COMICS REVIEW: SIMPSONS COMICS #197

Krusty the Clown considers torching one of his KrustyBurger restaurants for the insurance money until Homer comes up with a new burger for the chain that becomes a huge success. Meanwhile, Marge, concerned that Maggie is not talking yet, enrolls her daughter in an expensive preschool that guarantees results.

Spoilers Below

HOMER FRIES

 

The Simpsons are at Krusty Burger chowing down on all things bland. This leads to Homer complaining to the manager about it and offers up a solution, ‘The Clogger”. After introducing it at the restaurant all of a sudden every customer wants to get their hands on one. Krusty is so impressed by the sandwich’s success he offers Homer the chance to take over the restaurant and rename it ‘Homer Burgers‘ Grampa isn’t a fan but Burns is and he even offers Homer an indefinite leave from the plant in exchange for free burgers. Eventually, Lisa tells her dad of her concerns about peoples’ health and begs him to shut down, instead he re-brands the store Lisa Burgers of which she isn’t grateful one bit.

While Homer was off building a franchise, Marge starts to wonder about Maggie’s non-talking habits and thinks she needs to pick up the pace on her speech. Help comes in the form of Mrs Clanlard of Clanlard’s Baby Speech Academy. The academy offers speech lessons for the little ones at a fairly unreasonable cost, but the proof is in the pudding and that pudding brings results.  That said, Marge has to take on extra work as a house maid, but something’s funny about Maggies speech, she only talks while at the school. Marge’s work takes her all over town, from Lovejoy and Flanders to Cletus and Burns, all of which has their somewhat dangerous elements added in to make the job more tiresome. Bart decides to investigate and finds out that Clanlard is actually Art Crandall aka the former ventriloquist for Gabbo. Turns out he opened up this Academy in an effort to make money after his show went down and all of the baby voices are just his act.

Gabbo is working at Homer Burger and eventually he takes over the place because Homer listened to Lisa about her suggestions in making the burgers with farm-raised beef. This leads to another town revolt and Krusty firing the Simpsons in favor of Gabbo and Crandall running the joint.

What an issue of Simpsons Comics. We had guest appearances from Gabbo and Art in one of the best twist stories in quite some time. We also got a guest appearance from the Ralph Wiggum #1 contest winner and the Capital City Goofball! With all this craziness going on, the writers scripted together a rather fantastic couple of stories and to be honest I rather prefer this style of writing for the comics versus the three strips in one issue variety as this feels more like how an episode would look on FOX.  Bongo puts out a real winner with #197 and I can’t wait to see what they do next!

 

 

(9.0 out of 10)