$10.00 from Bongo Comics
<I>The Simpsons Comics Extravaganza</I> is an adaptation that can pull off something fairly unique, in that you'll never find an adaptation closer to the source material. By far the best comics adaptation I've read before, Stefan Petrucha's turn on the <I>X-Files</I> comics, still digressed from the show to go places the show could not. With <I>The Simpsons </I>, not only is there no need to do that, but it would be nearly impossible to do so.
There are a few television creations that deserve to be bundled up and shot into space for future generations to find, the stuff our culture can really be proud of, that took the television medium beyond its original parameters into the realm of art. <I>M*A*S*H</I> is one. <I>The Simpsons</I> is surely another.
What started out in 1990 as a series of animated shorts (on <I>The Tracey Ullman Show</I>) about a depressingly dysfunctional but funny little family of ugly, yellowish blobby people ended up a brilliant showcase for comic riffs every conceivable subject the modern mind could handle. <I>The Simpsons</I> can employ, on any given episode: satire on family comedies themselves, satire on family dramas, political humor, social commentary, Dostoyevskian morality tales, pop culture commentary, slapstick humor, movie satire, music satire, or buffoonish circus clown antics. It's a cliché to say "even X gets skewered" about any satirical show, but no show has ever been as maniacally all-encompassing in its attentions.
A curious literary thread runs throughout: anyone can riff on <I>The Brady Bunch, </I> but a <I>Simpsons</I> plot can begin as a spin on <I>The Great Escape</I> and slide right into <I>Wuthering Heights</I>, <I>Where Eagles Dare</I> can be the springboard for a show that ends up more like <I>Citizen Kane</I>. The gods of the Simpsons seem to know <I>everything,</I> and they dare you to keep up, but it doesn't even matter if you do because the show will always be funny.
<I>The Simpsons'</I> ability to do so much relies in no small part on the fact that the show is animated, of course. <I>The Simpsons</I> employs no stage, no studio, and so no limits. The Simpsons-- Homer, Marge, Lisa and Bart-- can remain the same age forever, learning nothing and forgetting everything, practically beginning anew with each episode. Except sometimes, all of the sudden, continuity will matter (such as when Bart's occasional nemesis, the nefarious Sideshow Bob, returns,) and this itself becomes a satire on the nature of fictional continuity. The past can be thrown forward, as characters re-invent their own pasts: Bart has been remembered to be entering school in both the mid-eighties and the early nineties. Homer has lived a thousand dullard lives, as a famous barbershop quartet crooner, an astronaut, and a shotgun-wielding bowling-alley manager.
Animation also means the walls and roof are blown off a normal family sitcom; Homer can root around in the refrigerator and suddenly grow to ten times his normal size, punching through the roof and going on a giant's rampage. The little town of Springfield can have any necessary plot device in its limits or at its edge, from hot desert sands to blustery seaside bluffs, Gallerias and Chinatown, Little Italy and an Air Force Base. Everyone knows everybody, and yet everyone remembers almost nothing. Springfield is a town where you could wait for Godot, and he might make it.
So when it comes to a comic book adaptation of <I>the Simpsons</I>, the show is already well ahead of the curve. Comics have always played fast and loose with continuity and age (now just when <I>did</I> the Fantastic Four crash?), and comics, too, can go anywhere unhampered by questions of budget and scope. Moreover, unlike comics adaptations of <I>The X-Files</I> or <I>Buffy, the Vampire Slayer</I>, <I>The Simpsons</I>in comics look <I>exactly</I> like they do in real life, as it were. It's as if someone took snapshots of the animated world and pasted them on the page.
<I>The Simpsons Comics Extravaganza</I> collects stories and shorts that have appeared in the <I>Simpsons</I> comic. The subjects go everywhere: in one, troublemaker Bart and nebbishy Milhouse are sent to a "scared straight" program in prison, and Bart ends up accidentally sent on a chain gang next to Sideshow Bob (at one point, Bob roars at the bad grammar of prison songs, "What we have here is a failure to communicate in proper English.") In another, a riff on <I>War of the Colossal Beast</I>, Homer is hit with malfunctioning youth ray that turns him into a rampaging, briefs-clad colossus tearing apart downtown Springfield in a hunt for giant donuts. "The Perplexing Puzzle of the Springfield Puma" is a dead-on riff on <I>The Maltese Falcon,</I> right down to plump nerd Martin doing a turn as the loathsome Sidney Greenstreet, and before you get tired of <I>that,</I> Lisa takes over the story and suddenly we're in the land of Hercule Poirot.
And since <I>The Simpsons Comics Extravaganza</I> knows it's a comic, the comic medium itself is fodder, giving us an issue that looks like a fifties romance comic. Or Krusty the Clown starring in an adaptation of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD so perfect you get the sense the artists lifted whole panels from Jim Steranko. And so on.
And it's all just perfect. Written and drawn by teams connected to the show itself, every character sounds exactly right, from the oddly eloquent Mr. Burns ("It will take more than the casual ruination of an insignificant office-supply manufacturer to lift me from my doldrums,") to the somewhat offensive Apu, who runs the Kwik-E- Mart ("So you are wanting to start a small business!")
<I>The Simpsons Comics Extravaganza</I> is a unique creation: a comics adaptation that lives up to the show to the limits of the medium. That's a taller order than it sounds.