Book Review: Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips

The secret origin of Jeff Smith’s Bone comes to light! New York Times bestselling author Smith returns to his roots with a new collection of his Thorn college strips, reprinting the entire run of his earliest rendering of the world-famous Bone characters for the first time. The strip appeared five days a week in the pages of The Ohio State University’s student newspaper The Lantern from 1982 to 1986. A few were reprinted in a self-published 1983 book called Tales from The Lantern. Another small selection was published in 2008’s limited edition Before Bone, a fundraiser for OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. 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.

Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986, and Other Early Drawings by Jeff Smith was published July 3, 2024, from Cartoon Books.

Anyone who has been reading comics for decades certainly knows of Smith and Bone. Ironically, I had not read much of the series nor did I know it started out as a strip he did while in college (at the same time I was basically in my undergraduate studies). Reading this collection now transports me back to that time period.

It was fun to see Smith's artwork and style evolve over this period. That is going to happen when he's working daily on his craft. There is a lot of fun bonus material in this new volume, including some behind the scenes interviews and early sketches from the artist. It helps to put the strips in the context of the times and in the historical benchmarks for the overall Bone franchise.

I came to realize that Smith and I shared something in common. The strips over the summer of 1984 find Fone Bone and his cousin Phoney Bone working jobs along with the cartoonist at an ice cream factory. This was Smith's art imitating life, and it was imitating mine too as I also worked the summer of '84 in an ice cream plant in my hometown. Talk about odd coincidences.