This is stunning. And baffling. But mostly stunning. This is a panel-for-panel re-telling of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira with Simpsons characters replacing the originals. And you see the above image? That’s a fucking “Bart’s Comet” joke seamlessly integrated into arguably the most famous splash page in the manga! This volume (the first of six—70% of which is finished—according to the Bartkira site) is FULL of deep bench Simpsons jokes for eagle-eyed fans, just like the one above.
How did this come to pass? I’ll leave that to the creators of this project from their own FAQ:
Q: Why is Bartkira?
A: Here’s the story. My friend Ryan Humphrey drew some simple, beautiful drawings of The Simpsons acting out scenes from Akira and put them on the internet under the title “Bartkira” . I loved it immediately. I’d organised a few collaborative projects before and… I just decided to push Ryan’s Bartkira snowball down a hill and see how big it would get. Neither of us thought it would grow into the colossus it has. We didn’t expect to see a Bartkira gallery show, or to be turning down offers from dodgy publishers left and right, or for a guy to make a custom Bartkira leather jacket or for another person to get a Bartkira tattoo- and we never expected the incredible amount of beautiful artwork we continue to receive. We’ve tried to answer the question “why?” in countless interviews and seem to give a different answer every time- all we know is we’re really happy so many people have been inspired by this project.
You can read the first volume from start to finish via the link at the top of this article, and check out the credits for the individual artists here.
