Bone and Beyond and Before Bone: The show catalogues

(Note: Apparently, one of these catalogs is now completely sold out. That’ll teach me to dilly-dally with my posts, which makes part of this somewhat less than timely. On the plus side, I may actually have a comic book that will be worth some money some day! Anyway, this is the review of the catalogs for the Jeff Smith shows I wrote up a couple weeks ago, expecting it to run at a site with higher traffic than EDILW, but apparently they weren’t interested, so I’m posting it here. Hopefully the info on the latter catalog will at least be of interest to some of those who haven’t seen it, even if now they can’t order one of their own)


The show is definitely something to see. Curated by Dave Filipi of Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts and Lucy Shelton Caswell of the OSU Cartoon Research Library, Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond features 80 original pieces. Most of these are from Smith’s signature work, but there are also example of his original art from Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil and RASL, plus a dozen piece of original art from Smith’s influences Charles Schulz, Carl Barks, Walt Kelly Will Eisner, E.C. Segar, George Herriman and Garry Trudeau (“Look at the dragon’s eyes,” Smith instructed an audience gathered to hear him speak about Bone when the subject of Trudeau came up).

It’s the presentation that went into it that makes it seem more special than your average gallery show of comics art, however. The Wexner Center gave over a wall near their entrance to a huge, full-color mural depicting Grandma, Rose and the Bone cousins sneaking along a rooftop. In the exhibit area itself, an entire wall is given over to a reproduction of a single panel from Bone, giving the viewers the impression of being inside a giant comics page.

(Above: The cover for the show catalogue)

While those within reasonable driving distance have been treated to a pretty extraordinary show, if you can’t come to the itself, the Wexner Center and Cartoon Research Library can always bring the show to you, with their Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond catalog, a gorgeous twelve-by-nine-inch, 85-page hardcover book reproducing all of the art for the show.

The images are supplemented by an introduction by Caswell, in which she describes the process of going through Bone with sticky notes marking the images they felt hey had to include, and some of the difficulties in replicating the comics reading experience in a gallery show (They ultimately did so by including the original art for one entire issue) and a 21-page interview with Smith conducted by Caswell and Filipi.

Also included is a three-page essay by Neil Gaiman, which begins with the reprinting of his introduction to an old collection of Bone in which he compares Smith’s work to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, before plunging into fresher analysis: “There. That’s what I thought when I wrote that fourteen years ago. I’m happy to say that there’s nothing in there that, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d want to retract or amend.”

And that’s followed by an essay from cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud, who says he and Smith are of the same “time and place, as well as profession.”

Perhaps the most scholarly bit in the catalogue comes from Filipi, who offers a closer comparison between Bark’s duck comics and Smith’s Bone, a comparison he feels “is both appropriate and overdue.”

Bone and Beyond isn’t the only Smith and Bone-related gallery exhibit hanging at Ohio State University this summer, however, nor is its catalogue the only interesting book about Smith and Bone the institution has published.

Smaller in scope and scale, but perhaps even more interesting to Bone fans, is Jeff Smith: Before Bone, a show hosted at the Cartoon Research Library featuring the pre-Bone version of Bone, Thorn, which ran in the school’s newspaper The Lantern in the early ‘80s.

The work is, simply put, weird. It’s clearly Bone, with almost all of the characters appearing, and plot lines and specific scenes familiar from the comic book version already present, and yet Smith’s art, while head and shoulders above what one might expect from your average college newspaper strip, is still nowhere near as accomplished as it would become.

Thorn was more or less a serial adventure strip, of the kind newspapers host less and less of, although it would sometimes break off into one-off gags and side stories. Here the Doonesbury influence is easier to see, both in the structure and the staging (as well as the dragon’s Zonker-like eyes).

College kid Smith himself would occasionally appear within the strip to help out his characters, and he and they would interact with the OSU campus (school mascot Brutus Buckeye appears in one strip).

In one sequence, Smith, with sideburns, a goatee and knit cap and scarf, tries to help them fight off rat creatures; in another, Fone and Phoney get jobs in the real world outside the strip to help make ends meet.

Politics were addressed in an odd, un-Bone-ian, Pogo-like way, with Phoney Bone teaming up with a Jerry Falwell-like clown named Barely A. Foulword in a scam called Life After Death, Inc., and a Ronald Reagan-like politician character named Ronny Doodie appearing in a few strips.

This is the first time anyone’s collected Smith’s Thorn, and while it’s easy to see why Smith himself hasn’t done so, it’s certainly fascinating to see where Bone evolved from, particularly considering where it ended up.

The catalogue, sharing the name Jeff Smith: Before Bone, isn’t quite the lush production that the other catalogue is, but its contents are well worth seeking out. It’s a ten-by-eight-and-a-half, 54-page trade paperback book, featuring two strips per page.

Also included are an introduction by Smith (“When I flip through these old college comic strips, what I see are clumsy attempts to manipulate a dip pen, and sophomoric jokes. Of course, I was a sophomore, so maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself…And don’t worry, I get better”); a piece by his lifelong friend Jim Kammerud, who lived and worked with Smith back in his OSU days; and another piece by Caswell, who first met Smith back in those days as well, and has had an advantage of watching him grow up as an artist through eyes attuned to cartoon history.



Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond runs through August 3 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. For more info, click here; to order a copy of the catalogue, click here. Jeff Smith: Before Bone will hang in the Cartoon Research Libarary through September 5. For more info on the show, click here; the catalogue is now sold out, but here’s the order form.

Related: Some images of the catalogues, which were so nice I didn’t want to risk bending by scanning, can be seen here.

Jeff Smith exhibits: Bone and Beyond and Before Bone

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked down the flight of stairs at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Ohio State University’s campus in the course of the eight years I’ve lived in Columbus.

