Posted By Dan Greenfield on Jul 14, 2025 | 1 comment

MORRISON MONDAYS!

By BILL MORRISON

At Bongo Entertainment, our main job was to create and publish comics, books, and calendars based on The Simpsons and Futurama, but every so often we received requests from our publisher, Matt Groening, to take on a fun and challenging job outside of our publishing mandate. Matt would occasionally get requests that were too much fun to pass up, but given his demanding schedule as executive producer of a prime-time animated show (and sometimes two shows), and as writer and artist of his Life in Hell weekly comic strip, he rarely had time to take on such projects by himself. Lucky for him, he owned a company that employed a small army of very creative writers and artists that he could call upon to pitch in.

One such assignment that fell to Bongo in 2002 was to create illustrations for a New York Times Book Review supplement around the theme of summer reading, featuring the Simpsons family. Simpsons fans and collectors may have missed this issue unless they had a subscription to the The New York Times, or happened to pick up the issue on a newsstand and discovered the supplement buried within. And since most people don’t save the NYT Book Review, it’s a bit of a rarity.

So, at the risk of burdening Simpsons collectors with yet another white whale to hunt for, I present the illustrations that were peppered throughout the Book Review supplement, along with one of my original concept sketches.

The final illustrations were drawn by various Bongo staff artists and freelancers, and I regret that I don’t have all the names handy to give them credit. But it’s safe to say that these were drawn and inked by me, Jason Ho, and Mike Rote (all Bongo employees), and at least one freelancer, the late Simpsons animation artist, Istvan Majoros. I know Istvan drew the beach blanket illustration from my concept, which I shamelessly swiped from a Little Lulu comic cover! Colors were probably done in-house by Serban Cristescu, Chris Ungar, Art Villanuevos, and/or Nathan Kane.

Some of these concepts were also recycled into Bongo comic covers, such as the one of the Book Review that I reused for Simpsons Comics #81. The comic cover includes a revision by Matt Groening himself, who suggested “Famous Hammocks” as the title of Homer’s choice for summer reading.

May your coming days be pleasant and relaxing, and full of great summer reads!

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— Beautiful! Dig BILL MORRISON’s Utterly Exquisite Homage to FLEISCHER SUPERMAN. Click here.

— RINGO STARR and BATMAN Almost Met in YELLOW SUBMARINE — For Real. Click here.