D'OH REPORT

Remember those cool-ass Simpsons stamps that I was raving about two years ago? Well it turns out the Postal Service completely misjudged the popularity of The Simpsons Franchise by about, oh, seven hundred million.

According to Bloomberg, all those beautiful, beautiful stamps are now just sitting in a stamp warehouse somewhere waiting to be disposed of, which is a real tragedy:

Bloomberg’s Dominic Chu reports that the money-losing U.S. Postal Service guessed that TV cartoon character Homer Simpson and his family were twice as popular as Elvis Presley when it came to sales of commemorative stamps. The service produced 1 billion of “The Simpsons ” stamps and sold 318 million with the remainder being disposed at a loss.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS

It was only a matter of time before tween heartthrob Justin Bieber did a guest voice for The Simpsons. And now the inevitable has become reality, and the show’s producers are surely confident it’ll give them a huge ratings boost. It didn’t work last time with Lady Gaga – just the opposite, in fact – but, dog gone it, they’re nothing if not persistent.

The Biebster tweeted the news himself earlier this evening. Here’s his Tweet, embedded below…

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SPRINGFIELD SHOPPER

homer simpson is the face of slaveryHey, uh, do you own that pair of slippers that look like Homer’s face? Are you perhaps wearing them right now?? Well, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn they were produced with state-sponsored Chinese slave labor.

Al-Jazeera has a 30-minute documentary on their site (use YouTube if it’s not loading) that uncovers how China throws political and religious dissidents into prison camps and forces them to manufacture consumer goods. It specifically highlights these Homer slippers, which were manufactured in Nanjing Prison near Shanghai for the New Jersey company SG Footwear. The company claimed (via Fox for some inexplicable reason) “it has never knowingly utilized involuntary labor.” Ha ha not only do they not deny it but they made their comment through a second company. Anyway, just something to think about next time your browsing the novelty slipper aisle at your local shoe store.

[Al Jazeera via Tumblr]

ROCK BOTTOM

!!!!! It’s not everyday that a big scoop lands right in your lap, but sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Someone… or something… threw a brick through the window of our offices (why people can’t just deliver bricks to the door I’ll never know). Tied to the brick was an Iomega Zip disk. Immediately I knew this was big, and not just because the disk has about 100 times more storage capacity than a normal floppy disk. A week later, after having secured an Iomega Zip drive from eBay, I looked at the disk’s files, or should I say file, because there was only one file: a single JPEG, which you can see below…
There it is. Solid, rock-hard confirmation that Simpsons Studio, the studio that makes The Simpsons, is abandoning the second dimension behind and going Full 3-D CGI for the next few seasons. Needless to say, this will definitely prove controversial… we haven’t heard anything about this until now, so therefore logistically the producers must be trying to keep things under wraps, afraid of what the bad people on the internet will say on the computer at them.

Personally I don’t think they have anything to worry about. Sure, some “purists” out there will whine about how it’s different from Old Simpsons, but I for one applaud the show-makers for taking such a bold leap into the future, and at great expense too. I await the upcoming Simpsons Season 24 with baited breath, and not just because I ate a bunch of fried worms.

No response from FOX or the producers as of yet, probably because I’ve made no attempt to contact them… Developing…

EYE ON SPRINGFIELD

Springfield Remember a few months ago when everyone thought the fictional cartoon town of Springfield was in Oregon thanks to an egregious misunderstanding on the part of the media? Well, apparently tourists from AROUND THE WORLD have been flocking to the town, evidentially hoping to snap a few photos of their favorite cartoon characters in their natural habitat, at least according to some guy:

“I’ve had people from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland – they’re coming here because this was declared Simpsontown, Springfield, the town of the Simpsons, so people are coming here,” he said.

I don’t really believe this guy, but if just one person from the other side of the world spent a thousand bucks to fly to America because of a misquote, that’s one too many in my estimation.

Anyway, the guy in question put up a few tacky Simpsons statues in front of his yogurt shop, which is apparently the full extent of The Simpsons Experience in Springfield. It’s been leaving tourists disappointed, because I guess they were expecting to see full-fledged Kwik-E-Marts or something? So now the yogurt guy is proposing the city take “just five or 10 blocks” and turn it into a Simpsons-themed shopping center. Now that’ll get people excited! And by “people” I mean copyright lawyers.

[KVAL via Seattle P-I]

BONGO BEAT

Mylo Xyloto Bongo Comics, makers of fine Simpsons comics and distributor of SpongeBob comics, is branching out again with Mylo Xyloto (get it, like xylophone??), a six-issue comic book miniseries thunk up and co-written by the band Coldplay. What’s it about? Judging from the book’s cover, it’s about some TRON-like cyberbabe who can emit magic beams from her fingers or something. I guess this is the band’s attempt at doing their own Yellow Submarine? (FUN FACT: A few Bongo Comics people were working on an adaptation of Yellow Submarine but it got abandoned.) Or perhaps this whole “making music and becoming really famous” thing was just Phase 1 of an elaborate scheme for Chris Martin to achieve his true calling, making comic books. Hmm!

Here’s how co-collaborator Mark Osbourne (probably the guy doing most of the actual work) describes it:

The comic is the latest expression of a music-driven feature animated film that the band and I started developing several years ago. It is the story of Mylo Xyloto, a young Silencer on the front lines of a war against sound and color in the world of Silencia. Mylo discovers that the enemy he’s been trained to hate his whole life might not be the enemy after all.

Blah blah blah, etc. Look, if a band is making a comic book and they’re not putting their blood in the ink, then I don’t give a hoot.

[Bongo Blog]

NEWS CORP. NEWS

I’m seeing double here! Four Krustys! “Spinoff!” Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul? Well, today billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch, CEO of FOX’s parent company News Corp., confirmed he’s splitting his baby in half and spinning off his cherished print assets (including the publishing company HarperCollins, which has published almost all Simpsons books) into a separate company within the next 12 months. Although Murdoch denies it has anything to do with the phone hacking scandal, this move will help insulate FOX News from the British tabloids that done did the hacking, allowing the cable news channel to maintain its high standards and journalistic integrithahahaha

[FOX Business]

GROEN DRAIN

Matt Groening gave a brief interview with Rolling Stone about ending his long-running comic strip Life in Hell that’s worth reading. He reveals that it was only running in 38 papers, compared to its zenith of 250 or so, which is pretty sad. I did make an effort to check it out every week in the LA Weekly, but when they dropped it there were no other LA-based papers to pick up the slack (at least, as far as I could find) so I haven’t been able to read it on a regular basis for years. I did find out fairly late it was running in The Oregonian, though.

Some choice quotes:

Why pull the plug on Life in Hell now? Did you simply run out of jokes?

It’s pretty obvious that I ran out of jokes a couple of decades ago – but that doesn’t stop any cartoonist!

[A] TV producer sneered at the strip and said, “Why do you bother? Give it up.” Because of that, I dug in my heels and kept it going two decades longer than I might have. I also liked the idea of having one slice of my creative output being completely solo, unlike TV animation. It’s very satisfying to sit down at a drawing table by yourself and solve a puzzle with a deadline.

[Rolling Stone via The Comics Journal]