Free Comic Friday: Bongo Comics Free-for-All! 2009

Bongo Comics Free-for-All 2009
Scripts: Chuck Dixon, Eric Rogers and Mike W. Barr
Pencils: John Delaney, Mike Kazaleh and James Lloyd
Inks: Dan Davis, Mike Rote and Andrew Pepoy
Colors: Art Villanueva, Chris Ungar and Rick Reese
Letters: Karen Bates
Editor: Bill Morrison
Released: May 2, 2009

At the top of my Free Comic Book Day list each year – well, right after whatever Marvel was putting out – was the annual Bongo Comics Free for All, featuring a comic book take on the Simpsons.

Despite enjoying them, outside of a few issues I snagged at a sale at the local library, I never actually bought an issue. And that made me feel a little guilty when Bongo shut down in 2018.

I don't have the kind of buying power to keep a company afloat, or even a single title. But still, I felt bad for never giving anything in return for that annual free pickup and the laughs that came with it.

The 2009 edition featured a trio of stories – two Simpsons and one Futurama – bookended with scripts by Chuck Dixon and Mike W. Barr, two men better known for their work on Batman than Bartman. I wondered if thy were brought aboard specifically for Free Comic Book Day, but each has multiple Simpsons credits to their name.

In “No Such Thing as a Free Comic,” Dixon pens a meta tale (with art by Delaney, Davis and Villanueva) in which Bart and Milhouse run afoul of the Comic Book Guy when they acquire the last two free comics in a Krusty Burger promotion. CBG wanted one for “investment purposes,” while the boys just want to read them.

The comic within the comic features Krusty telling a quartet of fast food mascots – All-American Fry, Johnny Buns, Patty Crisp and Onion Jack – that one of them has to be let go for financial reasons, then pitting them against each other in an extreme snowboarding/base jumping/fast food survival competition. After the bizarre and brutal battle, Krusty informs the battered crew that they're all fired in a cost-cutting move ahead of his chain's merger with Lard Lad Donuts.

Unimpressed with the lax effort put into the free comic, Bart and Milhouse leave their copies on the table. The issues are snatched up by Comic Book Guy, who bags and boards them while vowing an adult Bart will pay through the nose for a copy when he's feeling nostalgic.*

The comic is a collector's item since it's Krusty's first since an ill-fated partnership with Marvel in the '70s. The story-within-the-story portrays Krusty just as he is in the show, rather than how he would want to be portrayed in an in-universe product. But am I really going to criticize a breezy, all-ages Simpsons story for not being meta enough?

Nah. It's a hoot, especially the knowing jabs at both mercenary comic collectors and companies who phone in promotional items about which young readers are genuinely excited. It's stories like this that showed Bongo wasn't putting out half-hearted content for Free Comic Book Day.

Dixon shared the script for the story on his website back in 2015.

Sandwiched in between the Simpsons stories is “Hostile Makeover,” a four-page Futurama tale by Rogers, Kazaleh, Rote and Ungar. I never watched much of that show for whatever reason, so I only recognized Leela, the one-eyed alien who reluctantly gets taken shopping by Amy, who is apparently another character.

Amy makes Leela over in her own style, but when the men at the mall start paying more attention to her reluctant protege, Amy reverses course. She drapes Leela in a tent-like outfit accented with a Marge Simpson wig. Leela returns the favor by absconding with Amy's outfit while the latter tries on a skimpy ensemble from Sluttery Barn.**

Maybe this does more for me if I had watched the show. It's amusing enough, but the humorous highlight is at the beginning when Leela casually explains the male characters' absence by describing a more intriguing series of events.

Along with Lloyd, Pepoy and Reese, Barr brings us “Captain Cupcake and Pieboy,” an homage to Silver Age comic wackiness featuring Homer and Bart as costumed vigilantes Pieman and Cupcake Kid. They're pitted against perennial Springfield criminal Snake and Professor Frink, going by the villainous moniker Professor Fink.

When the heroes try to thwart the evil-doers' robbery of the Kwik-E-Mart, they get blasted by the Finkatronic Ray with which the Professor was attempting to imbue new pocket change with the age of expired canned food. Suddenly, Bart is an adult Captain Cupcake and Homer has a full head of hair as the young Pieboy.

With guidance from Lisa Simpson, the age-swapped duo pursue their nemeses, who are stealing coal from Mr. Burns. Their plan is to use the ray to drain the age from retirement home residents like Grampa Simpson and channel it into the coal, which will become diamonds. Bart and Homer trick Fink into blasting them with the ray again by dressing up as each other at their correct ages, then snap him out of his villainous stupor by playing a recording of the sea captain seen in so many episodes saying “Arrrr” over and over.

Because when you add an “R” to “Fink,” you get “Frink.”

If all of that sounds ridiculous, let me suggest you read some issues of DC's “The Brave and the Bold” by “Zany” Bob Haney. This story is over the top... by not by nearly as much as you might suspect. A lot of Silver Age tales were stuffed with crazy, convenient plots like this, as Billy D. has discussed with multiple guests, including yours truly, on “The Brave and the Bob.” They tend to be a lot of fun, and this story was too.

* - As someone who once sold Excalibur #125 at a garage sale, then bought it at a local comic shop –
albeit for a dollar – when I decided to collect the full run of the series, this hits close to home.

** - So not too all ages.