Most Simpsons fans can rattle off the big touchstones of the franchise without much effort – the TV show, the movie, the video games, the mountain of merchandise. But there is one corner of Simpsons history that barely anyone talks about, and it is finally getting the attention it deserves. A newspaper comic strip that ran from 1999 until 2004 is being brought back into the spotlight through a brand new hardcover collection from Abrams Books.
A Franchise That Stretched Into Everything
When The Simpsons premiered at the end of 1989, nobody could have predicted the scale of what it would become. Within a few years, Bart Simpson was everywhere. Plush dolls lined toy store shelves. Video games hit every major platform. There was Simpsons shampoo. Bootleg t-shirts flooded street markets across the country. The show did not just find an audience – it built a whole commercial universe around itself.
By 1993, the logical next step was a dedicated comic book. Bongo Comics, the publishing company founded by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, launched the official Simpsons comic and kept it going for an impressive 25 years. The line ran until 2018, when Bongo shut down operations entirely. That is a longer print run than many beloved superhero titles manage, and it stands as one of the more underappreciated chapters in the franchise’s story.
The Comic Strip Almost Nobody Remembers
Alongside the comic book, Bongo also produced something with a much shorter lifespan and a much lower profile. Starting in 1999, The Simpsons got its own newspaper comic strip. Written and drawn by members of the Bongo Comics team, the strip debuted in 80 newspapers across the country before quietly wrapping up in 2004.
Five years is not a short run for a newspaper strip, but the format meant that these comics were largely consumed once and forgotten. Newspaper strips do not get reread the way comic books do. They do not get bagged and boarded or organized into long boxes. They get recycled. As a result, the Simpsons strip occupies a strange space in franchise history – it existed at scale, reaching potentially millions of readers, but almost nobody thinks of it when they consider what The Simpsons
Abrams Books Is Fixing That on October 6
On October 6, Abrams Books will release The Simpsons Comic Strip Cavalcade, a hardcover collection pulling together the best strips from that five-year run. The book contains 126 comic strips in total. It is currently available for preorder through standard book retailers.
Abrams also gave Polygon an exclusive early look at six of the 126 strips included in the collection. The selection covers a solid range of what the strip offered during its run. There is a strip built around Homer explaining how to read Sunday comics. Another follows Bart on an adventure wearing his lucky red cap. A third puts Homer in a situation involving shaving cream. The Simpson family takes on a trust fall exercise in another. Ralph Wiggum gets his own strip billed as The Unpossible World of Ralph Wiggum. And a final strip in the preview takes aim at a misbehaving spoon.
Even from just those six examples, it is clear the strips leaned into the same character dynamics that made the TV show work. Homer’s obliviousness, Bart’s chaos energy, Ralph’s detached logic – it is all there, compressed into a format that had to land a joke in three or four panels with no room to waste.
Why This Matters for Fans
There is something genuinely valuable about collections like this one. The early and mid-2000s represent a distinct creative period for The Simpsons brand, and the newspaper strip was being produced by the same team doing the Bongo Comics work at the time. That means the strips reflect a specific sensibility and a specific moment – one that was never properly archived in a format most people could access.
For anyone who grew up reading The Simpsons in the newspaper, The Simpsons Comic Strip Cavalcade is a direct line back to something most people assumed was just gone. And for fans who never knew the strip existed at all, this collection is a chance to fill in a gap in franchise history that has been sitting open for over two decades.
The Simpsons Comic Strip Cavalcade releases on October 6 from Abrams Books. The hardcover is available for preorder now wherever books are sold.