Entering the building at ground level, you find yourself in a little lobby with a desk, manned by a student or volunteer who will sell you tickets or tell you you’re in the wrong building or whatever. And, if you’re in the right building, then you turn around and there’s a flight of stairs descending to where you’ll find the rest of the Wexner Center: The film/video theatre, their bookstore, their main exhibition space, their music performance space and their restrooms.

A hundred times, maybe?

And yet walking down those same stairs Saturday afternoon revealed a pretty unique experience. See this panel?

It covered a large wall parallel to the stairs, welcoming visitors to the Wex, which is currently hosting Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, and exhibit of the cartoonist’s work (and the work of other cartoonists that inspired it).

I don’t have a digital camera, or even a cell phone camera (or a cell phone, period), which, I realized while taking in the exhibit, makes me a not-very-good candidate for blogging on things like art exhibits.

To give you an idea of the scale though, here’s an image of the piece’s installation, swiped from Steve Hamaker’s blog:

I spoke briefly with show curator Dave Filipi and one the people who helped with the installation about how exactly they put it up, and, while it involves technology so far beyond my understanding that it might as well be witchcraft, its basically a printing of an extremely blown-up original image onto sections of vinyl-y, wall-paper like stuff, and then placed on the wall, in several layers.

The finished product is nice: A gigantic, full-color Bone panel. It was the first of several times during which I found myself divorcing myself from my own experience with Bone, and appreciating Smith’s lines and character designs (and, here, Hamaker’s colors) as art on their own. That is, devoid of context, whoever those people are sneaking around those rooftops, it’s a great-looking image.

Rounding the corner brings you to the exhibit itself, the presentation of which is—I feel a little silly saying this, but what the hell—awe-inspiring.

The entire south wall of the exhibition area is covered in a two-tone vinyl version of a panel, in which Fone Bone and Thorn are shown crouching through the rainy woods. The closest I can come to describing it is this: Imagine being a tiny little bug on the page of an issue of Bone, perched in the gutter below the panel covering the wall. That’s what it looks like.

Here’s an image of most of the wall, which I swiped from the Boneville blog :

(Check out Boneville’s blog for more photos of the exhibit, and some behind the scenes images of the set-up).

As for the exhibit itself, it includes 80 original pieces. The Smith pieces are mostly his original art for the pages of his books, black ink over faint blue pencils, framed and hanging on the walls with notes from Smith and OSU’s Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswel.

It’s a real treat to see the work in person and up so close, both as a comics reader and simply as a viewer regarding the pages as art objects.

There were two pages from Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil (the spread featuring giant Captain Marvel punching out the two giant monsters), and six from RASL #1, along with the cover.

The rest of the Smith pieces are original pages from Bone, including a few color pieces, and Bone #16 in its entirety.

No offense, to Smith, whose art I really can’t say enough good things about, but the real treat of the show was the work of his inspirations sprinkled throughout it.

Here are the original pages and strips you’ll see alongside Smith’s:

—A Carl Barks Scrooge page-long gag strip from 1966

—Two four-panel Peanuts strips by Chrarles Schulz from 1955 and 1958

—Walt Kelly Pogos from 1966, 1971 and 1970

—A Will Eisner Spirit page from 1949

—A pair of Doonesburys from the ‘70s

—A 1932 E.C. Segar Thimble Theatre strip, in which Popeye tries fighting with words instead of his fists, and ends up punching his enemy out (I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud at a gallery show)

—George Herriman Krazy Kat strips from 1943 and 1934

We’re lucky to be living in a time where large chunks of all of the above are readily available in thorough, handsome collections assembled by extremely knowledgeable editors for appreciative audiences. And as cool as it is to be able to read the first few years of Schulz’s Peanuts, back when the lines were more solid and smooth and the character designs cuter, or whole books of giant Krazy Kat Sunday strips, there’s something—okay, I’m gonna say something cheesy again—magical about seeing the actual pages.

There’s a light pencil line Schulz didn’t mean and didn’t ink over here, he lines guiding the letters on Eisner and Barks’ strips. Here is an actual piece of paper that Segar drew Popeye on; here’s one that Herriman himself touched for a few hours, drawing all those individual lines shading the pile of bricks.

I suppose Caswell gets to handle these things all the time, as do the folks at Fantagraphics or DC putting together their various strip collections and The Spirit Archives, but after years of only seeing reproductions, it’s hard to overstate how cool it is to see a Peanuts strip at the size Schulz drew it, complete with every pencil mark, including the ones that didn’t make it onto the newspaper page.


The other Smith-related exhibit currently on view at OSU is smaller and less, um, magical and awe-inspiring, but is arguably of greater interest. It’s Jeff Smith: Before Bone, and its on display at the cartoon research library, right next door to the Wexner Center.

During their talk on Saturday, Smith was telling Scott McCloud about his work on Thorn at OSU’s student newspaper The Lantern in the early ‘80s. It was, he said, essentially just Bone—all of the same characters were involved—but it was obviously a lot less polished, and formatted like a daily adventure strip, rather than a comic book.

When McCloud asked if they’d ever been collected, Smith pointed out that Caswell was collecting them for the first time as part of this exhibit, a limited run of just 500 copies (If there are still some left, you can order one here).

McCloud asked what Smith thought of Thorn now, and he replied, “I hated them; I can’t hardly look at them.”

I doubt others will feel the same. Obviously, the strips aren’t all that great (although they’re certainly not at all bad for a college newspaper strip, for which its incredibly ambitious), and don’t compare at all favorably to Bone the comic, which Smith has tinkered with over the years (Saturday he said he redid about 150 of the 1,300 pages before the final one-volume edition).

But it’s pretty amazing to see this alternate, pre-Bone Bone, like a pilot series for a later series.

The character designs were almost all completely final at that early point, but rougher, and lacking the polish they’d gained by the point Smith started putting them in his comics.

The Doonesbury influence was a lot more evident here than in the comic books, and you can see the constraint the strip format put on the narrative and presentation. It’s hard—if not impossible—to appraise these strips without judging them against what they ultimately lead to.

