Bloggasm

“To Simponize someone,” — that is, to take a person or character and depict it as a character from the television show The Simpsons — “you have to remember that they have an overbite, they have bright yellow skin, if they’re caucasian of course. No chin, and just kind of a simple fun look, and they’re usually very bright and colorful and wacky and crazy.”

And they have to have only four fingers, of course.

Dean Fraser, a 29-year-old freelance graphic artist from Alberta, Canada, began uploading his first Simpsonized drawings to his website about a year and a half ago. Given his penchant for nostalgia, he started with characters from the Adam West Batman series from the ’60s — Batman, Robin, Penguin, Joker, Batgirl — drawing sometimes multiple versions of the same person. Not long after placing them on his website, his server crashed from the thousands flowing in from sites like Digg. He eventually decided to move his hobby over to Blogspot, where he has continued with it ever since.

After finishing with the classic Batman, he moved on to more contemporary versions of the comic’s characters– including the Heath Ledger Joker — before expanding to other personalities and pop culture characters. Fraser told me that to keep things interesting he likes to dive into his own nostalgia, often Simpsonizing characters from old ’80s TV shows and cartoons. He has drawn versions of dozens of Marvel and DC comic book heroes, people from House, the Matrix, Indiana Jones, and Captain Planet, among others. Lately, he’s been fixated on characters from the show Lost, and has been slowly making his way through the entire cast.

Though he said that the Simpsons style is a simple one, that simplicity can make his job more difficult sometimes. When a character has strong, defining characteristics, Fraser has to find a way to water down those features while keeping them intact. Many of the characters from Lost, for instance, have very strong chins, which doesn’t always transfer well to a style that includes drawing a person without any chin at all.

“It can be a challenge sometime,” he said. “You’re taking the elements that are on a character, when they can be very detailed, and just simplifying those and trying to decide what can go and what can stay, pretty much.”

I asked Fraser how his work fits into the pantheon of fan art. After all, he’s essentially creating a mashup of fandom, mixing his love of The Simpsons with his other pop culture favorites.

“I never went into it consciously thinking that I’m going to join the Simpsons fan community, or I’m going to join the Lost fan community,” he replied. “It’s just that I happen to be a fan of Lost, I like to express [that fandom], and I like to promote it, to show people what I like. And I know other people will perhaps enjoy it themselves. I’ve never really just thought about it that much. I’m just going at it.”

Fraser said that lately his site has been averaging around 10,000 hits a day, an uptick that he attributed to his current Lost series. Now that his site has grown in popularity he gets reader emails asking him to draw certain movie, television and comic book characters. He even gets requests that he draw politicians, though to date the only one he has Simpsonized is former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Depending on the character and the level of detail needed, Simpsonizing someone can take anywhere from an hour to six hours. He said that drawing real-life people is more difficult than depicting super heroes, who are often already archetypal in their renderings. His productivity varies, depending on the amount of free time he has with his graphic design career. This is, after all, a side project.

“I fit it in when I can,” he said. “With my regular day job stuff, there will be a dry period, and I’ll have a lot of time. As you can see on the website, sometimes it trickles out one or two at a time. Sometimes I’ll do a whole post with a bunch of them. There’s no set regularity to it. I wish could do one every other day or something like that, but I’m confined to when I have time.”