Welcome to the Bongo Comics Box! Today’s feature: Itchy & Scratchy Comics #1! Yet another first issue! And this series was the worst of the lot: mostly visual gags that you could read through in two minutes. I expect the Itchy & Scratchy Comics write-ups to be a little bit shorter. Plus, there are only four of them.

Bongo Nostalgia Corner

I didn’t get this one until later. I found the entire Itchy & Scratchy run in an old comic store and shelled out the ten bucks for all of them. I’m going to be completely honest here: these kind of suck. They’re very forgettable, and I’m glad they ended after three issues and a special.

How about that for goddamn nostalgia?

Itchy & Scratchy Comics, Issue #1 [December, 1993]
Written by: Steve Vance
“Around the World in 80 Pieces”

How cute, I get a foreword by Matt “The Gnat” Groening himself! “We’ve got it all here: bone-crushing anvils, hostile bulldogs, angry bee swarms, red-hot pokers, handy blowtorches, oodles of dynamite, buckets of ravenous piranhas, extra-sharp carving knives, short-fused anarchists’ bombs, guided missiles, pesky electric eels, sawed-off shotguns, runaway steamrollers, skull-smashing falling safes, even eyeball-pecking canaries!”

He says a lot more than that because he’s Matt Groening and he’s verbose (like I’m one to throw verbosity shade), but it all means that we’re going to get a bunch of Itchy & Scratchy NOT in animated cartoon form. So it’s going to kind of suck!

Scratchy’s head is affixed to a guillotine! He screams at the sharp blade above while Itchy happily places a sharp knife near the rope. An inch away, one little cut means certain death for faithful Scratchy! What will happen?! What won’t happen?!

“CUT!”

As Scratchy struggles and squirms, Itchy instead uses the knife to cut Scratchy’s head off! A twist! I’m all twisted up myself!

A director fox hops in his director’s chair, then goes over to Scratchy’s headless body. “Sigh… Get Makeup in here…”

Later, L.B. Mayhem, owner of Mayhem Pictures, congratulates the duo on another fine season of the Itchy & Scratchy Show! “I hope you both enjoy your time off. Relax… Unwind…” he says as he shakes Scratchy’s hand. His head is stitched up, and–

What the fuck am I doing? I’m writing about Itchy and Scratchy comics? How far have I fallen?? Is this the legacy I’m willing to leave behind??

Oooh, my head! I just had the most amazing dream, and *points to you* you definitely weren’t there. That would not be an amazing dream.

Where was I?

Celebs think they’re on their high horses with all the good things they flaunt to us regular folk all the time. Elitist shit.

“Ahh – a vacation! No more getting chopped up or hit on the head! At last, a chance to take it easy!” Scratchy thinks as he ambles home. Itchy throws a bottle at his head from his private limo.

Scratchy goes home to his shitty apartment in his ugly, cracked apartment building where he’s $14,000 behind on his rent and his TV sucks ass. His TV sucks so much ass that Scratchy gets mad and he hits it and he gets electrocuted and starts a fire and he sticks his tail in the sink to put it out and he gets sucked down the garbage disposal and then his landlord evicts him. That last part he hates the most!

SCRATCHY MAKES A VISIT TO ONE MR. WILLIAM HORSE, HIS TALENT AGENT! Mr. William Horse wears a pince-nez and he has his hair slicked back and he looks sleepy, like someone who ate too many oats. “I don’t understand it!” Scratchy yells while pacing around the room. “Where did all my money go?!”

Bill the Horse reminds this piece of shit cat that just because he has a TV show doesn’t mean he has money. It’s like Scott Baio or Scott Bakula – anyone named Scott really – or Angela Lansbury who’s fucking DEAD, or Donal Logue! Remember that guy? These people suck and have no money.

It looks like Scratchy, against Agent Horse’s very loud and constant advice, signed a contract that gives 90% of Scratchy’s earnings to Itchy and 10% of the earnings to Agent Horse.

Agent Horse advises his terrible client to talk to Itchy because maybe something productive might happen in another dimension, or in Hell. So, yes, bolstered by gumption, Scratchy makes his way to give Itchy a piece of his brain. Or mind. It doesn’t matter.

Are you talking about Scott Baio? Remind him that he’s not seeing one CENT!

Itchy’s going to fuck Scratchy’s ass shut. “Release the giant robot hounds,” Itchy says with his itchy little itchy grin. Scratchy outruns the giant robot hounds by leaping over a wall at the last second, but he lands in the “World’s Largest Cactus Patch”, which is unlucky! That sure is unlucky!

OK, so now what? *flips ahead a few pages* OK, so in stereotypical alley cat fashion, Scratchy pulls a fishbone out of the garbage like Heathcliff or Top Cat or Sylvester or Scott Baio. “Blecch!” groans the completely disheveled feline. “Maybe I should call my agent and tell him I’ll take the movie-of-the-week part after all.”

From the garbage, Scratchy pulls out a newspaper. The Daily Fishwrap. “MILLION DOLLAR PRIZE OFFERED IN ROUND-THE-WORLD RACE” Cha-ching! Easy money, nerds! Scratchy’s gonna tear this race a new one.

He books it to Nutsy Squirrel’s Used Cars and sighs when he sees these price tags. $2,000. $7,226. $12,000. If he had that kind of money, he would be intrigued by the MILLION DOLLAR PRIZE OFFERED IN ROUND-THE-WORLD RACE!

In the corner, Scratchy sees a real piece of shit going for $250. It has a hand crank. Can’t even afford that.

Damn, I’ve got about 680 pints of blood in my own body! Easy Street, here I come!

I don’t know how many pints of blood Scratchy has in his body, but he can’t have much more than $100. Not nearly enough to buy a $250 garbage car. But hey, he found a way! Maybe he also sold his feces.

