
on the screen right now is actually
taken from a photograph of a forest
in Southern Ohio called
Old Man's Cave.
It's a real place,
it's in the books,
and it's a beautiful place full of
trees and giant rocks in the forest.
>> Yeah.
>> And grottos and cliffs and
waterfalls, and I always kind
of excited my imagination when I
was a kid and so when I started
to do Bone that's where
I wanted to set it.
So this cover shows a
version of Old Man's Cave.
>> Yeah. It's just beautiful.
>> This picture, this is Bartleby.
Bartleby is a young
baby rat creature
and this is the first time he
meets Fone Bone, and he's based
on a Great Dane that Vijaya and
I had just got so he's a puppy,
but apparently Great Danes have
this habit of leaning on you.
I don't know if they're
insecure or they're scared
or they want to possess you.
>> Yes.
>> Might actually be telling
you they're your boss.
>> Yes, absolutely.
>> They pin you there and
they're big, cute babies,
but they're just pinning you
and that's where that came from.
>> Great.
>> This scene, this is a
kind of Moby Dick dream.
In it this kind of relates to
my previous pet, Commander,
who I was working on
this page the day
after my 16-year old
Labrador passed away.
So I was very sad and it was a
scene where Fone Bone was left alone
in the ocean and, you know, I don't
know if the emotion really comes
through but I look at that page
and I see Fone Bone, you know,
almost terrified, don't leave me,
and I can see the emotion in there.
This is just more of
that same scene.
>> Sure, yeah.
It's gorgeous.
>> It's just neato.
I love it that people have props.
This is great.
>> You can see who matches,
who has the materials.
Yeah.
>> I should explain that a lot
of these pictures were things
that Mike kind of encouraged
me to find and bring.
>> Absolutely.
>> This is before I wrote
a single page of Bone,
I wrote the ending
and I sketched it out.
So what you're seeing right
now is a descriptive page
for the very last page of
Bone that I did in 1990
and then I started Bone in early
1991, and you can see in there --
I'm not close enough to
actually be able to read it --
but you can see you're looking down
a hill, the Bones are moving away
from us and they're making a joke
and I think they're making the joke
about give them another dollar.
>> So the whole time you're doing
this epic you have already created
the finish line.
>> I have the punch line and
you can see The End is written
in like a script like
in a movie or something
and then here is the real last
page, which I did 13-14 years later
and it's changed a little bit
it's not the exact same scene.
They were in a forest, but
now they're in a desert,
they're driving away, they're making
the same joke and The End is written
like a movie script in the bottom.
>> In that 13, 14 years, how
many dogs did you go through?
>> Three. [Laughter]
>> Okay.
>> Two actually.
But we have our third one now.
He's a Pit Bull named Preston.
>> Will we see him in
Tuki inspiring Tuki?
>> No, he hasn't made
an appearance yet.
He might now.
I don't think they had dogs
yet 2 million years ago.
I'm not sure what this is.
Oh, this is a page Bone was named
by the American Library Association
as one of the top 10 most
banned books in America.
It's not the top 10
most banned comic books,
it's the most banned books.
>> Flat out.
>> Like number 5 on the
list is 50 Shades of Gray.
>> Yeah.
>> And then Bone.
>> Right. [Laughter] So to be
clear S&M, Bone, a cartoon.
>> Yeah, right, right.
>> Cigars and beer.
>> Although you know
what was number one?
>> What's that?
>> It was even higher on the
list than 50 Shades of Gray.
>> Captain Underpants.
>> Captain Underpants
by Dave Pilkey.
>> Sure, because that's
way worse than S&M.
>> Yes, that is.
>> That is like poopie, you
know, that is poopie stuff.
>> Well, the Minneapolis
school, right, was it the cigars
and the beer they complained about?
>> There's been a number of reasons.
The most prevalent one is that.
There are scenes where they're
smoking and there's alcohol.
