The key to The Simpsons' comedic success, way back when the show actually was comedically successful, was its constant barrage of sharp, insightful, and/or outrageously silly jokes that went by so quickly you had to watch the best episodes a dozen times for everything to register. It all comes down to writing, pacing, and editing, most of which goes out the window in the transition from TV to comics. Frankly, The Simpsons comics were not really funny. With their over-reliance on trotting out obscure characters, lazy self-references, lazy puns, and slack pacing, they're not too different from what the TV series would start becoming during its spotty eighth season.
But since the Bongo Comics were a totally different medium, it had the freedom to become something different, and different it most certainly was. Some of the stories mimicked the look and storytelling style of the TV show as best as a comic could, but a lot went off into bizarre zones that felt much more indebted to Underground Comix than anything resembling what millions of people saw on the box every Thursday or Sunday night.
This was especially true for the annual Treehouse of Horror issues. Like its TV equivalent, the Halloweeny comics parodied established horror items with little allegiance to the series' already dodgy continuity and none whatsoever to reality. So long-dead Frank Grimes (or "Grimey," as he liked to be called) might come back as a zombie or Bart might transform into a cat person (think more Nastassja Kinski than Simone Simon) or Blinky might return as the shark from Jaws. Again, none of this is funny, but the artwork was often incredible and terribly creative.
Sometimes it all went so far afield that it went from thrilling to uncomfortable, as when Matthew Thurber uses nearly unrecognizable versions of Bart and Lisa for what seems to be political purposes ("The Call of Vegulu" is so utterly muddled its hard to really be sure) or when Glenn Fabry graphically mutilates various favorite characters in the legit disturbing "30 Days of D'oh". But since the comedic tone of The Simpsons is so impossible to recreate in a comic, the stories sometimes work best when they veer far off the beaten path, as the manga-like "Murder He Wrote" and the E.C. Comics-pastiche "Harvest of Fear" do. That Jaws parody, "Gnaws", works nicely if you read it as more of an homage to Mort Drucker's MAD movie parodies than anything Simpsons related.
Unlike the TV Simpsons, which somehow still churns along for an audience that couldn't possibly understand what made the show so powerfully hilarious and original in the nineties, the comics folded in 2018. Last year Abrams Comicarts anthologized a bundle of the Treehouse stories in an omnibus. I didn't get my hands on that one, but I did get the latest installment. The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Ominous Omnibus 2: Deadtime Stories for Boos & Ghouls still isn't funny, but viewed as a lushly packaged volume of Simpsons fan art, it is tough to beat. The stories, organized by theme ("The End of the World," "Fearsome Flora & Freakish Fauna," "Bodily Oddities," "From Bad to Curse," "The Lighter Side of Evil," "Historic Horrors") without any semblance of chronology, are beautifully reprinted in a beautifully designed hardcover book with heavy die-cut slip case and glow-in-the-dark cover depicting the whole Simpsons gang as tadpoles or sperms or something.
