Jeff Smith’s Bone is one of the best examples of an independent comic breaking out into mainstream awareness on the basis of sheer quality.
It’s a wonderfully drawn, imaginative, involving and beautifully realized comic series that has been collected in a series of books, translated into editions all over the world, printed in popular magazines, and now re-issued in a new full-color version from Scholastic Press (the originals were in splendiferous black and white).
I posted about Bone, and the Boneville website in two back-to-back posts in March, one about Smith’s post on the process of drawing Bone and one on Steve Hamaker’s post about coloring Bone. The former of my two posts has more general information about the strip and its creator, Jeff Smith.
Smith has since then revamped the Boneville web site with an entirely new design, featuring a clean, spare, blog-like interface and simplified navigation.
Most of the features are still there, like the Cover Gallery, Discussion Board, Shop (containing Amazon links to the various Bone editions) and Blog.
September of this year will also see a new pressing of the out-of-print Bone One Volume Edition, the 1300 page phone-book-thick paperback that collects the Bone stories in their original sublime black and white format (not to disparage the color editions, I just happen to think the strips in color and black and white are two different works, like a drawing and a painting of the same subject). Smith has created a new cover for the volume (large version here, Smith’s blog post here).
I’ve taken some license with my doctored “screen cap” to show both the new interface and as much art from the new color edition as I could.
Link via buffalog and Bolt City.
Hey, Charley,
Great site! Really beautiful stuff. You have good taste! I hope you come back and check to see if you got comments. I stopped by after seeing your post on the Boneville message board. Thanks for the kind words!
Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the good words on lines and colors. I have stopped back, and will continue to. (I notice you were looking forward to the show about Hergé as well, though I was hoping for a bit more about the work.)