Sketches of Bone from Jeff Smith before Bone #1 publication

These are sketches of various characters from the Bone series before their first comic book publication in Bone #1 (July of 1991). I bought this on eBay in the summer of 2016 from a former employee at Character Builders, where Jeff Smith used to work before establishing Cartoon Books with his wife Vijaya Iyer. Apparently, there was a decent amount of downtime between projects at the animation studio which Jeff used to develop Bone for comic strip syndication before realizing their comic book destiny.

The biggest sketch is Fone Bone of course with a crossed out version of his classic pose from the future cover of Bone #11 (he also used this image for the 50 pieces of painted OA that he drew for Bone’s 20th Anniversary). There’s a small blue pencil sketch of a rat creature on the lower left and Smiley Bone in the middle.

There is no date on the Bristol board itself so I can only guess when these were sketched. Jeff co-founded Character Builders in 1986 with Jim Kammerud and left in 1991. The board itself is 8” by 10”.

In the additional images is an advertisement for Character Builders which the seller sent with the piece.

NOTE: Smiley Bone did appear in the Thorn comic strip in late 1984 (changed on 5/4/23)