In October, after a long stay in the hospital for a sudden health crisis, Columbus cartoonist Jeff Smith approached the drawing desk in his German Village home. On Aug. 13, Smith had a heart attack that triggered cardiac arrest. Doctors told him that the oxygen supply had been momentarily cut off from his brain and, technically speaking, he had died for a brief time. In the hospital, he felt he was getting better and stronger, but he was still unsure what it would be like facing a blank sheet of paper again.
“I was prepared for: ‘Am I going to be able to do it?’ ” says Smith, the creator of the beloved graphic novel series Bone. “Everything feels weird, a little bit. First of all, I’d been trapped in a hospital bed for a long time, and they don’t let you get up and walk around. They’re very rude about that.”
Even so, Smith had some big projects on his plate. Foremost among them was a book-length collection of Thorn, a comic strip Smith created while an Ohio State University student. The strip functioned as an antecedent to the mythological, fanciful world depicted in Bone. The book, “Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips from 1982 to 1986 and Other Early Drawings,” is set for publication on July 30.
“We had everything pretty much done and ready for the book,” Smith says. “And I hadn’t drawn the covers. So, day one, when I got back, I went right to my desk, got out my pencils and inks, and I drew the two covers.”
For the 64-year-old comics legend, the health crisis was the most surprising detour of his life. Smith—a Pennsylvania native who was raised in Worthington and now splits his time between German Village and Key West, Florida—has no memory about that day, but his wife, Vijaya Iyer, has filled him in on the specifics. On that Sunday, Smith had been in the basement exercising when he trekked upstairs to the kitchen. He was getting a glass of water when the world stopped.
“She heard me drop the glass, and then, she didn’t hear anything—she didn’t hear me cuss,” Smith says. “She heard no swear words, so she got worried.”
Iyer found Smith on the floor. She called 911 and was instructed to press her husband’s chest, “like you see on TV.” The paramedics arrived quickly. “I don’t remember anything except [saying], ‘Why am I in a hospital?’ ” says Smith, who had dealt with high cholesterol. Even so, he thought he had maintained a healthy lifestyle. He bikes to get from one place to another in both German Village and Key West.
“I was in pretty good shape—apparently, I just ate too many hamburgers,” says Smith, who now maintains a diet that alternates between vegan and pescatarian.
Such an ordeal often prompts people to become philosophical, but, in reckoning with his early strips at The Lantern, Smith was already looking back at his life. Featuring early iterations of the same cast of characters later to appear in Bone, Thorn ran weekdays in The Lantern. “Every artist I know cringes when they talk about their early work,” says Smith, who, in preparing the upcoming, Kickstarter-financed book, had to familiarize himself with the entire run of Thorn. “I had a very firm belief that they weren’t good,” he says. But he was surprised: “It’s not as good as Bone, but it’s not as bad as I thought.”
Readers familiar with the vast universe created in the Bone graphic novels may be surprised to encounter the simpler universe shown in Thorn, which relied on gags or topical and political humor. “[The] Bone that most of us know was a novel, and it followed the rules of a novel,” Smith says. “Thorn didn’t know what it was, and it was more like watching a variety show, like the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”
Smith drew the strip with the hope of winning the attention of a newspaper syndicate, but when he faced pushback on his ideas, he ultimately decided to self-publish what became the Bone graphic novels. The first appeared in 1991.
“The newspaper syndicates had pretty much convinced me that my comics weren’t good, and I didn’t want to be convinced of that again,” he says. “I was better at telling jokes and stories when I had 25 pages to go with, so it all worked out.”
Smith describes central character Fone Bone as an avatar for himself. “With him, I go into this fun little world of dragons and princesses and roughnecks,” Smith says. But the appeal of the comic has proved contagious. In fact, multiple studios have expressed interest in an animated version of Bone, including most recently Netflix—which was to create an ambitious Bone series before plans were scrapped. “There was just some huge executive-level chaos [at Netflix],” he says. “They canceled everything that wasn’t in production, and Bone just fell into that.”
In the meantime, Smith is busy shepherding the Thorn book to publication, preparing to finish his long-running web comic Tuki and eagerly anticipating the latest edition of the annual comics festival he co-founded, Cartoon Crossroads Columbus; he missed last year’s installment because of his hospitalization.
He’s also spending time being grateful. “[The doctors] were taking pictures and scans of me all the time,” Smith says. “They said, ‘There’s no damage to your brain or to your heart.’ So, thank God. And apparently, I can still draw and write.”
This story is from the April 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.
