BWI: When did you first discover you had artistic
ability, and when did you know that you wanted to be a graphic
novel artist?
JS: Well, I always drew. As far back as I can
remember, I've always drawn, but I don't think I ever thought,
"I'm Michelangelo! And I'm going to be an artist!" or anything
like that. I was just in it for fun, all the way up through
high school. I never thought, "Oh, this is what I'm going to
do for a living." I think my first thought was to be a
comic-strip artist. That might be fun—to do something like
Peanuts. But the first big book I saw was Pogo,
and that was very exciting for me to see. Pogo is a
comic strip of course, but it was collected in the 50s and 60s
into big collections—big 150-page books. That was the first
thing that got me. I actually went to the library and asked
the librarian, "How is a comic made?" This is when I was nine.
She actually helped me. She explained that it's drawn, first
in pencil, then it's inked so that it can be photographed.
BWI: Do your illustrations now, the style of them,
reflect the doodles and drawings of your youth?
JS: They do. I've drawn the Bone cousins, the three
main characters, my whole life. I barely remember when I first
started doing it, but if I look through some of the old
stories that I used to draw, all the elements are there; the
personalities are all there. Fone Bone is just trying to get
through the day, Phoney Bone is greedy and bossy, and Smiley
Bone is crashing through walls and upsetting the applecart.
Even in the new stories, the drawings no longer look like
they're done by a ten-year-old, but the stories are all about
the same things: falling off cliffs, falling over waterfalls
and into water. I never really grew up!
BWI: What books did you particularly enjoy when you
were a child?
JS: The first children's book I remember that
really, really got my attention was Maurice Sendak's Where
the Wild Things Are. I suppose the quality of the drawings
are a big part of it, but it was also the fact that the
drawings were alive. There was a spirit inside the characters.
Do you know what I mean? A light. Those characters were real
and moving around and they were solid. But that was when I was
pretty young.
BWI: What artist did you admire as a child, and
whose work do you admire now?
JS: When I was young, I was very much into
Peanuts, and so it was Charles Schulz. You knew what
Charlie Brown was feeling; you could relate to what this
little drawing was going through. In fact, I learned to read
because I wanted to know what Snoopy was doing and what
Charlie Brown was doing, and when Charlie Brown looked out at
the reader with that little squiggly-line mouth, my stomach
hurt. It was amazing to me. I also like Walt Kelly, who did
Pogo, which I mentioned earlier. It was a beautifully
drawn strip, with all these characters that were running
around acting crazy in a swamp. . .these turtles and possums
and alligators. But every one of the characters had his own
personality—every one had a place he was coming from. When the
turtle argued with the alligator, it didn't feel like one
author was writing the script. You really felt like there were
two different people arguing with each other, and that was
just really fascinating to me. That was something I really
tried to bring into Bone. So, when the Bone cousins are
at odds, I try to have that same feeling: Even if you can't
see the picture, if somebody reads it to you, you know which
person is talking.
Nowadays, I'm still very much into comics. I like Paul
Pope, who does graphic novels. His work just flows. There's a
cartoonist from Canada by the name of Seth, who just had a
piece in the New Yorker, and he's designing the Charles
Schulz Complete Peanuts books. There's Jim Woodring.
Fantagraphic just published The Frank Book. Those are
just transcendent comics. I don't really know what he's
talking about [laughter.] There's a lot of really good stuff
out there right now.
BWI: Which part of the process of creating the comic
book do you enjoy most?
JS: That's a good question. I'll give you a short
answer: I like all the different steps in the creation and I
hate them all, too, because you're never doing it on time, and
as much as you love each step, you can't spend as much time
fixing it as you'd like.
Generally, there is a moment when you layer it up from your
first prose outline to the little thumbnails, and you start
penciling it onto the real art boards at full size. Then you
letter and then you ink it, and there's a moment where each
page or sequence actually starts to work; it starts to really
come to life. Because it can change as you go from what you
picture in your head through these many stages of building it
up, and you can see how one panel relates to another. As you
begin to fill it in, it gets more solid; it can change the
speed or the timing with which you read and absorb it. You
have to make adjustments throughout the whole process, but
there's a moment when you're not done yet—you've started
inking and you can see it and it's working, and that's it.
