Jeff Smith: 
     Basically, I looked around the industry and saw the big players gobbling each other up -- not unlike the real world where conglomerates are always consolidating -- and as far as I could tell, the people who were writing the future of our industry were doing it without the small publisher in mind.No, one of the reasons I got into self-publishing, as opposed to the reason I got into comics, was to have control. I was losing control with the way that the distribution system was turning. In order to maintain some of that control, I joined forces with the Image guys. They were more than happy to extend to me the protection that the Image "i" would get in the distributors catalogs, while still giving me all of the control I wanted.

indy: 
     Is that because with Cartoon Books, your self-publishing company, you only had a tiny industry market share, therefore you had to play by the distributors' rules?

Smith: 
     Sure, that is why I felt as if I had no control, because Bone, which even though it sold as well as it did, it was just one title. One title does not make a significant market share at any given time. Whereas Marvel, or any company that puts out multiple titles at any given moment, they are going to have a more significant market share. 

indy: 
     So even if your one title is outselling the majority of another company's titles, you are still
     considered insignificant compared to them. 

Smith: 
     Yeah, that is pretty much how it works. Bone is too small to think about when you have a crisis with your bread and butter books, and yet it's big enough to notice when it comes time to cut costs. I think I should make it clear here, that Bone is no longer a book that I do by myself up in my loft. I still write it and draw it, but my wife Vijaya handles a lot of the publishing duties like invoicing, licensing, foreign language editions; we have a staff, office space, storage, equipment, overhead --all the expenses it takes to run a publishing company. If our sales dropped, it wouldn't just be a drag, it could put us out of business! Image's market share offers a bit of a buffer from some of the craziness. 

indy: 
     So your only other option to get market share other than to join another company would be to start putting out a lot of different titles. 

Smith: 
     [Laughs] Yeah, I could do the swimsuit issues and make every millionth one a solid gold
cover. 

indy: 
     Did you see it coming that you were not going to be able to get what you needed from the
     distributors? 

Smith: 
     I think it was already starting to happen. 

indy: 
     So how did joining Image happen? Was Larry Marder a big part of it? 

Smith: 
     Larry was a huge part of it. As soon as the announcement was made that Marvel was buying Heroes World, I was pretty much cut off from the information circuit at the distribution and publishing level. I had no real information coming to me, and I could not really find out what was going on. Had it not been for Larry, I do not think I would have really known what was going on. He was my only source really high up there. Of course, previously I had felt pretty comfortable talking with anybody at any of the companies; distributors or publishers. Suddenly it got a little frosty outside [laugh]. Second, I know Larry because of Beanworld. We're good friends. He is the one who made me see Image as not just a smaller Marvel, but as pretty much a co-op of really successful, huge self-publishers [laugh]. It was important to me, philosophically, that Image was a creator-owned and creator-controlled company, as opposed to a company like DC, for example. DC publishes Sandman, which I think is a really good book, and Batman is one of my favorite characters, but they are very corporate controlled, and the creators have little or no say. Except for in the case of Sandman in which they are giving Neil some say for a couple more issues [laughs]. 

indy: 
     Before your deal with Image for them to publish your book in the United States, you have done this in Germany and France as well? 

Smith: 
     I think Bone is in nine languages now. We are doing very well in Germany. Vijaya does a lot of the dealing with the foreign companies. She sorts through the offers that come in and figures out which companies are valid, and does the contractual work and that kind of stuff. 

indy: 
     So how does your current deal with Image differ from what you are doing in foreign companies? 

Smith: 
     In the other countries, we are licensing the Bone stories I have already done to other publishers. It is more like the normal book market in the United States. In Germany it is Carlsen-Verlag, for example. We just license the properties to them over there. 

indy: 
     Do you have a say in how the books are translated? 

Smith: 
     Sort of. They send them to me for my approval, but I cant read German, so... [laughs] Germany was the first translation we did. Vijaya now takes the translations and sends them to another person. There is a service that we work with that will read the translations and tell us if they think that it has been done pretty well. Almost one hundred percent of the time they say that these translations are some of the best they have ever seen. Occasionally, they will have some nit-pick thing like the German translation may be too formal in one instance. Something that you would not really think of. Now the difference between those deals and the one with Image is that we are actually still producing books. We are not licensing the Bone characters to Image at all.

indy: 
     What was it like to be part of the giant Image display area at the San Diego Comic-Con last year? 

