Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986, and Other Early Drawings

The Secret Origin of Jeff Smith’s BONE Comes to Light! NYT Bestselling Author Smith Returns to his Roots with a New Collection of His THORN College Strips!

Cartoon Books announces THORN: The Complete Proto- BONE College Strips from 1982 to 1986, and Other Early Drawings, reprinting the entire run of his earliest rendering of the world-famousBONE characters for the first time.

The comic strips reveal an early version of BONE called THORN that was written for a college audience in the 1980s. THORN appeared in the pages of The Ohio State University’s student newspaper The Lantern. A few were reprinted in a self-published 1983 book called THORN: Tales from The Lantern. Another small selection was published in 2008’s limited edition fundraiser for OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum called Before BONE. Both books are long out of print and sell at collector’s prices. There has never been an official, complete run published until now.

This beautiful edition includes plenty of bonus material such as recently discovered early drawings of the BONE characters, essays and interviews.

Jeff Smith is the writer & artist of comics and graphic novels like BONE, RASL, TUKI, SHAZAM: The Monster Society of Evil, ROSE and Tall Tales. Both BONE and RASL were self-published and are New York Times Bestsellers. BONE began the current YA Graphic Novel explosion by launching Scholastic Books’ Graphix imprint and has won 48 national and international awards including 10 Eisner Awards and 11 Harvey Awards and has been published around the world in 33 countries. RASL won an Eisner for Best Graphic Novel. The webcomic version of TUKI won the National Cartoonists Award for Best Online Comic in 2014.