“Greetings, Race Fans – Kent Dachshund here at the starting line of the great around-the-world race,” announces, yes, a very Kent Brockman-looking news anchor. “The first leg of the race will be covered by car, but from there on, the contestants will travel by any means available.”

Everyone else starts off in a nice racecar, some real gonna-win-the-race caliber. Scratchy wears some old-timey hat and old-timey goggles in his old-timey car. REV! REV! goes the other cars. KAPOKKA POKKA goes Scratchy’s car. I think Kapokka Pokka is the capital of Estonia.

Scratchy is stupidly optimistic. He may have a poop car, but at least Itchy isn’t around to fly into his face with a blimp…

“YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE,” booms the loudspeaker. “WE HAVE A LATE ENTRY IN THE RACE. IN CAR NUMBER 1 – ITCHY THE MOUSE!”

Scratchy uses an expletive that is represented by four punctuation marks! It must be one of those good expletives. Itchy gives him a look that screams “now what, motherfucker?”

“Now I’d like to introduce our official starter–” Kent Dachshund introduces a very Rainier Wolfcastle animal caricature, “–your favorite action movie hero, the star of last summer’s overhyped box-office disaster The Last Reactionary Hero – WOLFBANE!”

Wolfbane pulls out a semi-automatic rifle and holds it up in the air with the intention kicking off the race in an old-fashioned way. “On your mark – Get set – GO!” he yells as his fires the gun right at the racers. Wolfbane puts some large holes into most of the cars. Some racers get murdered. Scatchy slowly putter-putt-putts ahead of all of them, unharmed.

Woo! Big lead!

Whomever is left of the not-killed gets run off the road by Itchy, who gains on Scratchy with incredible speed. Itchy’s smiling, psychopathic face can be seen in Scratchy’s rearview mirror, which terrifies the poor creature to kingdom come! Refer back to the cover art of this issue; this is the part where Itchy busts out the car’s buzz saw attachments. The $250 hunk of crap gets cut nearly in two, and Scratchy careens off a cliff and lands on train tracks. Action, baby!

Scratchy escapes the oncoming train, but then it jumps the tracks and flattens the bastard to the ground. “This puts the ‘loco’ back in ‘locomotive’!” Itchy, the conductor of the train, says while I grumble rather loudly.

Let’s keep this show moving. It’s Day 2, and the two racers are on their way to the North Pole. A couple of dog sleds are ready for the taking, and Scratchy is only a few seconds behind Itchy! What are the goddamned odds?!

Itchy successfully mushes his dogs forward. When Scratchy tries to crack his whip, the dogs pounce and start tearing him to shreds.

Hey, that parachute cost a lot of blood money.

On Day 4, riding biplanes toward Rio de Janeiro, Itchy shoots Scratchy down like the Red Baron. Bye bye, Snoopy. Then he shoots down his parachute for good measure. Scratchy lands in a river of man-eating piranhas, who eat him down to his skeleton bones. He looks what I can only describe as “peeved”.

On Day 7, Itchy is sailing on his way to Tahiti! Scratchy still needs to reach the coast, but decides to maneuver through a drug cartel’s plantation. He’s on a motorcycle getting chased around and shot at and whatnot. It’s a real racket.

He slices himself into four horizontal pieces through a wire fence, but he keeps on a’runnin’ to the port where he boards a submarine!

This is very exciting, folks. I love writing about almost-wordless action scenes.

Scratchy tries to launch a torpedo at Itchy’s sailboat, but it most certainly fails. Then his submarine gets attacked by a giant squid. These things happen and you can’t get too emotional about it.

Oh man, in a twist of fate, Scratchy’s submarine gets crushed by the squid, which is actually a robot squid, which is actually a robot squid controlled by Itchy.

I wish someone would snap his ass in a rat trap.

Day 12, Scratchy huffs and puffs his way to New Jersey so he can find a vehicle to traverse the Atlantic Ocean on the way to GAY PAREE. He rents a dang ol’ blimp.

Itchy’s already there, but Scratchy’s all like “that’s my blimp, you cunt” and then Itchy’s like “but of course my fine-feathered chum”.

Itchy had filled the blimp with hydrogen. Scratchy explodes in a fiery mess right away. Immediately.

Oh man, the, well, the humanity and etc.

You know, I bet before the Hindenburg blimp was filled with hydrogen, some scientist was probably hooting and hollering about the idiocy. I’d like to think so, unless scientists in 1937 didn’t know shit. That’s not true, though. They knew a lot! Where was I?

Itchy continues to kill Scratchy repeatedly all over the globe. It’s getting tiresome.

They enter the home stretch, neck and neck. Day 23. Itchy runs toward the finish line… but Scratchy appears on bike. Itchy looks nervous for the first time in 700 panels.

Aha, but Itchy, of course, certainly, because why not, has a bomb! And he’s going to *yaaawwwwnn* Scratchy is blown to bits.

BUT

“Holy cow! Scratchy’s decapitated noggin was blown forward by the explosion! It crosses the finish line before Itchy! Scratchy wins by a head!”

What a heartwarming ending. Scratchy is holed up in the intensive care unit recovering beside his giant $1,000,000 check. “I can’t believe it,” he boggles, “I finally beat Itchy! I’d pinch myself, if I could only move that far.

Itchy comes in smiling. As the bearer of bad news like a Bad News Bear, Itchy has a copy of the official race rules in hand.

Well shucks, that vacates my last six race wins.

“I guess these are mine now!” Itchy chuckles, stealing the 1st Prize trophy and the giant, stupid check.

Scratchy chases him into the sunset. The fucking end.

Final Thoughts

This was not a fun write-up. Three more Itchy and Scratchy comics to go, you guys. Can’t fucking wait.