Smith: 
     That was actually kind of fun. We did not actually have an official "i" logo on our booth, but we were in the Image area, so we tacked up an Image t-shirt so that there would be an "i" up there. There were some people who came by who had never heard of Bone, but they saw the Image "i" so they took a look. And of course once they got a good look at the book, they really could not fathom how we got into the Image section [laughs]. I think they started calling for Security [laughs]. I would have to say that it was a lot of fun. You can't deny that the Image guys have brought a lot of excitement into the industry, and a lot of that excitement takes place at conventions. We got to be a little part of that. I liked it. The reaction to our move was overwhelmingly positive. 

indy: 
     Speaking of San Diego. You received three more Eisner awards at the convention this year. Did  you expect it? 

Smith: 
     I did not expect it. I figured that there is a lot of timing involved for these things. I remember that Bone was getting a lot of good word of mouth right about the time that ballots were being mailed out in 1994. Taking home so many awards in 1994 was really overwhelming, but I figured that this is it, that everybody went "Oh my god, well if I had known he was going to win all of these awards, I never would have voted for him!" But, no, to get three of them again, and especially the ones that I got, it was pretty overwhelming. 

indy: 
     "Best Humor Publication," "Best Writer/Artist, Humor," and what was the third? 

Smith: 
     "Best Continuing Comic Book." That's a pretty big one right there. I was quite surprised. 

indy: 
     Does this mean that you are not just the flavor of the month, that you are the real deal? 

Smith: 
     Well, it is comforting to me in that respect, yes, a little bit. I do not think it necessarily means all that much in the long haul, we will have to wait and see about that. But, yeah, it is a little comforting. 

indy: 
     Speaking of the long haul, you just came out with issue #21. How do you see the story progressing now, as compared to a year or two ago? 

Smith: 
     I am into the second section of the story. I remember I was talking with Gary Groth, when I did an  interview with The Comics Journal. We were talking about some gripes someone had about my book. I was saying then that I hadnt gotten very far into the story, that there was more to the story than the humor part. And of course everyone who had read Bone knew that there was this underlying darker part, this fairytale type side. Now we are into it. Bone #21 is the scariest one to date. It isn't fun.

indy: 
     Do you think that Bone is still suitable for readers of all ages? 

Smith: 
     Yeah, I do. I think that fairytales are very scary. I do not show a lot of blood and gore. I think that scary stuff is good for kids, and I think that kids enjoy it. 

indy: 
     What percentage of each book is completely planned out ahead of time and what percentage is made up on the fly? 

Smith: 
     I would imagine that within an issue about twenty percent comes out while I am actually physically making the book. For example, in Bone #21, for a long time I have known that this was going to be a confrontation between Gran'ma Ben and the rat creatures. I also knew that Kingdok was going to come up and meet them. While I was writing the story I had it planned a certain way. The whole time Gran'ma Ben was holding her sword during her confrontation with Kingdok. I always thought that he was just going to decide to fade away into the woods, to step backwards, almost like a Cheshire cat. As he got farther back, you would just see his eyes and his grin, and he was just taunting her, as if her time would come. Kind of to leave it on pins and needles there. She could have been killed, but it was just his whim that she was not. Well, then when I was actually drawing this story, for some reason, I had Gran'ma Ben hand off the sword to Thorn. All of the sudden, while Kingdok was trying to kill Gran'ma Ben, Thorn comes out of nowhere and cuts his arm off! Man, I did not plan that! That was not in any of the outlines. It was never in any of the plans. It was never in my head to have Kingdok lose an arm. His arm comes off, and he has a hallucination. All of that was completely on the fly. It was when I was actually drawing the panels that it all just came out. 

indy: 
     What do you think of the idea of self-publishing as a community?

Smith: 
     I like the idea of solidarity. Nothing happens in a vacuum. When I was starting out I got a lot of help from guys like Jim Valentino, Larry, and Dave Sim. I try to repay the favor by plugging comics that I like in my book. I run ads free of charge for stuff I really, really like. And I think that as long as we all get together at shows and share tips and talk about the pitfalls, the community will flourish.  I don't buy into the "us" against "them" philosophy. Like it's a war of the self-publishers against the rest of the comic books. I am a little troubled when I look around and see the clique-ishness that the movement has taken; where the emphasis is more on the technicality of self-publishing, rather than on the artists who have decided to self-publish. The importance of self-publishing is that it remains one of the strongest tools an artist has to bring his or her own creation to market without corporate interference. But again, to my mind, the emphasis should be on the work. The real revolution is to try and get the marketplace to accept different kinds of comics; and on that front we
are making real progress. Think back just two or three years -- can you imagine books like Bone, or Stray Bullets, or Strangers in Paradise getting the kind of attention they do now?