Bill Morrison (born 1959) is an American comic book artist, writer, and editor. He is a co-founder of Bongo Comics (along with Matt Groening and Steve and Cindy Vance).
| Bill Morrison | |
|---|---|
 Morrison in 2009 | |
| Born | 1959 (age 64–65) Lincoln Park, Michigan, US |
| Area(s) | Writer, Artist, Editor |
Notable works | Bongo Comics MAD magazine |
Early life
Morrison is a native of Lincoln Park, Michigan, a Downriver suburb of Detroit. He attended the College for Creative Studies.[1]
Career
At the beginning of his career in the early 1980s, Morrison worked as a technical illustrator for Artech, Inc. (Livonia, Michigan) before going to work as an illustrator for Disney, where he created promotional art for:
- Lady and the Tramp
- Cinderella
- Bambi
- Peter Pan
- The Jungle Book
- Robin Hood
- The Rescuers
- The Fox and the Hound
- Oliver & Company
- The Little Mermaid (including a controversial image)[2]
- “Roller Coaster Rabbit”
- “The Prince and the Pauper”
- The Rescuers Down Under[3]
Subsequently, he worked as an illustrator and occasional writer for The Simpsons and created his own comic Roswell. He also served as a director for Futurama.[4]
Morrison was the creative director of Bongo Comics from 1993 to 2012.[citation needed]
In 1998, Morrison illustrated (although it was signed by Matt Groening) the cover artwork of The Simpsons' The Yellow Album. His cover was a parody of the cover art for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, replaced with characters from The Simpsons.[5][6] In 2005, the artist and designer Kaws (commissioned by Nigo) created The Kaws Album, a "traced interpretation" of The Yellow Album. In 2019, Sotheby's auction house in Hong Kong sold The Kaws Album for 115.9 million Hong Kong dollars, or about $14.7 million U.S. dollars, a new auction record for the artist at the time.[7][8] re-igniting a conversation about the appropriation of commercial illustrations for fine art (see Roy Lichtenstein).
Morrison is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA); he created the mural A Century of Values to celebrate the BSA centennial in 2010.[9]
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Yellow Submarine, The Beatles' 1968 animated feature film, Titan Comics published, on August 28, 2018, a hardcover comicbook illustrated by Morrisson.[10]
He was the executive editor of MAD magazine from early 2018 (beginning with the rebooted issue #1 dated June 2018) to March 2019.[11][12]
References
External links
Media related to Bill Morrison (comics) at Wikimedia Commons- comiXology.com's podcast with Bill Morrison and Scott Shaw on the Captain Carrot and the Final Ark limited series
