Press Release
IDW Publishing and Cartoon Books are pleased to announce Jeff Smith’s Bone Artist’s Edition, to be released this fall and featuring one of Smith’s most beloved stories: The Great Cow Race! Featuring Fone, Smiley and Phoney bone, Gran’ma Ben, the radiant Thorn, and, of course, those stupid, stupid Rat Creatures!
There’s movement on the Bone animated movie based on Jeff Smith’s comic book series. There’s a director.
This week on the show: The Complete Bone! Reviews! Odin does something to Iron Man! All this, plus Matthew, too, in this installment of the Major Spoilers Podcast.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU SPIT COFFEE ALL OVER YOUR COMPUTER IF YOU LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE AT WORK.
Show Notes after the Jump!
This week, on the Major Spoilers Podcast, the team celebrates the holiday by taking a super-sized helping of Jeff Smith’s Bone.
Bone: The Complete Volume
Art and Words by Jeff Smith
The series centers around the Bone cousins, white, bald cartoon caricatures. In the opening pages of Bone: Out from Boneville the three Bone cousins—avaricious Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone, goofy cigar-smoking Smiley Bone, and everyman character Fone Bone—are run out of their hometown of Boneville after Phoney decides to run for mayor and built a balloon on top the head of a statue of Boneville’s founder. A strong wind made the balloon break the head off of the statue and all the townspeople ran Vincible, Smiley, and Fone out of town. After crossing a desert, the cousins are separated by a sea of locusts and individually ending up in the mysterious Valley and must make their way across the fantasy landscape pursued by rat creatures. They joyously reunite at a local village called Barrelhaven, where they are taken in by a mysterious girl named Thorn and her even more enigmatic grandmother. Fone Bone instantly develops a crush on Thorn when he meets her, and repeatedly attempts to prove his love through poetry. As they stay longer in the valley, they encounter humans and other creatures who are threatened by a dark entity, the Lord of the Locusts. The Bones are quickly drawn into the events around them, compelling them on a hero’s journey to help save the world.
Join in on the discussion by ordering the book here Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume (Vol 1)
As always, the Major Spoilers Podcast is nothing without comments from great readers and listeners like you. You can use the comment section below, drop us a voice mail by calling (785) 727-1939, or record your comments and send it as an MP3 file in an email to podcast@majorspoilers.com.
Here’s your chance to be heard on the show! Give us your thoughts on this book, or if you want to share your thoughts on the state of the comic book industry, or anything else that might be on your mind drop us a line. Only the most awesome comments (positive and negative) make it on the show, so get your stuff to us right away!
If you haven’t already heard, Jeff Smith’s BONE is getting the big screen treatment from Warner Bros. Reports from around the Intardwebz have the studio prepping the comic series into a three movie trilogy.
Smith spoke to the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex and said he’s seen some early work on the computer animated 3-D movie.
“Fone Bone was falling in the water and going through cliffs and canyons. The dragon moved in from off camera in the shadows with smoke around him, all in 3-D. It was pretty mind-blowing,” said Smith, who estimates that the earliest a “Bone” film would be done is two years from now.
If the studio really is moving ahead with this as a three movie extravaganza, it sounds like they’ll be able to get most of the tale told – though it is interesting that the Hero Complex story says two scripts have been offered up and rejected, with a third on the way.
Here’s an interesting bit of news via Collider in which Sherlock Holmes producer Dan Lin mentions a multi-part Bone movie based on Jeff Smith’s work.
Lin said Justin Monjo is writing the script and they already did a test with Animalogic (who did Happy Feet and Guardians of Ga’Hoole). He went on to say “it really looks like a mix of Shrek as far as the three Bone characters and their comedy, their Looney Tunes or Marx Brothers comedy set in a Lord of the Rings world. We’ve met with several directors and we hope to come to a director decision by January and Jeff Smith has been very intricately involved in the development process with us.â€
This might be a surprise to many Jeff Smith fans, as the creator has stated before he had no desire to see Bone turned into a film. However, Lin died say that Smith is “very intricately involved in the development process”, and that a director may be named as early as January 2010.
Having made it almost all the way through the giant Bone collected edition, I can’t wait to see how Lin will bring the look and style to the big screen.
Press Release
Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, is delighted to announce the acquisition of US, Canada, Philippines, and English Language rights to new titles by Jeff Smith featuring characters from his bestselling BONE series of graphic novels.
First to be published will be “BONE: Tall Tales,” coming in Summer 2010, written by Jeff Smith and Tom Sniegoski, and illustrated by Jeff Smith, featuring new art and stories with favorite BONE characters. In addition, Scholastic will publish a highly-anticipated expansion of the BONE world-the Quest for the Spark Trilogy. Overseen by Smith, the trilogy will be written by Tom Sniegoski and illustrated by Jeff Smith. “BONE Quest for the Spark: Book One” (Fall 2010), “BONE Quest for the Spark: Book Two” (Spring 2011), and “BONE Quest for the Spark: Book Three” (Summer 2011) represent the first time Smith has continued the adventures set in the valley since the publication of Rose, the prequel to the BONE series-to be released by Scholastic/Graphix in August 2009. The deal for additional BONE publishing was negotiated by Vijaya Iyer for Cartoon Books/Jeff Smith and by David Saylor, Vice President, Creative Director of Trade Publishing and Editorial Director of Graphix, for Scholastic.
Comics on Comics had a chance to interview Bone creator, Jeff Smith at the Book Expo America a couple of weeks ago, and have finally gotten around to posting the video on the Interwebs.
Ohio State University has a new Jeff Smith exhibit going on that features Jeff’s work for the college newspaper. The strips, called Thorn, is being collected into a tome that has been signed by Jeff.
If you want all things Smith, you better hurry; the collection is limited to 500 signed copies, and with a $25 cover price, will go fast. If you want your Jeff Smith: Before Bone collection, head over to the Cartoon Research Library before they are all gone.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to produce a Bone movie based on Jeff Smith’s indie title.
Smith will executive produce the movie, but the big question is what format the flick will take.
An animated version was in development at Nickelodeon Films but fell through, partly because Smith was displeased that the studio was aiming it for kids and wanted the film to include pop songs.
I say get PIXAR to do it, make it a stunning 3D movie and make millions. The big drawback is PIXAR is owned by Disney/Apple and Warner Bros. wouldn’t go that far to jump in those waters.
uClick has announced it signed Jeff Smith’s Bone series to the company’s GoComics service for mobile phones.
GoComics offers a wide variety of exciting comic books optimized for mobile phone screens. Their star- studded lineup includes Virgin Comics, the sci-fi fantasy hits GØDLAND and Elephantmen, the webcomic-turned-comic-book PvP, the manga and anime horror import Guilstein, high-flying martial arts fun starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more. The Mobile Comic Book Reader is available on all major carriers, including Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.
The first installment of Bone on your phone launched July 26, with news chapters released weekly. As we move into a world of digital content delivery, the need for a bigger and better phone/mobile device is going to be imparative. Considering the size of my current cell phone screen, something along the lines of a iPhone might work size wise.
Jeff Smith has posted images of the very first plush Bone doll. The 13 inch toy should be available sometime in July.
This is the proto-type, and we took pictures of it yesterday to get ready for the Previews catalog. I’ll have more information later when it we get closer to the order date.
via Boneville (link)