Guilty. But my argument, and I was
asked to write a letter to be read
out at the meeting of
the Minneapolis board
where they were going to debate this
and whether or not they were going
to actually ban it or not.
>> Yeah.
>> My argument was, well, it takes
place in a medieval setting sort
of like the Lord of the Rings and,
you know, the saloon or the tavern
or the pub would have been,
you know, the center of life,
the Bones aren't children and
lastly, Fone Bone and Thorn,
the two heroes of the
story, never partake.
It's only kind of the
shady characters that do.
>> Yeah. If this had been Falstaff
or something in Shakespeare
where they're in a tavern,
they wouldn't have blinked.
>> No. Well, you know, some of the
other reasons that have been given
and they're not really
explained they're just
like a one word thing
like sexual situations.
>> Yes.
>> Which I just heard
somebody go what?
Yeah, I think they
hold hands maybe once.
Racism, it was banned for racism.
I really don't understand that one.
Violence, which I'm like
violence the Bones all they do
in a violent situation is run away.
[Laughter] I mean that's
their main thing.
But anyway after a few years of
these challenges I've grown to kind
of see it as more reflection of
the people doing the challenging.
It's almost like an ink blot test.
>> Like a Rorschach.
>> A Rorschach.
>> And the thing is in 2005 was
it Scholastic basically put you
in schools.
That must feel like you get
not the last word but it's sort
of like you get to do the neiner
neiner because now you're, you know,
you're read by millions
of school children.
>> You're right.
But it's probably because Scholastic
got it into schools and it's read
by so many kids and they
sell millions of books.
That's probably why it gets
on those kind of lists.
>> It's just a numbers thing.
>> Yeah, kind of.
So what do we have next?
Oh, I forgot [inaudible].
Here we go.
>> Okay.
>> Now my mother recently
claimed that she came
across the first drawing I did of
Fone Bone and this is, this is,
I don't know that that's
really true,
but this is definitely
really early on
and that's my memory
of what he looked like.
I was probably 5 years old.
His head is shaped
like a big letter C
or like a telephone
as you mentioned.
>> Yeah.
>> And he's very angry and
he has like a nightcap on,
I don't know why that would be.
[Laughter] I'm not that old.
[Laughter] I am old enough
to remember telephones
that were shaped like that.
>> Yeah.
>> But anyway there's something
about his anger that surprised me
and I enjoyed it and I
started working with trying
to close his mouth and see what
he would look like, you know,
with his mouth closed
or with other emotions.
Something about this little
character just kept coming up.
Seeing him smile, I named him
Fone Bone because he looks
like a telephone and when his mouth
was closed he looked a little bit
more like a cartoon bone.
>> Yeah.
>> Then this angry
version kind of resurfaced
as his cousin Phoney Bone.
>> Yeah. Were you about
10 or 11 when you kind
of hit another key point
in your development?
>> Yes. I've got a picture of
that, which is when I was about 10
or 11 I started drawing little
comics and in these comics,
I don't think, I think I may
only have this 1 picture,
but you can see Fone Bone and Phoney
Bone are there and if you were
to open this and see even at
10 Phoney Bone is, you know,
already becoming the Uncle Scrooge
type of miser, the greedy character,
he's bossy, and Smiley
Bone makes an appearance
and he irritates Phoney Bone
and at 10 the personalities
are pretty much there.
>> Wow. So any chance mom
would put any of these on eBay?
[Laughter]
>> I better get over there right
quick and go through the closet.
>> This was an example of a strip
I did for the Ohio State Lantern.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> This was actually in my
mind was like my Rosetta Stone.
>> Yeah.
>> It's probably too small to
see but it's basically the strip
that I did for Disney
Adventures Digest
where Thorn tricks Phoney Bone
into going on a treasure hunt
so that they'll do their laundry.
>> Yeah, and by college
you seemed fully formed.
>> I don't think so, no.
