Fone and Phoney Bone Inked Illustration from the 80s by Jeff Smith

Here is Fone and Phoney Bone in a delightful illustration from the mid-80s while Jeff Smith attempted to syndicate the story into a newspaper comic strip. I bought this directly from a former employee at Character Builders, an animation business founded by both Jeff and fellow cartoonist Jim Kammerud. She said that Jeff would draw pieces like this during the company’s downtime between projects.

The illustration was completed on an 11” by 11” piece of Bristol board and the characters themselves are drawn much larger than how Jeff inked them in the original Thorn comic strips. It’s unsigned but it was posted on Boneville.com a few years ago (see the additional images).

I originally had this piece up in 2017 but took it down for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, I didn’t have enough information about it. However, last year (2023) a fellow collector showed me a fantastic piece of OA that was a full page Thorn comic strip that Jeff had published in an Ohio State magazine called The Sundial in March 1986. One of the panels had Phoney in an extremely similar pose so I’m now fairly confident in dating this somewhere between 1986 and 1987.