Is Lisa really drifting helplessly toward bohemianism? Is Homer really a hitman in a Parallel-Universe Springfield? Can Marge manage her own day care center without provoking a bloodbath? Read on...
Matthew Abram Groening is an American cartoonist, television producer and writer from Portland, Oregon.
Groening is best known as the creator of The Simpsons. He is also the creator of Futurama and the author of the weekly comic strip Life in Hell. Groening distributed Life in Hell in the book corner of Licorice Pizza, a record store in which he worked.
He made his first professional cartoon sale to the avant-garde Wet magazine in 1978. The cartoon is still carried in 250 weekly newspapers.
I first read this collection in the early 2000s. I was happy to find it's still in print at the time of writing this.
In these pages Lisa has a slam poetry feud with Martin Prince, Professor Frink disrupts the time-space continuum, Mr Burns sets up his own Winter Olympics, Marge opens a daycare centre and the family goes to a tropical island to retrieve a nuclear additive.
The art of these comics reflected the necessity to emulate the cartoons as much as possible, and it shows. The same goes for the stories, whose jokes are of course also faithful to the ones you'd expect from the cartoons.
These comics really benefit from the cultural ubiquity of The Simpsons. At this point, the show is so embedded in my consciousness that when reading dialog from any of the characters (Wiggum, Kent Brockman, Homer, Bart, Apu, The Sea Captain, etc) I can effortlessly hear it in the voice of the character. It's like my imagination is on steroids. Thus it's very easy to read these comics and see it/hear it in your head as an actual Simpsons episode.
Plus the comics are often actually clever. There's enough good jokes that it feels on par w/ the best of early Simpsons (seasons 2-7).
These are great for beach reading or reading on the elliptical at the gym or any sort of situation where you need some mindless fun.
These could have been really poorly done, so hats off to Matt Groening's marketing machine for taking the time to do it right. Groening is a big comic book fan and it feels like he genuinely had a hand in approving these comics, or at least getting good people to work on them.
I've read a million Simpsons comics anthologies at this point. They vary somewhat in quality, but all of them are good enough to flip through. This is one of the better ones.
This is an earlier collection. The early collections appear to have much more dialogue and extras that the new books don't have. I suppose it all comes down to cost per word nowadays