>> Refined, but it was all there.
It was all -
>> -- it was getting there.
>> It was getting there, okay.
>> I hate my college strips.
I cannot look at them.
I'm constantly having, publishers
are asking me to publish collections
of 4 years of the college version of
Bone but they're so hideous I just -
>> -- you can't do it.
>> No, no.
Don't do it, mom.
>> We'll get that number later.
So, and one of the things I want to
say is, you know, I speak in schools
and one of the misnomers you often
hear is graphic novels are a genre
and it's like, no, graphic novels
are an art form, they're a form
of expression through
a delivery system,
they're refined form
of storytelling.
A genre is sci-fi or crime
noir or fantasy and adventure.
>> Yeah, autobiography.
>> Autobiography.
>> A category.
>> Yeah, and with category and to me
one thing I point to educators I say
if you want to understand
genre, go to Jeff Smith
because he crosses many genres.
You seem to have studied so many
you can do many of them so well,
all that I just named, and
RASL does quite a few of those.
>> Well, genre to me is,
it's what storytelling is.
I mean what you make believe.
So, anything that's just very
real obviously it's a documentary
but what genre does or like fantasy
or science fiction it allows you
to set the world and your
imagination somewhere
where you can let the real world go
and you can experience, you know,
whatever there is there
to be experienced,
and I always described
it as like night vision.
You can talk about something but in
night vision if you kind of look off
to the side a little bit you
can actually see what's going
on over there better.
That's what I think
genre is really good at.
>> Yeah. And you and
I talked a little bit
about with RASL I mean you, to
me you're as cartoonists go one
of the most intellectually
curious and you see it in the work.
I mean you spent a lot of
time studying string theory
and TESLA way before
it was cool and I mean,
you know, electromagnetic waves.
Can you talk a little bit
about you're both a comic's
geek and a science geek.
Can you talk about
that a little bit?
>> Yeah, I'm just a geek.
I am a total geek.
I only want to write a book
that's interesting to me and one
of the secret pleasures of
writing is the research that you do
and that's, you know, it's actually
my job to go in and surf the web
and what's catching my attention,
on TESLA or string theory
and parallel universes that
come out of string theory.
Then watch documentaries or
read books, and I love that.
I did 4 years of research
on RASL not full-time,
I mean I was doing Shazam!,
I was doing other things,
but it was about 4 years of trying
to understand what string
theory was talking about.
In a nutshell, it's the
theory of everything trying
to unite Newtonian physics
with particle physics
and mathematics imply that
there are parallel universes
and now I'm like there we go.
So I said let's have an art thief
who can go into parallel universes,
steal works of art, come
back and fence them in Vegas.
>> Yeah.
>> Now I have a story, now I
can start going from there.
>> But you also blend in there
a sense of noir and, you know,
the sense of the supernatural
but there's hard boiled
qualities as well.
Can you talk about sort of how
you did this creative gumbo
to create this?
>> Yeah, well, genres that we're
talking about have certain rules
of conventions and we all kind
of know them whether you
think you know them or not.
So I think that kind of
funnels the story a certain way.
One interesting, what
did I just call it?
One of the [inaudible] of
noir or hard boiled stories is
that you only know what
the protagonist knows,
what the good guy knows.
If anything else happens, you
can't do what I do in most stories,
what I did in Bone, was just cut to
the rat creatures or the hooded one
and they'll explain what
they're going to do.
They're going to attack
the valley tomorrow.
>> We get all that exposition.
>> Yeah, exposition and
you know what's going on
and there's a different
kind of excitement
that you can build with that.
>> Yeah.
>> With this I could only know RASL
didn't even know who the bad guy was
and he had to figure it out
and the reader couldn't know
until he figured it out.
>> Yeah. In RASL, I feel
like a claustrophobia,
I'm hungry to know what turns
the pages, I'm hungry to figure
out how he is going
to figure it out.
