Prior to the release of Bone as a comic book — and it eventually becoming a worldwide phenomenon — Jeff Smith had a college comic strip called Thorn. It introduced several of the characters who would eventually evolve into the ones we know and love in the Bone series, including Thorn and Phone Bone. In fact, Smith would reference many of those early strips directly in the early issues of Bone.
Thorn has never been collected in its entirety, but that will change when Cartoon Books launches a Kickstarter later this year for Thorn: The Complete College Strips.
“Talking Jeff into this book wasn’t easy, but fans have been asking us for years,” said Cartoon Books Publisher Vijaya Iyer, Smith’s partner.
The book will collect strips that ran from 1982 to 1986 in The Ohio State University’s student newspaper, The Lantern. Smith said he has always balked at the idea of reprinting them until recently.
“I confess I was a hard sell at first,” Smith said. “Talk of reprinting the Thorn comics has always been a non-starter for me. I didn’t think they were very good. In fact, I had an unshakable idea that they were terrible. But when I read them for the first time in over 40 years, I was surprised to find I enjoyed them! It’s fun to see these stories and know they eventually evolved into Bone.”
Some of the strips have fond their way into publication; Smith self-published a few of them in 1983, while 64 of them appeared in a 2008 limited edition fundraiser book called Before Bone, which raised money for Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Both are out of print.
In addition to the strips, to the new volume will also include early concept art for the Bone characters, essays and interviews with Smith. Cartoon Books will release both a hardcover and trade paperback version via the crowdfunding campaign, which starts in October. The book itself will arrive in the spring of 2024.
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