Character

Homer Simpson

Homer Simpson is a nuclear-plant safety inspector who would rather be a doughnut inspector. Matt Groening’s family sitcom moved cartoons into prime time and kept them there for decades by treating a yellow cartoon dad as a complete, flawed person — lazy, loyal, loud, and occasionally wise by accident.

The drawing is almost a diagram: a bald dome, two hairs, a five-o’clock shadow that is just a lip line. That economy let the show pack jokes into every layer of a frame, from background signs to a couch gag that reinvented itself every week.

His cultural afterlife is a sound as much as a face. A strangled “D’oh” became dictionary material. Homer stands here as the cartoon who made adult television look like Saturday morning, then made Saturday morning look like a mirror.