Link via The Comics Beat
From Publishers Weekly:
Throw Thorn a Bone: PW Talks with Jeff Smith
For a time, Jeff Smith’s comics masterpiece Bone was only available in a hefty collected edition numbering a staggering 1,360 pages, and when I started college 17 years ago, every friend, colleague, and professor in my major—not to mention related art majors adjacent to comics—had their own personal copy. For many, Bone was a glorious discovery they tried to convince their less comics-inclined high school friends to pick up before finding themselves in the midst of likeminded art nerds in college and learning that the series was nothing short of a movement: first within the comics world, then even across mainstream readerships.
Upon its 2010 release, Scholastic’s collected edition of Bone was held aloft as a work of staggering patience and a testament to its creator’s mastery of the craft and unwavering discipline. But before Bone, there was Thorn—the “precocious college comic strip” that Smith penned for the Ohio State University paper the Lantern, per PW’s starred review of a new complete collection from Cartoon Books comprising those strips: Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982–1986, and Other Early Drawings. We spoke with Smith about how Thorn led to Bone and how his comics classic found a home at Scholastic, got him to share some excerpts from the new book, and more.
The Toronto Comic Jam 