The Simpsons have been an American TV staple since its debut in December 1989. What started out as crudely drawn comedy shorts on the The Tracey Ullman Show became a full fledged show with huge cast of characters. The art evolved from roughly-drawn characters to more refined and rounded characters. In The Simpsons Handbook, artists from the show breakdown how each character is drawn. This book is a great resource for seeing how characters are developed to be drawn consistently by many different artists. It’s also just fun for fans of the show to flip through and see how the characters are drawn and see all the unique character variations from special episodes.

What I like in particular about this book is the wealth of examples of simple three-dimensional drawing. Each character is built from simple shapes but each have their own unique structure. There are so many little details that go into making each character look right that you’d likely otherwise miss. Also seeing each character’s varied expressions all laid out together on the page is interesting.

Most of The Simpsons characters are in the book along with a chapter covering backgrounds and props in the show. This book also has a few unique features. Some pages have tracing paper overlays to see the cleaned up versions of the characters. There are a few fold-out pages to expand on the character sketches. At the end, there is also a page that has multiple layers of tracing paper and a painted cell that shows how a rough sketch develops into the final artwork.

It’s hard to find a book that covers the topic of character design so thoroughly. Even if you’re not looking to draw The Simpsons characters, it’s still interesting to see all the thought and details that go into making successful characters.

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