Jeff Smith Goes Back to Boneville with ‘Bone: More Tall Tales’

Jeff Smith is returning to the world of Boneville with the first full-length Bone graphic novel in over a decade. Graphix will publish Bone: More Tall Tales in September 2023. The book is a sequel to 2010’s Bone: Tall Tales and will be co-written by Smith and his longtime collaborator Tom Sniegoski, with art by Smith, Stan Sakai, Katie Cook, Matt Smith, and Scott Brown. It features a series of stories set in the world of Bone, told by the Bone cousins and their friend Bartleby to a group of scouts as they sit around a campfire. The book will be rated for ages 8 to 12, and Graphix will publish it on September 5, 2023, in two formats, a hardcover with an MSRP of $26.99 and a paperback with an MSRP of $12.99.

Smith originally published Bone as black and white comics from 1991 to 2004, and it was the launch title for Scholastic’s Graphix line, where it was reformatted as nine full-color paperback volumes (see “Scholastic to Launch Graphic Novel Line”). By 2009, Scholastic had sold over 4.5 million copies (see “Jeff Smith Creating More ‘Bone’ Comics”), and subsequently they published Bone: Tall Tales in 2010, and the Quest for the Spark trilogy of illustrated prose novels in 2011-13. In 2016 they marked the 25th anniversary of the series with Bone: Coda, which was less a graphic novel than a fan book, with the full text of Stephen Weiner’s The Bone Companion accompanied by a new 32-page comic (see “New ‘Bone’ OGN Arriving”).