In the first part of a two-part interview, The Daily Cross Hatch chats with cartoonist Jeff Smith about the early days of Bone and Cartoon Books: “One day I walked into a comic book shop, in Columbus, OH — Monkey’s Retreat, which is one of the oldest comic book shops in the country — and came across Love & Rockets, and Cerebus, and The Tick. I remember looking at them and thinking, they’re in black and white, and you can really tell that they’re driven by their creators. I was used to reading comics like Archie and Spider-man. I thought, ‘maybe that’s the place where I can take this comic strip idea and expand it into a book.’”