That's what you're going for. That's when it comes alive.
BWI: Sounds like fun.
JS: That part is fun—worth doing.
BWI: How many hours do you work per day?
JS: Well, it changes. Cartoon Books is a little
company. Bone is a full-time job for four people,
including myself, and so I spend some time with my wife, who's
my business partner, dealing with business things. We have to
take care of non-artistic things. As far as just drawing goes,
it depends. If I'm working, I'll just work when I have a
chance—maybe three or four hours a day on the comics. But then
there comes the time when you've really got to get to the
printer, because once you've set distribution and printing
into motion, the deadline comes. It was not unusual for me
during the last ten years to spend big stretches of 20-hour
days, taking four-hour catnaps at night, just to get it done.
Not a fun part. [Laughter] It was worth it, though. I've never
not thought it was worth it. After those big, long stretches,
the book is done, and it's exhilarating.
BWI: Do you think that your work hours have
increased since you've been publishing Bone?
JS: Oh, absolutely! In no job I ever had would I
work twelve hours a day, let alone 20! Bone was just
such a work of passion; it just fascinated me. I was
interested the whole time I was working on it, so I could just
go. And I wanted it to be right, especially once I got near to
completing it. I put ten years into it, and during the last
two years I thought: I've got to get it right. Sometimes that
was more difficult than I thought, because it's a big story to
tie together, but it was worth the extra time.
BWI: How have you structured your schedule so that
your work is published on time?
JS: I think that I've done two things: One, I'm
relatively dependable—not 100 percent. The other thing I did
was I tried to change the expectation. Traditionally, comic
books have been periodicals and, as the name implies, the book
comes out for a set number of days and it's on the shelf until
the next one comes. And you know when it's going to come.
That's because comics for decades have been soap operas,
never-ending adventures. What I tried to do was create the
impression that every time a book comes out—it's a release! As
if they were real books, even though they were effectively
chapters. You wouldn't expect even Stephen King to come out
with a book every month—although he might, I don't know!
[Laughter] I tried to generate the idea in interviews that
it'll come when it's finished, and that what's more important
is quality. As long as I didn't wait too long, and it didn't
take me a year to do an issue, it was pretty well accepted.
BWI: Do you read the comic strips in the paper?
JS: I don't. I used to when I was a kid; it was one
of the most important things to me. Once I got into comic
books, my interest shifted. I'm aware there are still good
ones in there. I mean, I know Agnes by Tony Cochran is pretty
good when I see it. But I think The Far Side and
Calvin and Hobbes were the last ones I actually
followed.
I really loved Doonesbury. He (Trudeau) used to draw
four panels that were almost identical. He really drew them,
he didn't Xerox—you know, draw one panel and copy it three
times. There was always a subtle expression change in an
eyebrow, or a mouth. And it was like acting! I do that in
Bone: I try to do that Doonesbury-pacing of four
panels that are really similar. And sometimes you can get a
better joke out of it. It's actually harder to draw that,
because if you don't do it right, the illusion falls apart. I
just have to work harder to draw that same panel over and over
again.
BWI: Where do you draw inspiration for the
Bone adventures?
JS: I feel like if you're going to have a story with
a beginning and a middle and an end, you need a basic
structure, like a fairy tale: They get lost on a journey, they
meet some friends, they have to face some big conflict and
then have some kind of a resolution. Within that structure, I
just took gags and little awkward moments from real life and
usually exaggerated them or disguised them, so I could put
them in the comic.
BWI: Speaking of real life, are you considered a
comedian by your family and friends?
JS: [Chuckles] I don't think so. But, we laugh all
the time here. I am just amazed that we get anything done; we
just laugh all day at each other's jokes. So, I don't think
that anyone would think of me as Mr. Funny Guy, but I
definitely do have a sense of humor. I think I laugh more at
other people's jokes than people laugh at mine, though.
BWI: When you began work on Bone, did you
have the whole story in your mind originally, or did it
develop as you went along?
