Jeff Smith Biography
Jeff Smith is an accomplished American cartoonist. He is best known as the creator of the self-published comic book series Bone. He was born in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania to William Earl Smith and Barbara Goodsell. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio.
Jeff learned about cartooning from comic strips, comic books, and animated TV shows. The strip he found to be the most entertaining was Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, which he had his father read to him every Sunday, and which inspired him to learn to read.
10 Facts About Jeff Smith
- Name: Jeff Smith
- Age: 62 Years (As of 2022)
- Birthday: February 27
- Zodiac Sign: Pisces
- Height: Average
- Nationality: American
- Occupation: Cartoonist
- Marital Status: Married
- Salary: Under Review
- Net worth: $1 Million – $5 Million
Jeff Smith Age
Smith is 62 years old as of 2022, he was born on 27 February 1960, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, United States. He celebrates his birthday on 27 February every year and his birth sign is Pisces.
Jeff Smith Height
Smith stands at an average height. He appears to be quite tall in stature if his photos, relative to his surroundings, are anything to go by. However, details regarding his actual height and other body measurements are currently not publicly available. We will update this section when the information is available.
Jeff Smith Weight
Smith has a moderate weight. He has not shared his weight with the public yet. Smith’s weight will be listed once we get it from a trustworthy source. Known for his captivating personality, Smith has brown eyes and his hair color is brown.
Jeff Smith Education
Smith graduated in 1978 from Worthington high school in Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, where he was a classmate of Jim Kammerud. Later on, in 1986, Smith and Kammerud would co-found Character Builders, an animation studio in Columbus where Smith worked till 1992.
After high school, Smith attended the Ohio State University, and while there he created a comic book strip referred to as Thorn for the student newspaper, The lantern, which included a number of the characters who later featured in the Bone series. He also studied animation.
Jeff Smith Family
Smith was born to William Earl Smith (father) and Barbara Goodsell (mother) in McKees Rocks. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Our efforts to find out more about his family came to no avail as no such information is publicly available. It is also not known if he has any siblings. We will update this section once this information is available.
Jeff Smith Wife
Smith is currently married to his wife Vijaya Lyer. However, he likes to keep his personal life private hence information about his spouse and dating/married life is not available. Nonetheless, further information regarding his family in detail is currently under review and will be updated as soon as it is available.
Jeff Smith Net Worth
Smith’s net worth is estimated to be between $1 million and $5 million dollars as of 2022. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income is his career as a Cartoonist. Through his various sources of income, Jeff has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.
Jeff Smith Measurements and Facts
Here are some interesting facts and body measurements you should know about Jeff Smith.
Jeff Smith Wiki
- Full Names: Jeff Smith
- Popular As: Jeff
- Gender: Male
- Occupation / Profession: Cartoonist
- Nationality: American
- Race / Ethnicity: White
- Religion: Not Known
- Sexual Orientation: Straight
Jeff Smith Birthday
- Age / How Old?: 62 Years (2022)
- Zodiac Sign: Pisces
- Date of Birth: February 27, 1960
- Place of Birth: McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, USA
- Birthday: 27 February
Jeff Smith Body Measurements
- Body Measurements: Not Available
- Height / How Tall?: Average
- Weight: Moderate
- Eye Color: Brown
- Hair Color: Brown
- Shoe Size: Not Available
Jeff Smith Family and Relationship
- Father (Dad): William Earl Smith
- Mother: Barbara Goodsell
- Siblings (Brothers and Sisters): Not Known
- Marital Status: Married
- Wife/Spouse: Married to Vijaya Lyer
- Dating / Girlfriend: Not Applicable
- Children: Sons (Not Known) Daughter(s) (Not Known)
Jeff Smith Net Worth and Salary
- Net Worth: $1 Million – $5 Million
- Salary: Under Review
- Source of Income: Cartoonist
Jeff Smith Career
After graduating from college, Smith and his two friends, Jim Kammerud and Marty Fuller, started an animation studio called Character Builders Inc. Their first paid job was producing a 60-second animated opening for the TV series Super Safari with Jack Hanna.
