Jeff Smith is the creator of Bone, the series often credited with kicking off the boom in graphic novels for children when it was published beginning in 2005. Now Smith has a picture book set in the world of Bone, “Smiley’s Dream Book,” aimed at kids ages 2 to 6 — who may be the series’ future readers. I talked to Smith about where the Bone characters came from, how Bone ended up as a series for children, and what the transition from comics to picture books was like for him. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

I’ve always wondered why you made characters that are bones, instead of, say, animals.

When I was a kid I adored Peanuts. I knew Snoopy was created by a human, Charles M. Schulz. And back then Walt Disney was still on TV every Sunday night, introducing his new movie, and if it was a cartoon I couldn’t wait to see Dumbo or Donald Duck. So when I was 5 years old I knew these guys had made these characters up, and I wanted to make up my own. I came up with this little guy shaking his fist, and I kept drawing him, because I wanted to know: What does he look like when he’s smiling, or walking? I wanted him to do all the things Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck could do. But I forgot that those characters were animals. I just saw them as shapes. So I thought my character looked like a cartoon dog bone.

Why did you make a Bone picture book now?

I just didn’t want to do a sequel to Bone. It’s published for kids in nine volumes, but it’s really a 1,400-page novel with a beginning, middle and end, and I got to the end. So that book is done. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be. But I love those characters and I did still want to draw them. Scholastic came up with the idea of doing a children’s picture book with the Bones, and I thought, that’s perfect.

Was it hard to make a picture book set in the Bone world?

It took me a while to get the hang of the difference between comics and picture books. I made a picture book a while ago called “Little Mouse Gets Ready,” about a mouse trying to get dressed, for Françoise Mouly, the publisher of Toon Books. The whole story appeared in my head like magic: being a kid and learning to dress, putting on the underwear, struggling with buttons and buttonholes, and the payoff at the end. It took less than two weeks to write, draw and ink that entire book. That’s never happened before and was actually pretty fun.