#543 Jeff Smith

Bone cousins

Jeff Smith wanted to do a newspaper comic strip, but he couldn’t sell his idea, so he ended up self-publishing it. Bone eventually caught on, and now it has a color edition from GRAPHIX and it might become a movie!

Jeff Smith joins Tim in this episode to talk about how he got started with self-publishing, why he decided to have Grandma Ben raise cows, why Bone became less funny in the later volumes, and more; plus, answers to some lingering questions from our review of his book RASL!

#363 The Science of “RASL”… sort of

RASLAfter Jeff Smith finished his fantastic all-ages series Bone, he went a completely different direction with his next series: a noir/sci-fi hybrid called RASL. It’s a great story on a human level, but it also gets into quantum physics, the lost journals of Nikola Tesla, and and some real-life pseudo-science conspiracy theories like the Tunguska Event and the Philadelphia Experiment.

Helping us dig more deeply into these elements of the story is a guest co-reviewer with solid footings in both comics and science: Ryan Haupt, an earth scientist in his own right and host of the podcast Science…Sort Of, but also a contributor to iFanboy and Marvel.com. Tim and Ryan also look at RASL as a comic, examining the many story points that Smith leaves vague, and the philosophical questions the story raises.

The Very Large Array