It sure is cool seeing Bone in this weird, new (and by new I mean old) format, the characters in landscape-less panels, drawn in medium-shot profiles.

As a Columbusite, it’s both pretty cool and extremely weird to see things like the Bones talking about being from Ohio State, or OSU’s mascot Brutus Buckeye showing up in one of the panels.

Caswell describes Thorn as non-linear, and from the strips on the walls, they do seem to go off in weird little tangents, like the Bones getting jobs, a politician that might have been a Ronald Reagan parody asking Thorn to be his running mate because she had great legs (She does; Thorn’s Thorn seems somehow a lot sexier than Bone’s Thorn, for some reason), and several strips in which the characters interact with Smith himself.

In addition to the Thorn strips, Before Bone features a page from Smith’s college sketchbook under glass, along with what’s gotta be the first Jeff Smith trade, Thorn: Tales from The Lantern, and a group of books that influenced his work at the time: Some Gold Key Uncle Scrooge comics, a couple issues of Mad, some DC Tarzan comics by Joe Kubert, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and one of Walt Kelly’s Prehysterical Pogo collections.


Bone and Beyond will be on display at the Wex through August 3. Before Bone will be on display at the cartoon research library through September 5.

Jeff Smith and Scott McCloud talked comics; I took notes

There may not be a better illustration of the unique place Jeff Smith occupies in the history of comics—spanning the end of the black-and-white self-publishing boom and the beginnings of the current graphic novel boom—than the audience that showed up to see he and Scott McCloud speak this Saturday at Ohio State University.

The talk was held in the Mershon Auditorium, and drew a crowd of a few hundred. These ranged from grade school-aged boys and girls to grandparent-aged adults; there were college-aged boys and girls; there were bald men, balding men, men with long hair, men with ball caps and men with cab-driver hats; there were kids who looked like their parents dragged them there, parents who looked like their kids dragged them there, and, most remarkably, families in which both the grown-ups and the kids wore Bone t shirts and seemed equally excited about flipping through the books they purchased on their way in.

It was easily the most diverse comics-related audience I’ve ever seen in Columbus, and it was striking how so few people in the audience even thought that was at all unusual. Several times during their discussion, Smith would mention how much comics had changed—“Can you believe the acceptance [comics] have? Just in the last five years. It’s ridiculous!”—and the fact that it was nice to see so many women attending events like this and comics cons and reading comics in general.

Each time he seemed awed by the presence of women, the audience laughed, until at one point he clarified that, “No, I don’t mean that to sound lecherous or anything,” there was just a point where the only people Smith and McCloud would see at comics events were 35-year-old men. (He related an anecdote about the line for the bathrooms at San Diego, which were the reverse of typical events; long lines to get into the men’s room, none at all outside the women’s room. They both regarded lines for the ladies’ room at SDCC as a great indicator for how far comics have come).

The talk was part of OSU’s Wexner Center for the Arts and Cartoon Research Library’s summer-long exhibit of Smith’s work, Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, one of several such events over the next few weeks.

Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator for the cartoon research library, took the stage first, standing at a podium off to the right to explain how they had decided on the format. McCloud was on campus in ‘07 as part of his family’s nationwide tour (and a few years previously to give a speech about manga in coordination with the library’s celebration of Osamu Tezuka and Astro Boy), and Smith, a Columbusite and OSU grad, was there. The two started talking comics, and Caswell said the grad students present were just in awe of the men’s conversation on comics. So the idea was to replicate that format, “and give us all an opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation between these two old friends, ” Caswell said.

Smith and McCloud then took the stage, sitting in a pair of chairs in the middle of it. Behind them was a projection of a color Bone panel featuring Grandma, the Bone cousins and Thorn peering over a rock ledge (That’s it at the top of the post).

Smith’s longish dark hair was combed back, and he wore a grey/green long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, leaning back in a chair facing the audience.

McCloud’s appearance always shocks me in real-life, as he doesn’t resemble the highly-abstracted, 2D avatar of himself that I’m used to spending time with in Understanding Comics. His hair is now all gray, and wavy in the back, and his glasses aren’t at all opaque. He wore black pants and an unbuttoned black, short-sleeve shirt, alternately hunching forward and leaning back while asking Smith questions.

Upon first sitting down, he brandished a sheet of paper and announced that, despite Caswell’s intentions, he was going to “kill any possible spontaneity” by only asking questions he had previously written down.

That plan didn’t last long, however, as he often held the sheet of paper at arm’s length and squinted at it, mumbling into the mic clipped to his shirt, “That’s not a very good question…I already asked that, not going to ask that, I’ll ask that later…”

McCloud started by asking Smith about having lived in Columbus his whole life—parents were from Worthington, he moved to German Village in ’78, attended Columbus College of Art Design, switched to OSU where Bone began as a Lantern strip entitled Thorn—and about drawing as a little kid.

Smith explained that his father got him started drawing. While he wasn’t an artist per se, he knew how to draw a very good, very detailed Donald Duck. “I still remember him showing me, here’s the white of the eye, and here’s the pupil,” Smith said. “I was only four or five, but I remember it really vividly.”

“It was Mickey Mouse!” his father yelled from the fourth row or so in the audience.

“Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday,” Smith deadpanned at the correction, looking down at the table where their water bottles (and McCloud’s questions) were positioned.

Smith was, like all kids, pretty fascinated by cartoons and drawing (McCloud’s specialty at age six, he shared, was the Lost In Space robot), but it was at age 9 that he settled on his desire to be a cartoonist.

That was when he saw one of the three or so books that would have a profound effect on his career path, a collection of Walt Kelly’s Pogo strips.

He was nine-yeas-old, and a girl at his school knew he was into cartoons and, after the airing of a half-hour Pogo cartoon special, brought her father’s book of Pogo strips in.

