Jeff Smith (cartoonist) - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Jeff Smith was born in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania and grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where he now lives.

Smith learned about cartooning from comic strips, comic books, and animated TV shows. Smith has cited Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts as a very early influence on his understanding of comics He has also named Walt Kelly's Pogo, which he discovered at the age of nine when a classmate brought a collection of the comics to school, as his "biggest influence in writing comics." Smith began to create comics with the "Bone" characters as early as 1970, when he was about 10 years old.

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 until 1992.

After high school, Smith attended the Ohio State University, and while there he created a comic strip called "Thorn" for the student newspaper, The Lantern, which included some of the characters who later featured in the Bone series.