”Bring Me the Head of El Barto”
Written by: Bill Morrison

What? There’s more?!?! Yes, there’s more. Strap in, there’s a lot more! This is one of them multi-pager posts that takes me about six handfuls of caffeine pills to write. I don’t drink Mountain Dew. No one who ever gets laid drinks Mountain Dew.

The second story is Bart-centric, wouldn’t you believe it? The shot of the Simpson house shows several instances of red-paint graffiti. One graffito after another! “El Barto Wuz Here” all over the roof! “Viva El Barto” on the sidewalk. “El Barto Rules” on the fence. Ned Flanders rings the doorbell.

“Howdy-Doodily-Doo, Little Neighbor,” he greets Bart, who answers the door with a can of spraypaint hidden behind his back, “I’m carrying a petition that calls for the arrest and incarceration of El Barto, that mysterious unknown serial spraypainter. Are your folks at home?”

Run! The crime is coming from inside the house!

600 signatures later, Mayor Quimby has no choice but to get his fat JB Pritzker butt on TV and give the people what they want: “They’re like sheep. Once I pour on the charisma, they’ll hand me their votes on a silver tray.”

Well, the people don’t want that! That’s a poor thing to say on TV without knowing the cameras are rolling! Quimby, you little rapscallion. BUT, he begins making one of his many unfulfilled promises. Let’s hear what the next one is.

“By election eve, I will rid this fair town of the plague we call ‘El Barto’ once and for all,” *shakes fist* “All I ask for in return is another four years to finish the job I started twenty-four years ago…”

Ha, well, looks like it’s business as usual. If El Barto is the worst thing in the city anyway, then they should consider themselves lucky. MY city has vagrants roaming the streets at night and police officers who shoot unarmed black teenagers seventeen times after they collapse on the ground.

“Nice speech, Mayor. Good luck catching El Barto,” Chief Wiggum laughs, doughnut in hand.
“You listen to me, Wiggum. I’m trailing in the polls. If I lose this election, I’m taking you down with me.”

Yes sir! Right away sir! I’ll fire up my incompetant police force sir! I’ll focus all our energy on tracking down the kid with the can of spraypaint sir!

“This is for all the marbles, boys,” Wiggum points a finger and his squad of shitty cops, “Bring in El Barto!”

My money’s on Wheelchair Girl.

Later, on the the day before the election, a time when Quimby promised El Barto and Wiggum doesn’t yet have El Barto, the chief gives the mayor the skinny. “The morning after your TV speech, I briefed Springfield’s finest on the urgency of our mission. After a hearty steak and eggs breakfast, we set up a roadblock on Main Street. The objective: stop any suspicious-looking vehicles.”

Yadda yadda yadda. Prime suspects included Marge, Selma, Reverend Lovejoy. You know, the real ne’er-do-wells of the town. Some real fucking criminals here. I believe Marge may have stepped on a weed at some point.

Meanwhile, behind their backs, El Barto strikes again! Tagging a cop car! Tagging a statue! Is nothing sacred?! The humanity!

“Finally, we mounted a door-to-door campaign, questioning residents and searching for evidence. No stone was left unturned,” Wiggum reports. Officers are seen running through the Simpsons’ garage, hungry for snickerdoodles and passing by a giant pile of empty spraypaint cans.

Fuck you, Wiggum! Voting starts tomorrow, you fat, ugly can of squishy Pillsbury dough. Get the lead out you dumb sack of dog bones! Or else Quimby will have to go back to his day job, which he doesn’t even know how to do anymore. Something about switchboards, maybe.

Meanwhile, Bart asks Lisa for a couple of bucks to go buy more spraypaint. Lisa chides her brother, tells him to lay low while Springfield’s finest are on the prowl. Plus, something about undermining the pride and dignity of the town with vandalism. *jerkoff motion*

So Bart is about to enter the hardware store when he sees a SWAT team marching the street! Shit, man, time to lay low like his dang ol’ sister advised!

The fat kid in me loved these particular panels at age 7. In fact, at 35, these are the only two panels from the story that I remembered so vividly.

Bart ducks in for a delicious Krusty burger and gets hoisted by his own petard! Verily! With his very large, incriminating stain on his shirt, Bart tries to sneak through town. Too bad he’s caught by the dumbest policeman in the city.

“The results from the forensics lab are in,” Wiggum announces to the detained, shirtless Bartholomew J. Simpson, “The paint used by El Barto on your shirt are both red. It’s a perfect match! Cuff him, boys!”

See, it’s hard to poke fun at a comic series that is already funny to begin with! It’s redundant! What am I supposed to do here? How am I supposed to work with this??

Quimby gets a boost in his approval rating after the incarceration of El Barto. Marge becomes anxious that her 10-year-old son is rotting behind bars. Homer fantasizes about drinking beer and eating chips on the couch in his underwear!

Ahhh, incarcerated youth.

However, later in the week (while the 10-year-old is still in jail), Brockman reports that El Barto is still at large! Oh snap! Snippity snap! The egg is on the mayor’s face now! Chief Wiggum is stunned, baffled, and replete with doughnuts

Having wrongfully convicted and arrested Bart, the police set him free. AHHH, and it’s good to see the outside again. Shit is really fucked up on the inside. I wonder how he’s going to integrate back into society.