JS: I did have the story in mind. It was my goal
from the beginning to do in comics something I had only seen
in prose. . .and that was to really pull off a giant epic
narrative—a narrative that had its own weight and forward
momentum. That being said, I couldn't plan out every page ten
years in advance. I had a pretty loose outline and I had the
ending, and in fact I wrote the ending before I started the
actual comic book. I have the little page, that rough little
last page drawn out in 1989, and I can put it against the last
page that I drew about four months ago, and they're really
close. It's the same joke—maybe a slight change, but not much.
But I got really lost a couple of times in the ten years
because part of the story-writing process is to let the
characters go, let the story go. As the adventure would take
the characters in one direction, I would panic and go, "Where
are we going with this?" I'd have to stand back from my desk
with a sledge-hammer and knock the whole story back into shape
and back on the road. But it always added to the story; I
never felt like I got so lost that it was the wrong thing. It
was just scary because I had to trust the story.
Was that a good answer or a bad answer?
BWI: It was great! A little bit ago you mentioned
the character traits of the three cousins—do any of your
personality traits translate into Fone Bone's personality?
JS: I think they do. I mean, when I read a comic
that I really like, like Peanuts, I just know that part
of Charles Schulz's personality is in a little bit of each
character. You know that Lucy the fussbudget is part of his
(Schulz's) personality. And when a cartoonist is really good,
he is revealing aspects of his own personality that fit into
the readers' as well. So, all the Peanuts cast kind of
adds up into one person. There are some clues in there as to
how that kind of storytelling works. As far as Fone Bone is
concerned, I'm still. . .I'm just learning to keep going.
BWI: You originally published Bone in 55
individual comic books yourself. Now that publishing giant
Scholastic has taken over the publication of Bone, how
difficult is it to see your labor of love in someone else's
hands?
JS: Well, I've had offers before to publish
Bone and it just hasn't ever seemed right. When we were
contacted by Scholastic, it was different. I think it has to
do with the times: Graphic novels are being accepted by
librarians, by school teachers, and bookstores. The time is
right, and my timing was good in that I finished the book
right at this moment so that it could make this leap.
I have to say the people at Scholastic "get it;" they did
not come to us the way other publishers have and say, "Well,
this is an interesting story, and my kid really loves these
characters, and why don't we do it right and have an
illustration on one page and text on the other?" Scholastic
got it. They wanted to do the books as books and treat them as
books, which may or may not seem miraculous to you, but I've
been talking to comic book people and book people for years
now, and the idea of treating a comic book like a book—it's
radical. It shouldn't be, because it is literature; you read
it from right to left, top to bottom, just like a prose book.
Some of the story information is in the pictures, but it's
still literature. There is a language and a symbology to it
that is its own. From the beginning, Scholastic never wanted
to do anything except treat Bone like a book.
I hope I'm communicating to you how intrigued I am with
that notion. Instead of feeling like my characters are going
off and leaving me, I kind of feel like the stories are
graduating into the world, and I trust Scholastic. I think
they're going to do a very good job.
BWI: You're coloring them for Scholastic—how did
that feel?
JS: I'm very happy with it. I wasn't very into that
idea at first. Scholastic would do it in color or not in
color; they didn't care, but I had some friends who were
trying to get me to do it in color. When I tried it, I
realized there were storytelling elements that the color could
bring to it. A friend of mine—Art Spiegelman—convinced me. His
story Maus is about the Holocaust, and it works in
black and white, but he felt that Bone was more like
The Wizard of Oz and it needed color. So I did give it
a shot, and once I did, I was very, very happy with the color.
And we're doing the color ourselves here at Cartoon Books so I
won't be surprised by it when I see it.
BWI: Were you surprised by Bone's success?
When and how did you realize that it was a great success?
JS: I always thought there would be an audience for
it because I was pretty sure that I wasn't the only one who
grew up reading Uncle Scrooge Stories or enjoying
Bugs Bunny, right? And, at the time The Lord of the
Rings was something I really liked, but that was way
before the movie and it seemed like nobody really talked about
it. So, I was pretty sure there was some way to combine those
elements and I would find a small audience. I had no idea that
it would be read by children and adults and professionals and
grandmothers and young couples together. That was a completely
unforeseen effect of the book. Sort of knowing it's a success,
I never believe that. I'm always worried that any minute now,
everybody's going to lose interest in it. I'm not kidding.