Other jobs followed for clients such as White Castle, sequences in films that the studio was given when other studios fell behind, and a claymation project that they were given following the rise in popularity of The California Raisins.
Initial budgets were restrictive for the studio, which required the animators to be resourceful in order to meet their deadlines. Smith sometimes did the voice work as well as the animation on certain projects, and the animators sometimes had family members come in on some evenings to paint animation cells.
Though Smith found the projects exciting, he realized that it was not the type of cartooning he wanted to do, which was complicated by periods in which the studio had no work. It was during one of these slow periods that Smith reconsidered his career.
Drawn to the idea that he could produce his own animated-type story but in the comics medium, and convinced by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alan Moore’s Watchmen that a serious comic book with a beginning, middle, and end structure was both artistically and commercially viable, Smith decided to produce Bone.
In 1991, Smith launched his company, Cartoon Books, in order to publish the series. Initially, Smith self-published the book, which meant that he did all the work required to both produce and distribute the series as a business, including answering letters, doing all the graphics and lettering (which he did by hand), sending the artwork to the printer, handling orders and bookkeeping.
This made it difficult to focus on writing and drawing the book, and as a result, he fell behind in his production. To remedy this, he asked his wife, Vijaya, to quit her lucrative job at a Silicon Valley startup company in order to run the business side of Bone as the President of Cartoon Books.
As a result, Smith was able to refocus on drawing, and sales improved. Smith published 55 issues of Bone between 1991 and 2004. The black and white comic book proved very successful and has been collected in a number of trade paperback and hardback collections, including a series of nine books that collect all 55 issues, originally published by Cartoon Books in black and white, and later reissued in color by the Graphix imprint of Scholastic.
In 2004, when Cartoon Books released a “mammoth” one-volume black and white collection of the entire nine-volume series, Time critic Andrew Arnold called Bone “the best all-ages graphic novel yet published”.
In 1994 Smith created an original cover for Dan DeBono’s Indy: The Independent Comic Guide (issue 13) and was interviewed to help to promote his and other alternative comics. Two additional volumes, Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails and Rose collect a number of Bone prequel comics created by Smith and his collaborators.
In 1995 French publisher Delcourt acquired the rights to translate Bone into French. The translator of the first four French volumes was Alain Ayroles who would be inspired by Smith’s storytelling and go on to write the very successful Garulfo series, among others.
In 2003, Smith started work for DC Comics on a miniseries starring Captain Marvel, a superhero of which Smith is a fan. The series, entitled Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil was published in four prestigious format issues in 2007 and later collected into a hardcover edition.
In 2007, Fantagraphics Books named Smith as the designer for an upcoming series of books collecting the complete run of Walt Kelly’s Pogo. He also designed the cover art for Say Anything’s album In Defense of the Genre.
Smith released the first issue of RASL, “a stark, sci-fi series about a dimension-jumping art thief with personal problems”, in February 2008. A six-page preview was shown at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con.
Originally intending RASL to be released in an oversized format, Smith consulted with retailers who unanimously cautioned him against the unconventional size. Smith later self-published RASL as a standard-sized, ad-free, black and white comic book.
The first trade paperback, titled The Drift, is in stores in the originally intended oversized format. Smith’s art was featured in a pair of museum shows in Columbus in mid-2008: “Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and “Jeff Smith: Before Bone” at the Cartoon Research Library of Ohio State University.
The exhibits were featured in a segment on the PBS news program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on July 21, 2008. In 2009, Smith was featured in The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, BONE, and the Changing Face of Comics, a documentary film on his life and work.
In September that same year, Toon Books, the children’s book line launched by cartoonist Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, released Little Mouse Gets Ready, a 32-page children’s graphic novel written by Smith and aimed at very young “emerging readers”.
