Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How quickly we forget what an art school nerd Matt Groening is. Every so often, producers of The Simpsons get one of their stranger pals to offer a unique spin on the characters to open an episode, and invariably, those ideas are as good as or better than the episode itself.

Groening's high-art bonafides are real—he and illustrator Gary Panter used to "split burgers and scheme about how to invade pop culture." So it would follow that the list of collaborators on Simpsons couch gags is heavy on high-art cartoonists, animators and, uh, whatever you want to call Banksy.

Mind you, Groening's guest directors come in all cultural shapes and sizes—there's a great Robot Chicken opening from last May, and Guillermo Del Toro, of course, showed up to do this beautiful/terrifying sequence for last year's Treehouse of Horror episode—but we're chiefly concerned with the gallery-haunting oddballs and geniuses whose work doesn't look like anything you'd ever see on TV. And here they are now!...