“And I thought to myself, ‘She’s never getting this back,’” Smith said. “It just had some of the best drawing I’d ever seen. It looked like a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny cartoon in a comic book form. And I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s what I want to do.’”

Young Jeff Smith was enraptured by the book, and loved everything about it, right down to the lettering. He even went to the library as a kid and asked the librarians to look at the book and tell them how it was made.

By the time he was at OSU in the early ‘80s, he was making a comic strip, the proto-Bone Thorn, which was his attempt at a fantasy continuity strip of the sort that stopped being popular decades ago (“I think the only one left is Mary Worth,” Smith said, prompting McCloud to choke on his sip of bottled water, “Which almost made you do a spit-take.”)

He spent a few years trying to sell the strip to the syndicates, and got far enough that he was being flown into New York for interviews and asked repeatedly for six-week batches of examples, “but something was missing.”

It was a frustrating time for him, but makes for amusing anecdotes now, as he was being given such suggestions as, “Just lose all the human characters and the dragons, and focus on the Bones in Boneville,” or “Have the Bones talk in thought balloons,” because that’s what Garfield did, and, at the time, Garfield was at the height of its popularity.

Then came the next book to influence his move to comics: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was, at the time, gaining mainstream newspaper attention, an extremely unusual occurrence back then.

“I’d never seen anyone deal with a comic in such a cinematic way. He didn’t have any of that, ‘Meanwhile, in Commissioner Gordon’s office,’ he just cut to a different scene, and suddenly it was daylight and you were in a different place,” Smith said. “We’re a very visual society, we all go to the movies and watch TV, we understand cutting to a different scene. I was used to comics treating you like you were retarded.”

“And that lead to the brief period where you portrayed the Bone cousins as these dark, aging vigilantes,” McCloud deadpanned. “The Dark Bones.”

Then came the final book that set his course, given to him by his mother

She was New England for some reason, and was in a comic shop for some reason—“I’m not even sure what she was doing there,” Smith said. “What were you doing there?” he asked, looking to the audience.

Again his father shouted to the stage, “Because we have a son that likes comics!”

There she bought a copy of The Tick #1, a comic that “changed it for me,” Smith said. Here was a comic that one guy was doing all by himself, and it was hilarious. So he thought to heck with the gatekeepers of the comics pages telling him to have the Bones talk in thought balloons because Garfield does, he was going to make comics.

The Tick lead to Love and Rockets, Cerebus, Fantagraphics, Beanworld, Zot! and “this whole underground that’s not doing Spider-Man.”

(In a nice bit of symmetry, his interest in cartooning began with his father, and interest in self-publishing comic books began with his mother).

Sitting down to try Bone as a comic book instead of a comic strip, everything else fell into place, and Smith discovered the infinite room of the comics page. Instead of doing Bone in four panels, wasting the first panel each time to catch reader’s up, know he could tell a joke in three panels. Or five panels. Or six. Or 20. Or 20 pages.

And we all know where it went from there.

Caswell re-emerged to open the talk up for questions, at which point McCloud snapped up his list of questions to hurry through a few more.

“Okay, desert island question,” McCloud said. “If you were trapped on a desert island and had to choose between the complete works of Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly or Carl Barks, which would it be?”

“Oh man, I’m going into the ocean,” Smith said. “How about you?”

“Oh, I’d probably go with Tezuka,” McCloud said, and Smith settled on Kelly.

“I’ve gotta ask about RASL,” McCloud said, getting to the last question on his list. “Is it ‘wrassle’ or ‘razzle’?”

Smith shrugged indicating it was up to him, and then nodded, “Wrassle.”

“Okay, that was my only question about it. No, why did you go back to the magazine format instead of a graphic novel?”

Smith explained that the model of selling comic books serially before re-publishing and selling them as a graphic novel makes some sense economically, but the main reason was he enjoyed the instant feedback he’d get from readers, which in some ways would shape the future narrative of Bone or, at the very least, keep working on it fun and exciting.

He contrasted working on Bone with working on his Captain Marvel comic for DC. For that, he wrote the entire 200-page script, showed it to DC to have it approved, and then spent the next year and a half drawing it and then it started coming out. It wasn’t an experience he enjoyed as much as the work-in-progress nature of serial comic-making.

Then McCloud turned question-asking duties over to audience members, and those lining up in the aisles before two stand-up microphones again demonstrated the wide breadth of Smith’s current fan base. About a third of the questions came from grade-school aged boys, a few from college-aged kids, at least one from a white-haired man.

One boy asked about the backgrounds in Bone, and Smith told the kid, who was from Columbus, to have his parents drive him down to Old Man’s Cave in the Hocking Hills area, which is where Bone is mostly set.

Another asked him why he decided to use dragons and “made-up stuff,” to which he responded he’d need to see the boy’s ID. The dragon, he said, is based on Doonesbury character Zonker (Hey, you can kinda see it in the eyes! A Doonesbury influence is more evident in Smith’s Thorn version of Bone, which we’ll talk about tomorrow).

A twenty- or thirty-something asked about Smith about online comics, to which he turned to McCloud, author of a book on the subject (Reinventing Comics) ) and a longtime proponent of comics’ online future (earlier Smith said McCloud was advocating online comics before there were online comics, and, when talking about the new crop of web cartoonists and how their end goal still seems to be print, he turned to McCloud and pointedly said “for the time being” as if to cover himself).

“Oh, you don’t want to open Pandora’s Box,” McCloud laughed and, despite some prodding, resisted taking off his interviewer hat and putting on his theorist hat. They both marveled at the talent of the current generation of cartoonists, online and in print, and the infinite space the Internet offers them.

“I haven’t quite figured out how you make money on the web,” Smith said. “Me neither,” McCloud sighed.

Another asked the fairly perennial what advice do you have for aspiring artists, and Smith bluntly said that for the most part, everything he and McCloud had learned about the industry no longer applied, since things have changed so drastically since they were breaking into it.