>> Right. That's a genre thing.
So, yeah, I'm a geek and one of the
things I was looking for was, well,
what ties all these things
together in the Maltese Falcon,
a very good genre and noir piece.
There's the Maltese Falcon.
Everybody is after
the Maltese Falcon;
that's kind of what
drives the story,
but really you don't really care
about the Maltese Falcon you only
really care about all the characters
and their relationships
and Humphrey Boggart.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, I needed a Maltese Falcon
and while I was doing the research
for RASL I came across Nikola Tesla,
who as I said I started talking
about, I started researching this 5,
6, 7 years ago nobody
knew who Nikola Tesla was,
I mean some people knew who he was
obviously but now everybody does,
but I discovered that I could
use Tesla to play the part
of the Maltese Falcon so to speak.
>> Yeah, sure.
Within that I mean you -
>> -- we'll come back to that.
>> Go ahead.
>> He's Tesla.
I discovered that there
are a lot of parallels
with the Frankenstein movie, the
1933 James Whale movie and Tesla.
In the original Frankenstein book,
the scene where the monster comes
alive is more like a seance.
It's more like they're lighting
candles and they're kind
of bringing, willing him to life
with their potions and stuff.
In the movie as we all know, there's
this great, loud contraptions,
the snapping and crackling
and they raise the monster up
and there's lightning, none
of that was in the book.
That was all because Tesla and
Edison were bringing electricity
to the world in a new
way in the early 1900s.
So I made those connections
in the book
and drew a lot of Tesla
stuff in there.
>> Now let me ask you about
the art because you get,
you can get into an artistic grove
when you're doing a 10-volume epic
and you know the characters
it becomes almost like a part
of your hand, but here you
have to create different looks,
you have to create a
style within what you do
that matches the genre,
matches the story.
Can you talk a little
bit about that?
Sort of your approach to RASL?
>> Yeah. I didn't consciously
try to draw the humans
that much differently, but I did
try to draw them the best I could,
but I was very aware that there's
a lot of shadows, a lot of angles,
people's faces are cut
off a lot by shadows.
I paid a lot of attention to that.
I read about it and for
the Tesla part these pages
that I'm showing here instead of
having Tesla be like a character
like walking around in his
laboratory and talking to Edison
or something, I wanted to
look more like a documentary.
So I went and I found lots and lots
of photo reference and made collages
so that it was really, we
were seeing RASL's knowledge
of Tesla being shared with us.
>> Yeah.
>> I thought that would be more fun.
>> To that point we're still
only getting what he gets.
So we're learning it
as he does, yeah.
>> Right. And Tesla's
life paralleled RASL
so that was interesting.
This was a page I thought was, all
right, this was a slight experiment
where RASL has met this woman,
Maya, who runs a museum,
and she's explaining some of
the maze artifacts on the wall
and he's falling in
love with her or lust.
>> Does he have the Maya
tattoo by this point?
I can't remember.
>> Yeah, he has the Maya tattoo.
She doesn't know it.
>> Okay. Just to indicate.
>> But she's giving him
a tour of the museum
and as she's talking he starts
paying more attention to, you know,
the line of her jaw or the hollow of
her neck or the dimple in the back
of her shoulder and as I had her
talking I had the balloon empty
and kind of moving off out of
the way and I think it works
that when you read this you actually
do forget that she's talking,
but the balloon is there and
then the last panel she turns
and confronts the reader
as well as RASL
and says are you even
listening to me?
>> It works brilliantly because as
a reader we immediately know those
moments in our own lives where we
see something and we just, you know.
>> So, we'll zoom back
through Tesla here.
>> Ah, Tuki, the web comic.
Any Tuki fans here?
Go back 2 million years is it?
>> Yeah. Do you want to
have time to do questions?
>> Yeah.
>> Five minutes.
>> We do want to do some questions.
>> All right.
I'll just do a quick shout out
for Tuki, which is my new project.
