Jeff Smith responded to the disappointing news that Netflix will not be moving forward with its previously announced, animated adaptation of Smith's classic comic book series, Bone, by sharing a comic strip he drew in the style of Charles Schulz' Peanuts.In the strip, Fone Bone replaces Charlie Brown while the various companies that previously promised to adapt Bone over the years take on the role of Lucy, always pulling the football away from Charlie Brown before he can kick it. In keeping with the Charlie Brown aspect of the strip, Smith simply added "Sigh" in response to the news reported two days earlier that Netflix Animation was in the middle of some dramatic changes, including the firing of Netflix's Director of Creative Leadership and Development for Original Animation Phil Rynda, and a number of shows being either canceled or not being produced, period. According to TheWrap, Netflix itself directly confirmed that Bone was one of the shows that will no longer be produced by the streaming service.
Smith is a major Schulz fan, once noting that he learned to read specifically so he could read Peanuts. "I was a big fan of Pogo by Walt Kelly, but even earlier than that when I was very young, I liked Peanuts, Charles Schulz. I absolutely adore that. In fact, I taught myself to read kind of like I was just saying I taught myself to read with the Peanuts collections. My dad used to read Peanuts to me on Sundays, but, you know, during the week he wasn’t there. I had to read it myself to find out what’s going on with Snoopy, what’s going on with Charlie Brown. I love those strips."
Bone is a critically acclaimed comic book series starring cousins Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone that Smith wrote and drew that launched in 1991 and ran until 2004, primarily at Smith's own company, Cartoon Books. The collected version of the series by Scholastic has been one of the most successful all-ages comic book collections of the 21st Century.
As Smith points out in the strip, Bone has almost been adapted two other times before Netflix. Nickelodeon Movies was the first studio to try to bring Bone to theaters in the 1990s, but Smith objected to the studio's plans to include pop music in the film. Warner Bros. then acquired the film rights to Bone in the 2000s with plans for a trilogy of 3D-animated films, but eventually that project was canceled once Netflix acquired the rights to adapt Bone into a series in 2019.
Source: Twitter