Trivia / Bone

• Bury Your Art: For decades, the Thorn comic strip was almost impossible to get ahold of — some of the strips had been collected in the book Thorn: Tales from the Lantern, and later in the book Before Bone, but both books had extremely limited prints (1000 copies for the first and 500 for the second and) are very rare. They have never been republished and fetches really high prices on eBay whenever they show up. The reason is that Jeff Smith didn't like Thorn, which he came to view as basically is a first draft of sorts. And so, for ages, the only way to read even some of the strips was through the online archive of the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library — or through certain unofficial image hosting sites.
  • In later years, though, Jeff has softened on the strip, and has finally decided to reprint the entire sun of the strip in one volume — Thorn: The Complete College Strips, set to be released in 2024.
• Development Hell: The movie, which was to be made by Nickelodeon, but Executive Meddling caused Jeff Smith to say no. It would be years before anything more would be heard, but then came Warner Bros. acquiring the rights. However, little has been heard from it since, with Jeff Smith not making too many comments on it. Rumors have it that a CGI movie will be made, to which Smith eventually agreed, though he insists in interviews that he'd have preferred a hand-drawn-animated one. Eventually, Warner Bros.' rights to adapt the comic lapsed, and they were acquired by Netflix, who had announced their intent to turn it into an animated TV series, until that was canceled due to Netflix restructuring their business model. Smith made a follow-up comic parodying his optimism and experience working to try to get an adaptation off the ground. As of February 2023, Smith has declared that following Netflix's attempt being canned, other studios started approaching him to continue development on the adaptation, but Netflix currently owns the adaptation rights, so time will tell if anything will happen.
• Executive Meddling: Nickelodeon wanted to change some things that were present in the comic for the film. They also wanted the likes of Britney Spears and *NSYNC to sing for the film. Jeff Smith was not amused, and as a result, their version of the film was never made.
• Hypothetical Casting: When asked about a potential adaptation, Smith chose Tim Robbins for the voice of Fone Bone and Steven Wright for the Red Dragon.
• Inspiration for the Work: Smith said he got the Red Dragon's dictum of "never use an ace when a two will do" at an actual poker game, and immediately wrote it down to use it in a future work.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Thorn: Tales from the Lantern, was only reprinted once for a book that only has 500 copies.
  • The same can be said for each of the three failed adaptations and their development. Concept art, test animation, and scripts were produced for all three, but almost little-to-none of the material has ever resurfaced.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Bartleby was named via a "name the character" contest. The winner was Shaenon Garrity who eventually went on to make Narbonic and Skin Horse
• Screwed by the Network: Bone just cannot catch a break when it comes to adaptations, as any attempts resulted in the network in question to force unnecessary changes (see the Nickelodeon example), got silently cancelled (see Warner Bros.), or publicly cancelled (Netflix announced this in April of 2022).
• Shrug of God: When the series was completed and a fan asked Jeff what the Crown of Horns actually was, he basically said that he couldn't give a definitive answer and that the fan would have to figure it out for himself, implying the reason for his secrecy is either the 4th, 8th, or 19th reason.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Nickelodeon considered to make an adaptation, but they never did. See Executive Meddling above for more details.
  • The Warner Bros. version of the film is most likely in this as well, especially with the Netflix show having been announced.
  • Netflix was also interested in making a Bone adaptation. However, the project was silently dropped as early as Fall 2021, and publically cancelled on April 20, 2022. In a report by The Wrap, Netflix restructured its business model to focus more on acquired shows to mimic the viewership success of The Boss Baby: Back in Business. As a result, Netflix downsized its in-house animation branch for Kids & Family series, terminating numerous projects like Bone.
    • The Netflix series would have been co-executively produced by animator Nick Cross. He is best known for his Emmy-winning work on Over the Garden Wall.
    • Nathan Ramos-Park and Justin Michael (Infinity Train) were attached as story editors.
    • During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Jeff Smith scouted around for talent from Cartoon Network and other Netflix series he liked to work on the series. At the time, he was proudly successful in "getting everybody I wanted."

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