It takes place 2 million years
ago when multiple species
of hominids existed
at the same time.
There was one of the first really
great ice ages which froze,
captured all the moisture on
the planet in the ice caps.
So Africa experienced a huge drought
and all the animals including
the early hominids were all
going extinct.
Well, somebody had to be the first
human to leave Africa and we know
that that happened around
2 million years ago.
So, that's the story.
Tuki is the first human
to leave Africa.
That's what that story is.
>> And you have the new, you've
bound the web comic and hard -
>> -- yeah, it's a web comic.
You can read it for
free on boneville.com.
>> Yeah. And RASL won a
number awards recently, right?
>> RASL won best graphic album
at the Eisner Awards this year.
>> Eisner Awards in July.
>> And Tuki won - thanks mom.
[Laughter] Tuki won best web comic
at the National Cartoonist Society.
>> Great.
>> So it was a good year; it
was definitely a good year.
>> I see mom just put
it on eBay I see.
So, we do want to do
questions and get a few.
We have the 2 microphones set up so
step up to the microphone, please.
Yes, please?
>> Hello, Mr. Smith,
nice to finally meet you.
>> Hello.
>> My name is Bob Hoffman with the
Middle East Film and Comic Con,
and I was just in town and had no
idea this was going on until today.
>> Wow.
>> I've been teaching Bone
in classes for 10 years.
>> Wow.
>> It's an honor.
>> Thank you.
>> This is something
I've wondered a few times
over the years have
you ever been back
to Old Man's Cave, you and Vijaya?
>> Yes. We haven't been there,
we didn't go there this year.
We had a lot on our plates this
year, but generally we go back 2
or 3 times a summer, yeah.
Have you been there?
Have you ever been there?
>> For the first time this year.
Beautiful.
>> Ah, it's really
something isn't it?
>> Yes, it is very much
what you see in the books.
>> But the fact you tagged it
Jeff Smith was here kind of good.
>> Yeah.
>> Just a quick follow up
speaking of travel I think you
and Vijaya took some time off
during Bone to actually travel
and you incorporated some
of that in the story?
>> Yeah. The final act of Bone
takes place in like a kingdom,
a kingdom that Gran'ma Ben and
Thorn had come from and they talked
about it throughout the
book and then the Lord
of the Rings movies were
coming out right then and all
of a sudden I thought, well,
I don't want to do the Lord
of the Rings type of a
castle, A King Arthur,
Disney Cinderella castle;
I needed something else.
My wife is from India, her family
is from India, she's from here,
but we went back to visit and
we traveled around India looking
for architecture and we actually
went up to Nepal and Kathmandu
and that's where I found my City
of Aethia because I needed a place
that once was great and powerful
but had since fallen on hard times,
I need some place that was full of
mysticism because there was a lot
of implications from Gran'ma
that there was, you know, dragons
and dreaming and all
this kind of stuff.
So, yeah, I was able to, I found
Kathmandu and I'm like this is it.
I took some pictures
but I also spent a lot
of time just drawing little
sketches of dogs laying in the road
or chickens or, you know,
what does a gutter on the side
of the road look like
and things like that.
>> Awesome.
If you ever made it or you didn't
have time to make it to Dubai,
we'd love to have you both.
>> That would be awesome.
>> I'll find you.
>> Thanks.
>> [Inaudible] 2015.
>> Hi, I wanted to revisit
that question about art.
You said in RASL you didn't
consciously draw the humans
that much differently, but it seems
like you made some really deliberate
choices with the protagonist's head,
for example, and a lizard-faced man.
So almost Dick Tracy in a way.
So I wanted if you could talk
about why you chose to do that,
if it's a conscious choice
or if it's just for fun?
>> It was a conscious choice.
When I didn't make that
much [inaudible] I was
like by the time I got to the
end of Bone I was really trying
to draw Thorn's hands as good
as I could draw them, you know,
like actually show how the
wrinkles in the palm work
and all that kind of stuff.
