Posted By Dan Greenfield on Nov 3, 2025 | 2 comments

MORRISON MONDAYS!

By BILL MORRISON

Even though this is being read a few days after Halloween, it’s being written on that day exactly. And since I’m still very much in the Halloween mood as I write, I’ve decided to show a limited-edition print that I drew and painted several years ago for The Simpsons animation art program. Old movie posters are a favorite parody subject of mine, so when this job came along, I really dove into it.

The subject is “Time and Punishment,” one of three segments from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror V from 1994. If you’ve seen it, you may have recognized that the story itself is a parody of Ray Bradbury’s classic tale, “A Sound of Thunder.” And the title is a parody of the Dostoevsky novel, “Crime and Punishment,” making this print a parody triple-play!

In the segment, Homer is fixing a toaster and gets sucked into a vortex that sends him back in time to a prehistoric era, where he accidentally kills a mosquito. This alters time in a very negative way (I won’t spoil it for you, the way somebody spoiled Peacemaker Season 2 for me!), and Homer ping-pongs back and forth through time in an effort to get his present-day world back to normal.

The design of the print is based on several science-fiction movie posters from the 1950s, and like those fantastic posters it features vignette line-art that illustrates key moments in the segment with lots of cheesy, hyperbolic text, and a painted main image that shows Homer being pulled through time.

This limited edition giclee print was issued decades ago, but amazingly, it’s still available at ACME Archives Direct, in both paper and canvas editions, at their website.

And like I said, I’m in a Halloween mood, so I’m going to pop some corn and see if I can find on TV one of those scary sci-fi movies that inspired the print!

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