“Welcome home, Bart. How is life in the joint?” Lisa asks as Bart enters her bedroom with two empty cans of spraypaint.
“Lisa, I know the truth. While I was in jail, you became El Barto.”
“How did you know?”
“These were stashed near my bike,” Bart says, holding up a can, “and they’re not my brand.”

HERE’S THE QUESTION. HERE’S THE ZILLION DOLLAR QUESTION. Why would Lisa bail out Bart when she cares more about the town’s integrity, the petty crimes, and the whatnots and whozits?

Aww, she did it because she loves him! THE END.

”Maggie’s Excellent Adventure”
Written by: Steve Vance / Cindy Vance

Hey, this is gonna be a shorter write-up because this story barely ain’t got no dang words for nuthin’!

“Down you go, Maggie. It’s nap time,” Marge tells her youngest daughter, quite ignorantly. It will NOT be nap time. You can bet your pale, fleshy butt on that one.

Maggie stands up in her crib. She hears birds outside her window. She climbs out of her crib and tries to reach for the birds outside her window.

Millions of families worldwide are plagued by large, angry ravens snatching babies from their bedrooms.

As you can see, Maggie gets PLUCKed from the house. The bird takes her to the nuclear power plant, where Homer, Lenny, and Carl run around screaming like monkeys as alarms go off. “Core explosion in 30 seconds,” a calm voice announces over the intercom, “Please proceed to the nearest emergency exit.”

The alarm terrifies the bird, who drops Maggie directly over one of the plant’s cooling towers. Now, I have not yet suspended my disbelief up to this point; a story where large birds carry babies to the local nuclear power plant, but apparently a cooling tower has plumbing that leads to a wall vent. Maggie pops out of one in a control room and lands on the emergency shutdown switch of the console, neutralizing the threat. “Meltdown has been averted. Return to work immediately,” the soothing intercom voice relays to the employees as Maggie lands on a rolling cart and rides down a hallway, “All personnel will be docked 30 minutes’ pay due to work stoppages during this incident.”

The cart crashes against a wall. Maggie flies through an open window and lands in an open delivery truck loaded with soft stuffed animals. She is transported to the Springfield Mall loading dock where she sneaks through into the mall as workers unload the truck. Troy McClure is running a Berger Baby Food contest to find the new Berger Baby mascot! A bunch of cameras take photos of Maggie as she sits on the floor.

Pffft. I’m cuter than that baby.

Now, I have not yet suspended my disbelief up to this point; a story where large birds carry babies to the local nuclear power plant and babies fall down cooling towers and land in open delivery trucks, but apparently A TIGER HAS ESCAPED FROM THE CIRCUS. Troy McClure yells for everyone to run for their lives! The tiger chases everyone off in three seconds. Everyone except for Maggie, who is not afraid. The tiger takes a liking to the baby and carries her on its back, much like that shitty episode from season one where she makes friends with the local bears during the family’s tragic RV vacation! Homer was Bigfoot! We all had a “laugh” at that one.

Ok, ok. The tiger walks to the Kwik-E-Mart where Apu is being robbed at gunpoint AGAIN. Otto walks out of the store blasting music in his headphones, blissfully unaware that Apu is about to be murdered.

“Yes, yes. You need not be forceful. I am familiar with the protocol of armed robbery,” Apu calmly says as a gun is pointed at his chest.

The tiger chases the armed robber out of the store, throwing Maggie into Otto’s grocery bag. He must be pretty baked to not notice an extra 20 pounds dropping into a bag he’s holding with one arm.

Otto drives away in his bus with a baby in a bag in the seat behind him. He sings “Bohemian Rhapsody” loudly to himself, hits a pothole, and Maggie flies out yet another window into a paperboy’s newspaper sack! The kid bikes along Evergreen Terrace and throws Maggie at the Simpsons’ house. She bounces off the roof of the garage and through her bedroom window. She scurries back into her crib and pretends to be asleep.

And not a moment too soon! This lucky little sprat, Marge is none the wiser! She enters the bedroom to wake Maggie up. GROCERY STORE TIME.

This is really exciting, isn’t it folks?? I love recounting wordless yarns.

Yada yada yada. Without Marge’s consent, and literally 30 minutes after her photo was taken, Maggie became a local celebrity.

I’m seein’ double here! Four Maggies!

”Krusty the Clown Presents: Itchy & Scratchy’s Power Tool Safety Tips”
Written by: Bill Morrison

This is a single page faux public service announcement. I think it speaks for itself.

The cat wants to murder the mouse, but the mouse murders the cat. A tale as old as time.

Final Thoughts

This holds up better than I expected. The stories leave a little to be desired, but the stories aren’t exactly the point. Matt Groening aimed to put the “comic” back into comics, and these are admittedly as funny as he set out for them to be.

Too bad that he stopped giving a shit about his own franchise by the turn of the century, but hey. Nobody’s perfect! You know what else isn’t perfect? Definitely not the last 23 years of the Simpsons!