So I was still trying
to do that but, yes,
I actually saw a review
of RASL somewhere.
It was like science
fiction with big heads.
[Laughter] My earliest drawings
of RASL were very monga
flavored with giant hair.
For some reason I wanted
him to be very primitive.
I wanted him to be a tough
mug and be kind of beat
up with this broken lightning
bolt nose and, yes, you nailed it,
the lizard-faced guy is just a
Dick Tracy, Chester Gould villain
who is evil because I mean he looks
evil and he is evil and that's it.
>> Thank you.
>> All right.
>> Yes, please.
>> I really enjoy the Bone series
but one thing I noticed was
that as the series progressed it
just got kind of darker and darker
and darker and we had
all these darker themes.
>> It's sort of like
growing up, you know.
>> Yeah. So I was wondering if
you planned that on purpose?
Like from the beginning
you're like, okay,
this is going to start getting
darker and scarier or were you like,
you know, this is going
to a lot harder
and as you kept going you're
like, whoa, this is getting dark?
>> I did plan it on purpose.
I remember people in the comic book
community were a little surprised
because they were reading
it and a chapter would come
out every 2 months as a comic book
and they really thought it was
just going to be, you know,
a Donald Duck type of a story
and here's the Marks Brothers
or whatever, but I did plan it out
that way because when things go bad,
when the world starts to go to
hell in a hand basket you needed
to care about the world before.
So I wanted the early chapters
to be fun that's why
the cow race is there.
I wanted you to miss that
when the rat creatures came
and the ghost circles came
and everything was gone.
So I really wanted to really
make you like everybody
and love the world and wish
Gran'ma Ben's cabin was still
in one piece and that kind of thing.
So, yes.
>> You did a very good
job with the series.
I'm definitely going to
look into your other books.
>> Okay, thank you very much.
>> Thank you.
Yes?
>> Hi, I really enjoyed
the Bone books.
I've been reading them ever since
they started coming out and a couple
of years ago a little
rumor was going
around about a Bone movie being
man and how it was rejected
for one reason or another.
Can you elaborate on
that per chance?
>> Yes. Warner Brothers bought the
rights to it about 5 years ago,
and I'm not sure I can give
you, get you excited about it
because 5 years is a long time and I
think they kind of got a little lost
and they keep making
Lego movies so who knows.
Maybe they'll do a Bone Lego movie.
[Laughter]
>> I was going to ask about the
movie, but I have another question,
but if I can begin with
a quick thank you for one
of the great family bonding
experiences of my life.
>> Wow, thank you.
>> I read Bone originally
in the comic form but then
when the collective version
came out and then I was married
and a father read it as a family
with my wife and daughter and son,
read it out loud, it
was a great experience
and everybody loves the book.
>> Thanks.
>> It was like reading
it for the first time.
>> That would be fun to
read it with new eyes.
That would be good.
I didn't write Bone for children,
I wrote it to other
cartoon comic book heads
and I just was using the language
of Cark Barks and Walt Kelly,
and I figured they would understand
it, but it took me so long
to do the novel 12 years that I,
that people read it got married
and had kids and started
reading it to their kids
and then it became a
real children's book.
>> Will you go back
to the characters?
The thing you did in
the Washington Post is
that the first new Bone
strip since the end of -
>> -- that's one of the
first, yeah, for sure.
That's the way I'll go back to them.
I'm not going to do
another actual bone comic.
Moby Dick has no sequel
and I will have no sequel.
[Laughter] Neville
smith as it should be.
>> Thank you.
>> I was actually one
of those people who back
in 1995 started realizing, wow,
this is getting kind of dark
as it was going along and to go back
to that I was wondering do
you have any advice for people
who are writing things that are
trying to balance the really light,
Walt Kelly with the much darker
elements Ghost Circles kind
of thing.