One thing that hasn’t was the need to know as much as you can about comics, who makes them and how they’re made, something Smith started doing when he was only nine. I was quite amused to hear Smith suggest reading Tom Spurgeon’s Comicsreporter.com, which, after only a few days of reading, will give you a good idea on all of the players in the comics industry (McCloud also suggested Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat and Dirk Deppey’s Journalista). You hear that kids? Want to break into comics? Read comics blogs!

They also noted that in the old days, there used to be publishers and syndicates, but more and more there seem to be communities of artists who help each other out on the path to publication.

One person asked about the ending of Rose and how much of it was Charles Vess, another about Smith’s current dealings with Hollywood, and another about why he decided to do Shazam! (“The honest answer is I just thought it would be fun.”)

The final question was from a woman who mentioned that she has relatives who are ages seven and 11 who love Bone, but their four-year-old sister hasn’t been allowed to read it yet, because of some of the violence and how intense it is. She wanted to know what audience Smith intended Bone for when making it.

“That is a really, really good question,” he said. He then turned to McCloud: “Why didn’t you ask that?”

He explained he was writing it for himself, and perhaps other “cartoon head adults;” adults who grew up digging and still dug Chuck Jones and Carl Barks. “It was the book I wanted to see since I was a kid.”

He explained that it really started becoming a book for the all-ages demographic when librarians started embracing the trade paperbacks he was printing, as early as 1995. “We never claimed it was a children’s book; parents and children claimed it as a children’s book.”

With the question and answer portion over, the crowd dispersed, some to buy books and have McCloud and Smith sign them, others to wander around campus to check out the Bone and Beyond exhibit in the Wexner Center (which includes original Smith pages and the works of some of his favorite cartoonists) and the Before Bone exhibit in the Cartoon Research Library, which consists of Smith’s Thorn strips from The Lantern.

Come back tomorrow night for a discussion of the exhibits themselves.

In the meantime, here are some links to the rest of the Jeff Smithstravaganza:



Exhibition info

Show curators Caswell and Dave Filipi to give gallery talk

Some photos of the exhibit set-up from Boneville’s blog

The catalog for the exhibit is on sale

Info on the Before Bone exhibit

Terry Moore!

Paul Pope!

Smith to introduce his favorite Chuck Jones Looney Tunes (You’ll need to buy a ticket for this one)

Billy Ireland's Chris Columbus

Uncle Sam is probably the greatest character creation of political cartoons, a symbol/character who has never gone out of style there, and has gone on to a great career in armed forces recruitment and WWII era propaganda (not to mention superhero-ing).

While he seems to be the most successful and most often-used political cartoon character, others have appeared over the years and still show up fairly frequently—Lady Liberty/Statue of Liberty, England’s John Bull, the Russian Bear and, of course, the Democratic Donkeys and Republican Elephants.

Columbus cartoonist Billy Ireland had a few creations of his own, which he used quite often in his work. One was Old Man Ohio, who, like his name implies, was an old man who symbolized the state of Ohio. The other was Chris Columbus, sometimes spelled “Kris” because, I don’t know, maybe spelling things with a K was funny to people in the early 1900s.

Chris Columbus was drawn with hair and clothes to resemble Christopher Columbus from that Sebastiano del Piombo portrait which seems to be his most common portrayal. His physical appearance would vary greatly depending on the subject matter Ireland was addressing in the cartoons; he was generally more realistic looking in the political cartoons, but given a more abstracted and highly animated, silly design when appearing in Ireland’s “Passing Show” (which was discussed in Friday’s post).

Ireland used Chris as a symbol for the city; as Uncle Sam was to the United States, Chris Columbus was to the city of Columbus, Ohio. It’s probably an obvious idea, but I still think it’s pretty inspired. After all, how many modern American cities share their names with an easily identifiable and caricature-able historical figure?

I’ve seen other local cartoonists—um, the guy they had at the Dispatch before the guy they have now, at least—draw Columbus to stand in for Columbus the city too, but Ireland’s usage is differentiated by the fact that he was, oh, let’s say ten thousand times a better artist (Um, nothing personal, guy who used to work for the Dispatch whose name I can’t remember!).

In a cartoon featuring the foundation of the city’s park system, Ireland drew Chris standing around with a couple of other guys, one marked “City Council.” Another had him hanging out with Santa Claus and William Byrd (I don’t really know what that subject was, really). When drawing a cartoon about a proposal to fix up the city, Ireland drew Chris at a tailor’s, getting his measurement taken.

One of my favorites, which I didn’t scan either, was a part of a “Passing Show” in which I think a new airport opened…or maybe a new airline…? Whatever it was addressing exactly, it dealt with airplanes somehow bringing Columbus and the city of Los Angeles together.

Ireland drew Chris and a beautiful angel woman marked Las Angeles before a clergyman airplane performing a ceremony that concluded, “I now pronounce you…neighbors.” While, off to the side, two proud and happy looking train engines looked on.

It wasn’t easy to find scan-able images of Ireland’s Chris from the collection of cartoons Lucy Shelton Caswell authored (more on that book in Friday’s post too), but here are a few I managed.




In this (pretty poorly) scanned detail of “The Passing Show,” Chris leads a visitor to the city on a tour of the place, taking care to angle the umbrella just so to keep the not so nice looking buildings out of view at all times.

This is one of Ireland’s looser versions of Chris, in which he is drawn more like a mascot or funny character. Ireland must have been using him in “The Passing Show” for some time at this point, because he doesn’t even bother to tag him as “Chris” or “Columbus” as he sometimes did.

I love the expressions on the faces (or is that façades?) of the derelict buildings in this sequence…how they start out all proud and eager in the first panel, and then are increasingly crestfallen as it progresses.