In a February 2009 Newsarama interview, Smith noted that the book featured another character Smith created in his childhood, “a little gray mouse with a little red vest”. In March 2013, Smith said his next project would be a webcomic series called Tüki: Save the Humans, which tells the story of the first human to leave Africa.
The web publication began in November 2013 and the print version was first released in July 2014. The fourth issue was delayed due to a hand injury, sustained by Smith, but after its release in February 2016, the series was put on hiatus in June 2016 due to the need to rework the strip.
Smith served on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization founded in 1986 chartered to protect the First Amendment rights of the comics community, from 2013 to 2018. Smith helped found the annual Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival, which debuted in 2015. He serves as artistic director of the convention.
Jeff Smith Bone Books
Bone is an independently published comic book series, written and illustrated by Jeff Smith, originally serialized in fifty-five on an irregular basis released problems from 1991 to 2004.
Smith’s black-and-white drawings were inspired by animated cartoons and comic strips, a notable influence being Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “I was a big fan of Carl Barks and Pogo, therefore it absolutely was simply natural for me to want to draw that sort of mixture of Walt Kelly and Mœbius.
“Accordingly, the story is singularly characterized by a mixture of both light-hearted comedy and dark fantasy thriller: Time has called the series “as sweeping as the Lord of the Rings cycles, but much funnier. Bone has received numerous awards, among them 10 Eisner Awards and eleven Harvey Awards.
The series centers on the Bone cousins, bald cartoon characters. within the opening pages of “Out from Boneville” the 3 Bone cousins, a prehensile and greedy Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone, a goofy cigar-smoking smiley Bone, and an everyman character Fone Bone, have been run out of their town of Bonneville after Phoney’s campaign for mayor went awry.
When crossing a desert, the cousins are separated by a sea of locusts and one by one ending up in the mysterious valley and must make their method across the fantasy landscape pursued by rat creatures (Fone Bone uses a mysterious hand-drawn map that smiley had found).
They gleefully reunite at a local tavern known as Barrelhaven, where they’re taken in by a mysterious lady named Thorn and her even more enigmatic grandma. Fone Bone instantly develops a crush on Thorn once he meets her, and repeatedly tries to express 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, making an attempt to flee to Bonneville, are quickly drawn into the events around them, compelling them on a hero’s journey to assist free the valley.
Jeff Smith Books
- Bone, Vol, 1: Out from Bonneville
- Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race
- Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm
- Bone, Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer
- Bone, Vol. 5: Rock Jaw Master of the Eastern Border
- Bone, Vol. 6: Old Man’s Cave
- Bone, Vol. 7: Ghost Circles
- Bone, Vol. 8: Treasure Hunters
- Bone, Vol. 9: Crown of Horns
- Bone, Coda
- Bone, Boxed Set Books 1-3
- Bone, The Saga Continues
- Bone, Stupid Stupid Rat-Tails
- Art of Bone
- Bone Reader – The Making of the First Trilogy
Frequently Asked Questions About Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith is an accomplished cartoonist. He is best known as the creator of the self-published comic book series Bone. He learned about cartooning from comic strips.
Jeff is an American national born on 27th February 1960, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.
Jeff stands at an average height, he has not shared his height with the public. His height will be listed once we have it from a credible source.
Yes, Jeff is married to his lovely wife, Vijaya Lyer. However, he likes to keep his personal life private hence information about his spouse and dating/married life is not available.
Jeff has an approximate net worth of $1 million and $5 million. This amount has been accrued from his leading roles in the entertainment industry.
Details about Jeff’s salary are not yet disclosed. However, information about how much he makes will be updated as soon as it is available.
Because of security reasons, Jeff has not shared his precise location of residence. We will update this information if we get the location and images of his house.
Jeff is alive and in good health. There have been no reports of him being sick or having any health-related issues.
Smith is still an active participant in the creative entertainment industry. He learned about cartooning from comic strips, comic books, and animated TV shows.
Jeff Smith Contacts
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