Simpsons Comics Colossal Compendium: Volume One
I do like the Simpsons’ comics, a lot, and these Colossal Compendiums offer a selection of their best stories so they’re usually quite enjoyable. That said, I didn’t think this volume was all that great. None of the stories were particularly funny and the weird ones were only slightly off-kilter, unlike the really creative (and demented) stuff in the Treehouse of Horrors collections. There are a lot of good ideas here, like the characters transformed into different digital avatars in MMORPGs, a full-length “official movie adaptation” of the Radioactive Man movie, and a trip to a Simpsons Museum in the future that explains how they saved (and then doomed) humanity. But there aren’t a lot of good gags and I didn’t feel the writing was as sharp or as smart as it usually is.
There’s lots of Professor Frink though, if that’s your jam. And only a brief appearance by Ned Flanders, if he isn’t.
As a bonus, each Colossal Compendium comes with a little cut-paper project of a Springfield building that you can fold together. Volume One has The Android’s Dungeon comic and baseball card shop.
Alex Good 
And have you built it yet?
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Nah, I left it in the book. I could imagine what it would look like assembled and I was . . . unimpressed.
I’m good at being disappointed in advance of doing things. Which means I do less.
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A reasonable explanation.
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Have you watched the tv show much? Wondering if being familiar with the show helps or hinders enjoyment of the book.
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I watched it semi-regularly for its first ten years. Haven’t seen it in a long time. I guess it’s in its 37th season now. Knowing the characters and the style of humour is a plus I think for enjoying the comics.
Now that you mention it, I’m having trouble thinking of how anyone wouldn’t be at least a little familiar with the show. They’d really have to have been living in the proverbial cave for the last thirty years.
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My knowledge of the Simpsons is all second hand. People talking or blogging or leaving youtube clips in comments 😉
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I know those people!
Even if you’ve never seen the show though, if someone mentioned Homer Simpson or Bart Simpson you’d know who they were talking about and have a general idea of who the characters were and what they were like.
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Yep, it’s become a cultural phenomena. Not necessarily a good one 😉
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Now I think about it, it’s lucky I got into The Beatles in the 70s because super-popularity drives me away damn near every time. I watched a few early episodes of The Simpsons and liked them, but as their popularity rose my interest waned. Now I just find it disgusting this thing is still on the air. (I do, however, still have my copies of Work Is Hell and School Is Hell, and I just pretend there aren’t 10+ other books in the series.)
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I remember the Life is Hell strip that ran in alt-newspapers back in the ’80s, before The Simpsons. Groening really hit the jackpot in a way that’s almost unimaginable for a cartoonist.
At the end of my run watching the show I felt it was really played out. Or that it had jumped the shark, as they liked to say back then. I’m surprised it’s still going. But the comics are pretty good overall. Not at all subversive like Groening was back in the day, but well produced and generally pretty funny.
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