MORRISON MONDAYS!
By BILL MORRISON
This month, Epic Games launched a Fortnite mini-season featuring The Simpsons — it started Nov. 1 and ends Nov. 29 — for which I was commissioned to create nine loading screens. It was a big job, so I assembled a small, but mighty team consisting of two of my former Bongo accomplices, Mike Rote and Serban Cristescu, to get it done. I handled concept sketches and rough pencils, and Mike tightened up my drawings and provided finished inks. Then Serban took over, adding brilliant colors and rendering.
I’m not a gamer myself, so I haven’t seen the screens in game play, but it’s been very exciting and gratifying to get fan reactions to the images as they’ve been posted on the web.
This has made me reflect on my early days as a Simpsons artist, creating art for every item imaginable, including video game boxes. I knew I had illustrated several early game packages, but I wasn’t quite sure how many. A quick web search revealed that between 1991 and 1997, there were 15 Simpsons games, and I was a little surprised to realize that I provided the art for every one of them.
Inks and colors by Tim Bavington
The first was for Bart vs. the Space Mutants, for which I also drew a custom print ad. This job was followed quickly by the case art for The Simpsons Arcade Game by Konami (the only one on the list that wasn’t a home system game). Some of my favorites over those seven years were Bart vs. The World, Krusty’s Super Fun House, Bart vs. the Juggernauts, and Bart’s House of Weirdness.
My final game art for The Simpsons, until the Fortnite project, was 1997’s Virtual Springfield. That was the year I began working on my creator-owned Roswell, Little Green Man comic series, and as I recall, between that project and my regular Bongo duties as creative director, I didn’t have as much time for jobs outside of comics.
Inks and colors by Tim Bavington
In 2021, Arcade1Up released a 30th anniversary home version of the Konami Simpsons arcade game with my original cabinet art intact! I thought about buying one, but they appear to be out of production now and selling for upward of a thousand dollars! I have a stat of my original art, so I guess I’ll stick with that.
—
Want more MORRISON MONDAYS? Come back next week! Want a commission? See below!
—
MORE
— MERMAIDS, MICE AND MORE: The Stories Behind Classic Animated Movie Poster Art of the ’80s and ’90s. Click here.
— RADIOACTIVE MAN #222: An Uncanny FOOM Parody Right Out of the 1970s. Click here.
—
Eisner winner BILL MORRISON has been working in comics and publishing since 1993 when he co-founded Bongo Entertainment with Matt Groening, Cindy Vance and Steve Vance. At Bongo, and later as Executive Editor of Mad Magazine, he parodied the comics images he loved as a kid every chance he got. Not much has changed.
Bill is on Instagram (@atomicbattery) and Facebook (Bill Morrison/Atomic Battery Studios), and regularly takes commissions and sells published art through 4C Comics.
