I can’t remember when I first saw an episode of The Simpsons. I know for sure I started watching new episodes in season 10, but I can’t recall when I started regularly watching reruns before that. I consider myself within the second generation of Simpsons fans, as I was born right around when the series began, being a literal infant during the heyday of Bart-Mania, then discovering the show and becoming a fan at the tail end of the 1990s. But even though I missed that initial wave of popularity, I was still growing up in a world where The Simpsons‘s presence in every day life was inescapable, with Bart Simpson being as ubiquitous for a 90s kid as Batman or the Ninja Turtles. I also grew up with the show being considered somewhat taboo; it wasn’t out-and-out banned in my house, but I was strongly encouraged by my mother to not watch it at a young age, until she eventually relented when I got older. For whatever reason, this restriction did not extend to non-show-related material, so there’s part of me that feels like for a brief window of my childhood, I had more exposure to Simpsons books than I did with the show itself. I have a memory of having The Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book at a pretty young age, which released in 1991, but I must have found the book somewhere around 1995 or 1996. Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life and The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album would soon join it in my library, as well as what would become my personal Bible, The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family.

It wasn’t much longer after that that I discovered the Simpsons comics. The first issue I bought when it was new was #37, which hit shelves in June 1998, but I distinctly remember the first comics-related thing I owned was The Simpsons Wingding, a trade paperback collection of issues #19-23 released in May 1997. Having missed the initial wave of Simpsons commercialism, I wasn’t able to experience first hand the early 90s toys, T-shirts, or video games due to lack of availability, but with the comics, I could easily pick up the reprinted volumes comprised with back issues at any book store, easily garnering a complete collection of the series up to the point I was picking up new issues. These were all put out by Bongo Comics, the company founded by Matt Groening, named after the one-eared rabbit character in his Life in Hell series. Bongo Comics had an incredibly impressive run, releasing titles from 1993 all the way up to 2018. Looking back at the issues I remember having, I stopped collecting the comic around mid-2006, so it’s wild for me to think that they kept plugging along for over a decade more.

Some readers in the past have asked if I was ever going to cover the Simpsons video games, but that always felt like well-trod ground that many people had covered, plus I felt less inclined to do it given my lack of exposure to pretty much all of the games pre-Road Rage (YouTuber honestom23 has been doing an unbelievably thorough job in his series ranking every Simpsons game, including all the different console versions of each game, as well as stuff like covering all the content from the recent Fortnite crossover. I highly recommend checking it out.) But the Simpsons comics feel a little less discussed, and for a brief, shining moment, I thought I might want to burn through a whole bunch of them and give my broad thoughts about the series, as I remembered it as a kid and looking back on it now. However, similar to past jolts of creative writing energy I’ve had for this blog in the past five years or so, my motivation dropped like a stone pretty early in actually reading the comics, in addition to being busy with other stuff that ate up my time. Never say never, but I don’t think I’m going to actually come back to cover this topic. However, I had already researched and written up my prelude article about Simpsons Illustrated, the magazine that predated Bongo Comics in the very early 90s. Rather than let it languish in my drafts, I figured I’d just post this as a one-off, since it is an interesting Simpsons curio, and something I think a lot of fans, myself included, had never really examined that closely.  Continue reading “Simpsons Illustrated (or, an Aborted Bongo Comics Look-Back)” →