Here are two of the political cartoons featuring Chris. City Council wasn’t always presented as his wife, but here are two examples in which she, er, it is:



These are three years apart, but not how different Chris looks in each, aside from wearing the same clothes. And his wife sure has changed! In the second one, she even gets a name, “Mrs. Councilella Columbus.”

I really like the relationship Ireland infers between the city of Columbus and its City Council—that of a somewhat henpecked husband constantly being railroaded and dragged around by his wife. The city and its council were in a voluntary relationship, but one was clearly in charge of the other, and the city had to always go along, even if it wasn’t excited to do so.

Don’t feel too bad for Councilella and Chris though. They did share happier times, too. In one panel of a “Passing Show,” for example, they’re shown joyfully taking their kids to the circus when it stopped in town. And that Councilella was much prettier than the one with the crazy collar window shopping up there.

Billy Ireland's use of map shapes in his cartoons

In yesterday's post about late Columbus cartoonist Billy Ireland, I had mentioned how similar Ireland's political cartoons from the first decades of the 20th century to those being produced in the first decade of the 21st (The main differences being how rare abstraction was in Ireland's work, and how intricately drawn it was).

The most frustrating similarity? Ireland tended to over-label the components of his cartoons. And by "over-label," I simply mean "label." Because so often, Ireland's ideas are so perefectly crystallized in the drawings themselves that the labeling becomes completely superfluos.

Now, one of the many rewarding aspects of a book like Lucy Shelton Caswell's Billy Ireland, whcih collects so many cartoons from a single newspaper cartoonist in one place, is that by seeing such a large swathe of their work, one gets to see the issues they were most concerned with and become familiar with the techniques they used.

One strategy that Ireland seemed to employ quite often was using the shapes from the map as components in his drawings, using, say, the shape of the United States as the body for an animal, thus visually telegraphing that the animal is a symbol for the U.S. (and thus making labels or good old tried and true Uncle Sam unnecessarry).

Here are a half-dozen or so examples, all culled from Caswell's book.



This one's actually pretty abstracted for Ireland. The eagle doing the feeding and the world-bird are both pretty loose in terms of representation, leaning closer to "cartoony" cartooning than a lot of his political cartoons tended to. I'm not 100% on what real world events this was responding to—I gather from the other cartoons on the topic in the book that plenty of other countries were relying on the U.S. for food in and around World War I?—but the point of the cartoon sure is clear.

The words "the world" seem pretty unnecessary on the baby bird, since it's head is shaped like the world. Similarly, the "U.S." tag on the eagle seems a bit much. You can't get much more obvious in terms of "This is America!" symbolism than an eagle dressed like Uncle Sam.

Of course, this likely has more to do with the way cartooning was done in Ireland's day than any sort of weakness on his part. I mean, the words "Some job!" aren't necessarry across the top, but all of his cartoons have similar over-telgraphing, explaining the joke to readers, in case the picture itself doesn't do the job.

But looking at the picture, it's hard to see how it wouldn't. The size of the baby bird, it's huge gaping mouth, all those other babies, the tiny eagle, the look on his face—it's pretty clear the bird labeled U.S. is comically overwhelmed in its task of feeding the world, right?

Note the way Ireland tags the eagle with "U.S." It doesn't have the letters written on its body, or a button, or a T shirt, as is more cocmmon these days, but has a tag hanging off it. He does this a lot when labelling characters; sometimes they just grow off the character like that, and some time they dangle by a string, as if they were price tags.



Here's a great cartoon in which he uses the shape of the United States as a central image. What a great, simple, evocative way to say "this boat symbolizes the United States." I like the contrast with the especially realistic men doing the rowing, and the Uncle Sam who looks as real as your own uncle. It makes the images single non-representational image—the United States-shaped boat—stand out.

Again, I don't think it was necessarry to mark it "USA," but hell, it was 1917; maybe most Columbus Dispatch readers hadn't taken basic geography in school. I don't know.



Here's one I love—an Americamel. In this case Ireland resisted labeling the beast "U.S.A.," but labeled a couple of individual states on it. Maybe he had to label Florida, so people didn't mistake that for a turgid camel penis or some sort of cancerous chest growth.



And another great use of the shape of the United States. Check out the Americow's haunches. The north western states really blend into an emaciated cow's ass quite well, don't they? This is one that kinda confuses me. I think the americow is the mom cow and the gigantic calf is Europe, looking to feed off the states, despite the states needing their own food? I don't know, really. But those are some nice-looking cow heads. And clever use of a globe and map. And Uncle Sam as farmer.



Finally, here's Ireland using the shape idea on a more local level...



Here, the labeling of everything except the state is probably needed, as were it not for the "Mother Nature," there'd be no way to know that was anything other than some random old lady. Again the shape from the map is the only highly abstracted part of the drawing, calling attention to it and giving it stronger impact. I don't know why more Ohio cartoonists don't do this...the state's shape is such that it could easily be used to stand in for almost anything concave, you know?

It's probably not apparent to any of you not from Ohio, but the background to the right? That's taken from the seal of Ohio. Those hills are in Chillicothe, where Ireland was born. The area is currently a state park.

Who is Billy Ireland?

(Above: A detail from “The Passing Show” featuring “Carmen Ohio.” That’s the name of a 1902 OSU football song that’s still quite popular, but is here anthropomorphized into a symbol of the team)


Now that I know who he is, it seems strange that I’ve gone this long being completely ignorant of Billy Ireland, despite having lived in Columbus for about eight years now and being as interested in comics and cartooning as I am.

You see Ireland was, according to Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, Columbus’ greatest cartoonist. And this is a city that can boast of having been home to several great cartoonists, from Milton Caniff to James Thurber to this Jeff Smith character you’ve probably heard of, so it’s actually quite a heap to be said to be at the top of.

