When you walk into the exhibit, you’re first struck by two giant charcoal caricatures, one of the late President Ronald Reagan as a cowboy and the other of former President George H.W. Bush as Lawrence of Arabia.

The two drawings illustrate the acidic reverse alchemy mastered by Oliphant. He takes the gilded icons the two presidents would prefer as their historical representations and turns them on their heads. He’s drawn Bush 41 with a smile that captures the shadow of foppish wimpiness that he couldn’t shake, no matter how grand a coalition he led into battle. And he mixes Reagan’s winning affability with a certain lost-on-the-range quality that’s more Bonzo than John Wayne.

This is the power of Oliphant’s graphic gift. Millions of advertising and marketing dollars are spent selling the public larger-than-life images of political figures. Talented cartoonists such as Oliphant can puncture these overinflated media creations with the artistic equivalent of perfectly aimed spitballs.

He spent a few years trying to sell the strip to the syndicates, and got far enough that he was being flown into New York for interviews and asked repeatedly for six-week batches of examples, “but something was missing.”

It was a frustrating time for him, but makes for amusing anecdotes now, as he was being given such suggestions as, “Just lose all the human characters and the dragons, and focus on the Bones in Boneville,” or “Have the Bones talk in thought balloons,” because that’s what Garfield did, and, at the time, Garfield was at the height of its popularity.

Then came the next book to influence his move to comics: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which was, at the time, gaining mainstream newspaper attention, an extremely unusual occurrence back then.

“I’d never seen anyone deal with a comic in such a cinematic way. He didn’t have any of that, ‘Meanwhile, in Commissioner Gordon’s office,’ he just cut to a different scene, and suddenly it was daylight and you were in a different place,” Smith said. “We’re a very visual society, we all go to the movies and watch TV, we understand cutting to a different scene. I was used to comics treating you like you were retarded.”

“And that lead to the brief period where you portrayed the Bone cousins as these dark, aging vigilantes,” McCloud deadpanned. “The Dark Bones.”

Then came the final book that set his course, given to him by his mother

She was New England for some reason, and was in a comic shop for some reason-”I’m not even sure what she was doing there,” Smith said. “What were you doing there?” he asked, looking to the audience.

Again his father shouted to the stage, “Because we have a son that likes comics!”

There she bought a copy of The Tick #1, a comic that “changed it for me,” Smith said. Here was a comic that one guy was doing all by himself, and it was hilarious. So he thought to heck with the gatekeepers of the comics pages telling him to have the Bones talk in thought balloons because Garfield does, he was going to make comics.

Boneville blog has a mass of photos of the event.

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

But it may be the first time a character was based on a true corporate sibling. A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.” (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

Very worth your time as it explores the impact of a comic character.

Hat Tip: The AAUGH blog.

» Slashfilm.com is reporting that Frank Miller will be directing a live action remake of Buck Rogers. The Buck Rogers story has been retold in many formats - movie, television, comic books and the original source - a newspaper comic strip that began in 1929.

The Detroit News has added Keith Knight’s The Knight Life to it’s line up.

The News Tribune, (Tacoma, WA) is adding Zits, Baby Blues, and Pooch Cafe. To make room, Mary Worth, B.C. and World of Wonder are being dropped. The paper said the change was necessary to save money and make room for more local material.

Tundra has been picked up by two more papers: Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Day in New London, CT

An even more recent trailer can bee seen on StarWars.com

David, you may have just answered my next question, but I was wondering for each of you, what was the element of piece of the show that really had you going “Wow”? The thing that made you feel everything was coming together.

FILIPI: Well, I think for me once Lucy and i said “Let’s do this” I had to come over and convince a contemporary arts center that’s never done anything like this before to do this. And so all I could show them were the comic books or the Bone One Volume, and if you’ve seen the One Volume, it’s not the same as looking at an original page. The people I had to – well, convince is maybe too strong of a word.

CASWELL: But they were just not familiar with Jeff’s work.

FILIPI: Yeah. Exactly. But seeing Jeff’s original pages for the first time and seeing how beautiful they were as art objects and the level of craft that goes into each page just convinced me that there’d be no issues hanging these on a wall and that people would completely be able to appreciate how this art – yes, they’re pages from a continuing story, but each page stands on its own as a work of art. That was a moment for me where not only was I trying to convince the people I had to at the Wexner Center, but it was a very reassuring moment for me when Lucy started getting original pages for us to look at, and we could be absolutely convinced that they’d work in a gallery setting. That’s not to say that seeing an original George Herriman was not incredible. And the color Thimble Theater Lucy got for the show is amazing.

CASWELL: I think for me – the Library is doing an exhibit of The Lantern, Jeff’s student cartoons called “Before Bone,” and obviously I hadn’t read through that stuff since it was published in the paper in the ’80s. He donated the originals to the Library when he left Ohio State, and when I went back through all of the ones he had given us, I was astonished at how well the work held up. He was so sophisticated as a student cartoonist, and we see all of the Bone cast of characters in the Thorn comic strip that he did as a student and all the proto-Bone story is there. The interesting thing is that there’s also a Ronny Doody satire of Ronald Regan. There’s a Jerry Falwell satire. There’s all this other stuff going on too, so it’s not just a linear story. By the time we get to Bone it’s a very linear story, so it’s so much fun for me to look back at the early work. Our show will be up all summer too, and we’re hoping that people will visit both places. It really is fun to see how Jeff matured.

FILIPI: They’re a great compliment for each other.