Alluding to the influence of Barks on Bone, Smith commented, "I always wanted Uncle Scrooge to go on a longer adventure.

The day after that program aired, a girl brought her father's Pogo book to school and gave it to Smith, who says it "changed comics" for him.

Smith keeps that book on a table next to his drawing board today,[6][8] and refers to Kelly as his "biggest influence in writing comics".

His name is derived from Fonebone, the generic surname that Don Martin gave to many of the characters that appeared in his Mad magazine strips.

[10][11] 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.

[6] After graduating from college, Smith and his two friends, Jim Kammerud and Marty Fuller, started an animation studio called Character Builders Inc. Their first paid job was producing a 60-second animated opening for the TV series Super Safari with Jack Hanna.

Though Smith found the projects exciting, he realized that it was not the type of cartooning he wanted to do, which was complicated by periods in which the studio had no work.

Drawn to the idea that he could produce his own animated-type story but in the comics medium, and convinced by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore's Watchmen that a serious comic book with a beginning, middle and end structure was both artistically and commercially viable, Smith decided to produce Bone.

To remedy this, he asked his wife, Vijaya, to quit her lucrative job at a Silicon Valley startup company in order to run the business side of Bone as the President of Cartoon Books.

In 2004, when Cartoon Books released a "mammoth" one-volume black and white collection of the entire nine-volume series, Time critic Andrew Arnold called Bone "the best all-ages graphic novel yet published".

The translator of the first four French volumes was Alain Ayroles who would be inspired by Smith's storytelling and go on to write the very successful Garulfo series, among others.

Smith released the first issue of RASL, "a stark, sci-fi series about a dimension-jumping art thief with personal problems", in February, 2008.

Originally intending RASL to be released in an oversized format, Smith consulted with retailers who unanimously cautioned him against the unconventional size.

[6][20] In September that same year, Toon Books, the children's book line launched by cartoonist Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, released Little Mouse Gets Ready, a 32-page children's graphic novel written by Smith and aimed at very young "emerging readers".