I first heard his name just a month or so ago, when I saw the listing in the Wexner Center for the Arts’ calendar for Caswell’s lecture on “Columbus’ greatest cartoonist,” whom she’d previously authored a book on. Simply titled Billy Ireland, it was first published in 1980 by Ohio State University Libraries*, but a newer, updated version** was more recently released, which prompted the lecture.

I tracked down a pretty battered copy of the 1980 version from my library. It was an oversized trade paperback held together with tape, and it didn’t take too many pages before I became deeply impressed with Ireland’s ability to draw. But it’s the back section of the book, in which his weekly “The Passing Show” is collected, in which merely being impressed turned to flat-out awe.

In an odd synchronicity, that week I was reading a (extremely boring) book about the history of a local suburb, and both Ireland and “The Passing Show” showed up in it. Apparently, he was quite the prominent figure in Columbus during the first third of the 20th century, and an event in the suburb getting covered in his cartoon was a big enough deal to be put in the city’s history.

How did I manage to live here this long without having ever heard of him?

The book certainly went a long way toward rectifying that, and I went to check out Caswell’s presentation yesterday to see what else I could learn. I’m going to share all that with you now, like it or not.

It was not a pleasant day in Columbus yesterday. It had been snowing big, fluffy flakes for much of the morning, and while it wasn’t enough to shut anything down, it was just enough to make leaving one’s house inconvenient—you’d have to clean off your windshield, your feet would be wetter and colder than usual and, as is usual in inclement weather, one’s fellow Columbusites would forget how to drive.

Visiting OSU’s campus is never terribly pleasant either, at least not for the poor/cheap. I used to live a few blocks from the heart of campus, so attending events there was simply a matter of a few minutes’ walk, but now I have to drive in from a suburb, and spend twenty minutes driving around back-alleys and sidestreets trying to find a parking spot within a few blocks. That, or shell out three bucks to park in the garage conveniently located right next door to the Wexner Center’s film/video theater, which is where the talk was to take place.

I don’t know if the snow, cold and/or inconvenience of ever going to campus for any reason was a factor or not, or if it was perhaps the 4:30 start time, before those with day jobs would punch out and be able to attend, but the theater wasn’t exactly crowded.

I counted 25 people there, counting Wex staff and volunteers, friends of Caswell’s and yours truly. The smallness of the crowd was accentuated by the size of the theatre (it sits about 300 people), but it reminded me that no matter how many graphic novel reviews you see in respectable newspapers, how many hundreds of Marjane Satrapi profiles are written or how often Joe Quesada gets asked on the radio or TV to talk about the latest lame event in the fictional lives of Captain America or Spider-Man, there’s still a certain small-ness to comics.

At the start of her lecture, Caswell put the front page of The Columbus Dispatch from the day Ireland died up on an overhead projector, as a way of emphasizing how important he was to the city at the time. Ireland’s death was the front page; there were four huge pictures of him, several articles and remembrances, and the sorts of headlines usually reserved for wars. (Nowadays the Dispatch devotes that same amount of front-page coverage to each and every OSU football game).

Caswell then spoke briefly about Ireland’s biographical details, the same ones covered in her book, before turning to the work itself. She put up several of his political cartoons dealing with local, state, national and international topics—all given the same weight in terms of the quality of the drawing and complexity of the image and message construction—and then dove into “The Passing Show.”

And, as I noted earlier, this is where admiration easily turns to awe in earnest.

Caswell said the best way to describe “The Passing Show” was as “an illustrated column” dealing with whatever was of interest to Ireland. But it was a page long. An entire newspaper page. And he did it every single week. For 27 years.

Each “Passing Show” had a unique title strip across the top, with the words “The Passing Show,” “by” and a shamrock representing Ireland, all arranged into little scenes, like the letters all playing baseball or football, or forming a bridge, or baby birds in a nest, or captured German soldiers or whatever. Below that would be a dozen or so little mini-features or cartoons. There were more or less regular features within the page, like one-panel strip “The Jedge and Jerry” and caricatures highlighting local people and their interests and accomplishments, but the bulk of the page were standalone text and cartoon pieces dealing with nature, corn on the cob, OSU football, city politics, fashion and whatever the hell Ireland felt like drawing that week.

The dozen or two little pieces didn’t really interact with one another, and Caswell said the page was designed to be read over the course of the day, with some people returning to it throughout their reading experience, while others sat there and read the whole thing.

Appearing fairly regularly was Ireland himself. Not just as the shamrock-headed caricature in the title panel,
but also as a little, fat white-haired guy in a janitor’s outfit; the page was his page, and he saw himself as in charge of its maintenance.

You probably can’t tell from that little scan there,

but each one of these things was a massive amount of work (The smaller reproductions in the book were still too big for the scanner, and Photoshop couldn’t take the size of the image when I was saving pages to re-post here).

(A detail from the above "Passing Show," guest-starring J. Wellington Wimpy)

I mean, you’ve probably heard cartoonists complaining about how difficult it is to crank out six daily strips and a Sunday strip, right? Well compare that work load to Ireland’s on “The Passing Show,” and keep in mind he’s not simply drawing the same simple character talking to each other for three panels like in, say, Dilbert or The Boondocks (to name two strips I really like, neither of which are exactly brilliantly drawn), but this involved a considerable amount of planning, character design and drawing each week.

Caswell pointed out in her talk that Ireland not only cranked out a weekly page of the newspaper for those 27 years, he was also responsible for four to seven editorial cartoons a week.

(Part of a "Passing Show" from the week of a Columbus auto show; note the top half of the badly-scanned page is arraned to resemble the front of an automobile)

I would have loved to have watched him work at the drawing board; it’s hard to imagine a man’s hands moving fast enough to produce so much work, especially considering that he was married, had kids, and was very involved with the Dispatch’s business, city politics and policy, and, according to Caswell, loved to hunt, hike and golf (That last one being a passion shared by 99% of today’s newspaper strip cartoonists, based on the number of limp golf-focused jokes I’ve seen in them over the years).

