Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment

Playboy Shows Off The Earliest Look At Jeff Smith's Bone

Jeff Smith's comic Bone has been revived for one last time as part of a new collection of the series, with the new story Bone: Coda being released in a limited fashion at San Diego Comic-Con from Scholastic and making it to comic stores last week.

Which is all the excuse that Playboy Magazine needed to run an article. Including a look at the very first drawing of Fone Bone from Jeff Smith's childhood, from around 1965.

Smith told Playboy

"I was worried about being able to draw the characters—I hadn't drawn them in 11 years… Actually making them come alive…I wasn't quite sure how difficult that would be. But it wasn't, at all. It was just like riding a bicycle. It just came alive and they started arguing with each other."

And just like Playboy, it has battled with censorship constantly.

 The book often, and inexplicably, is requested to be banned from libraries. Reasons include general concerns like violence, alcohol (the townspeople drink beer) and tobacco use (Smiley constantly chomps on a Groucho Marx cigar) to bizarre citations like "political viewpoint" and racism.

"It's a question of being one of the first graphic novels to be so widely available and read by kids," Smith says. "The very nature of comics is that they're visual, so it's easy to just glance and not know what the context of anything is. It's part of the age we live in when people are so divisive. Anything that they don't like they want to destroy. I can't really explain it."

Here's a peek at what you can still pick up right now at your comic store, rather than have to wait for Amazon to catch up.

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