Sometimes it goes that way.
BWI: Well, it is very popular with our customers.
JS: Good, I'm very glad to hear that. I guess you're
just hearing my artistic, neurotic side coming out.
BWI: Now that the Bone series has come to an
end, do you have any plans for anything else and have we seen
the last of the Bone cousins?
JS: The story is finished, so I don't plan to do
anymore. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some excuse to
draw the cousins again, because I just can't imagine not, but
I don't think I'll ever place them in a story that's directly
a sequel to Bone. . .because there's no sequel to
Moby Dick, at least that's the way I see it. [Laughter]
I have a few 200-page stories that I want to do—shorter
pieces that involve other topics that I'm interested in, and
some other characters that I'm working on. The thing I'm
working on right now is an old 1940s character, from DC
Comics, Captain Marvel. I'm doing a 200-page story,
kind of revisiting some of the elements from the golden age of
superheroes and updating them a little bit. I'm having fun
doing that.
BWI: Now that you know so much about publishing
comics and graphic novels, have you ever considered publishing
another artist's work?
JS: In the past, we did publish some other people's
stuff, but it's difficult since we're such a small company. We
created Cartoon Books just to publish Bone because I
couldn't get anybody else to publish it at the time, but it
takes so much energy and resources to publish just Bone
that it's very difficult to publish somebody else. I don't
think we'll do that in the future.
BWI: How do you feel about the proliferation of
series graphic novels, and how does that proliferation affect
quality of the genre overall; if it does?
JS: That's actually a very good question and I'm not
sure I have a great answer, but overall I'm pleased with
having more graphic novels series on the shelves. There must
have been a point in the mid-60s in the music industry when
they shifted from the little singles over to albums, and I
think that shift did two things: it gave artists more creative
freedom, and I think it also created higher profit margins,
and thus a better revenue flow for the retailers who were
selling them. So all in all, I think it floated all the boats.
I think the same thing's happening here now: We've gone from
these little periodicals that have no shelf life to graphic
novels. For the first time in cartoon's or comics' history, we
have a format that can be restocked-something that's meant to
be put on the shelf and restocked once the stores have sold
out. And, just like in music, not all of it is great, but I
think that the good ones like Maus or From Hell
will be restocked and will begin to form a core library of
classic graphic novels. Even in manga, there are works like
Nausicaa and Akira that transcend their
particular categories and are great works. I guess what I'm
saying is that I'd rather have this period of proliferation
with some bad stuff in it than none at all, because I think
it's better for everybody—the artists and the stores.
BWI: That's a good answer. You told a story at the
Mid-Ohio Comic Convention in Columbus about the interesting
deal you made with your wife. Would you share that with us?
JS: The story was that I was turning 30 and when you
approach that milestone you kind of reassess. And, I thought,
if I'm ever going to do this Bone story, I've got to
start. And I'd thought about the comic strips—I had tried to
do it in animation, and I discovered the independent comic
book market. I thought that might be the way to do it. And so
I had to convince my wife to let me sell my animation studio
to my partners and live on her salary for a year. That was the
deal: one year. I'll do six issues of the comic and we'll know
in a year if it's got any chance or not. And if it doesn't,
I'll go apply for a job at Disney or something and get back
into animation. And she agreed to that. We'll give it a shot.
One year.
And I did it, and the sales were terrible on the first
issue and they were really terrible on the second edition and
went down from there. And then, I think on the fourth or fifth
issue, I got a couple of phone calls from Neil Gaiman, who
even then was doing Sandman and was at the top of the
comic book game. He gave me some words of support, and so did
a few others: Dave Sim, and Don Thompson, who's editor of
Comics Buyers Guide. I had a little write up in the Comics
Journal. And that was enough to let us think there's something
to this. And then suddenly the sales doubled on issue number
six, and that was enough to go forward to a seventh issue, and
then every issue after that for almost two years doubled; the
sales were exponential.
So then my next job was to talk my wife into quitting her
job in Silicon Valley and making comic books with me.
[Laughter] And that was even harder to talk her into. But once
she did, then things really took off. And that's the story of
Bone! [Laughter]
BWI: Thank you very much for talking with us.