Actually, the way he worked at the drawing board is one of the things that Caswell covers in the book. He’d hold the page against his desk with his left hand (which usually also held a cigar) while drawing with his right.

During the question and answer portion, someone asked Caswell if it were possible for someone to do something like “The Passing Show” today, and she said it was possible, but difficult, and that “very few people have it in them to do it.”

Me, I would probably have straight up laughed if I were her. Even if there were artists capable of that kind of weekly workload, can you even imagine a newspaper turning over an entire page to a cartoonist today? And a local one at that, one who is mainly cartooning on topics of local interest?

Back to Ireland’s bio for a moment: He was born in 1880 in Chillicothe, Ohio, and started working for the Dispatch as an 18-year-old in 1898, remaining at the paper through his death in 1935.

I don’t know how unusual it was for the cartoonist to be as influential and powerful within the paper as Ireland was, but he definitely seems to have been, and I’ve always thought of cartoonists as somewhat marginal figures within their papers.

In 1905, Robert F. Wolfe and Harry P. Wolfe, owners of the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company, purchased the Dispatch, and became friends with Ireland (Particularly Robert, Caswell said). This friendship allowed Ireland to buy stock in the company, and become involved with its general editorial direction, with he and the Wolfes taking up the same local causes back in the day (Interestingly and/or depressingly, over a century later, the Wolfe family still owns the Dispatch, which has grown into a local media empire, including TV and radio stations, suburban papers, a Spanish language paper and what used to be Columbus’ alternative newspaper).

Caswell repeated anecdotes from Will Rogers saying he subscribed to the Dispatch just for Ireland, and that William Randolph Hearst had tried to entice Ireland to syndicate his work, going so far as to promise to build a color printing plant in Columbus, but Ireland turned him down, being more interested in the city and state than what was going on outside it.

She also repeated one about Milton Caniff (which is apparently pronounced “Cuh-niff;” I always thought it was “Cane-iff;” good thing I’ve never had occasion to say his name out loud, I guess). It was Ireland who hired Caniff at the Dispatch, allowing him the means to continue going to college. When Caniff was considering a career change, forsaking cartooning for acting, Ireland told him, “Stick to your ink pots, kid. Actors don’t eat regularly.” And thus Terry and the Pirates was saved.

As for the work itself, that is easily the most valuable thing about Caswell’s book, which reproduced plenty of political cartoons and “Passing Shows” (The book is mostly a collection of these, with a relatively small percentage of the book devoted to Ireland’s bio).

The political cartoons are a bit of a revelation in that they are so clearly the work of an age long gone—the earliest one reprinted in the 1980 volume is 120 years old now—and yet in some ways share the strengths and weaknesses of today’s political cartoons (Has political cartooning really just not changed much over the last century?).

Ireland’s artwork is somewhat old-timey in just how detailed and representational it is. There are an awful lot of ink lines in almost every one of them that is represented in the edition, and terribly few of them have any sort of serious abstraction within them. In many cases, the drawings themselves aren’t trying to be funny, just good drawings, and humor will come from juxtapositions.

I mean, check this out:
That’s a really nice drawing of a really realistic snake, you know? Ditto the dove drawing. The most abstracted part of the drawing is the German dude, and he’s not exactly what you’d think of as “cartoony” looking.

One thing I can’t help but notice—and lament—in Ireland’s work is the need to relentlessly label everything. This is something that drives me crazy about the bulk of modern political cartoons (and, to expand a bit, about comics in general—the need to use more verbal communication than necessary, when the visual handles it just fine). It’s easy to forgive Ireland because, hell, it was the early 20th century and political cartooning was still new-ish, so I’m not going to hate on him the same way I would on someone political cartooning today, but there’s a real excess of labeling in that image above.

The German doesn’t have the word Germany written on him, and yet its clear, even a century later, that that’s what he’s supposed to represent. A dove holding an olive branch is a pretty universal symbol for peace, did it need to be labeled “Dove of Peace,” with the branch redundantly further labeled “peace?”

Probably not. It’s still a nice image and a strong cartoon, I just wanted to point out that over-labeling was a problem as far back as the early 1900’s. And Ireland would sometimes accomplish it in strange ways, having tags sort of sticking off his figures identifying them, as if they were huge washing instructions on their clothes or whatever.

Seeing so many of his cartoons gathered in one place, it’s easy to get a sense of what issues he was passionate about. In addition to attacking Germany, Europe and the League of Nations around World War I, he would commonly speak up in favor of women’s suffrage and better support for veterans, against both Ohio’s KKK and FDR’s New Deal, and, in what was apparently a pet issue of his, in favor of keeping the quail on Ohio’s songbird list (thus keeping it illegal to hunt). Caswell noted that among the local issues he was most passionate about was the sad state of the riverfront, which he and Robert Wolfe campaigned to have cleaned up.

They eventually succeeded, which, during her talk, Caswell said she likes to think of as proof that one person can make a big difference in their city. You can literally drive around Columbus today and see streets that look the way they do now because of Ireland' campaigns.

After reading about Ireland and looking at his work, I'm beginning to think Columbus needs another public campaign—one to erect a statue of Ireland somehwere around here.



Billy Ireland Weekend will continue here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday tomorrow and Sunday, with a couple of looks at some of Ireland’s cartoons, and many, many fewer words than I subjected you to tonight. Promise. We'll get back to making fun of superhero comics and posts about how awesome Martian Manhunter is*** on Monday.



*I found a copy at my local library, but it might prove more difficult to track down outside of the Buckeye State; here’s a great site for finding where the closest library to you that owns a particular book might be. You’ll probably want to bookmark that shit, cuz it’s hella useful.

**I understand the new version is a hardcover, and features quite a bit of color art; the original is all black and white. For those of you outside of Columbus and thus nowhere near OSU, it looks like you can buy the book for $35 online here.

***Very awesome.