>> Yes, go read Walt Kelly.
[Laughter] I mean Walt Kelly was
sort of the beginning of that,
of my awakening that comics could
be funny and dark and meaningful,
and I think the comics, any author
should have a moral point of view
and Walt Kelly was really
the beginning of that
and all Walt Kelly is being
reprinted right now by Finagraphics
and there's only like 2
of them out, get them.
That's the deal.
>> All right we're getting -
>> -- yeah, close.
Is there a way we can
just get 2 quickly?
>> I think we have time for 2.
>> Was it you or Thomas Nygosky's
idea for the quest to the spark?
>> It was Tom's, Tom had this idea
for the story and he really wanted
to write it and at the same time
Scholastic wanted more of Bone
and I said I'm just going to
get you crazy cats together.
We worked together though.
He told me the story I made some
suggestions so that it would be more
in line with the Bone universe and
I thought he did a pretty good job.
I thought he really captured
like the rat creatures
kind of personality.
>> Yes, right here.
>> In the Bone books there were
those 2 stupid rat creatures
that would always be clumsy and
one would always like quiche.
Were you ever thinking
of naming them?
>> No. I wasn't because, and I'll
tell you why I originally was not
going to have, I was just going to
have these hordes of rat creatures,
these rats were just going
to come out of there,
and one day I thought well maybe,
maybe it would be more interesting
if we actually knew someone,
if you knew some of the rats.
So we came up with these 2 rats
and the story behind the quiche
and the older people in the audience
will know what I'm talking about,
when I was doing Bone in the Lantern
in my college paper there was a book
out that was very popular
for about a year.
>> Real Men -
>> -- Real Men Don't Eat Quiche,
and that was my whole joke was
that real monsters don't eat quiche.
I probably made much more money off
of that than the original guy did.
[Laughter]
>> Well, thank you so much, Jeff.
>> Thank you all for
coming out tonight.
>> Now we have time for a raffle.
Jeff has been generous
enough to donate 3 prizes.
I believe a Tuki.
So let's start, don't
we have the Tuki?
Yes. So you pull a ticket
and we'll call the numbers.
So we'll do first the Tuki.
>> All right.
So the first ticket is are all
the first numbers the same?
>> No.
>> Will that save some time?
>> No.
>> No. Got to read
them all, 5-3-6-9-4-0.
Yeah, there we go.
>> Right there.
Nice. [Applause]
>> Do you want to present.
>> There you go.
He'll sign it after.
Personalize it.
So second is the RASL book.
>> The RASL book, all right.
5-3-6-9-6-2.
>> Okay. Anyone?
You have to be here to win.
>> All right, 5-3-7-1-1-9.
>> I think it's got
company down there.
>> All right this is going
to take a while isn't it?
Don't dig too deep.
There's a lot of tickets in there.
5-3-7-0-3-4.
>> All right.
>> Why don't you give
me your ticket.
[Laughter] 5-3-7-2-2-6.
>> All right, yay.
>> I was starting to grab
handfuls of them there.
>> Okay. You can present, please.
>> There you go buddy.
>> Congratulations.
You'll sign that after, right?
>> Oh, they're signed.
>> This is Bone.
>> This is the big slip case.
>> Wow, the slip case Bone.
>> This is like the
absolute edition.
It's full color, hard cover.
All right here we go.
5-3-6-6-6-5.
No.
>> Yay. [Laughter]
>> 5-3-6-5-5-8
>> Yay. 5-3-6-5-5-9.
>> Yes. There you go.
All right.
>> Okay. Lift from the knees.
All right.
Congratulations.
>> All right.
That was fun.
>> Thank you guys so much.
Thank you, Jeff Smith.
>> Good night.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Good night, Washington.
>> Thank you, guys.
You can all say you're part of
the first graphic novel night ever
at National Book Festival.
You're a part of history.
Thank you so much.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.