Review by Frank Plowright
More so than your regular Bart Simpson collection, Master of Disaster features a fair number of contributors known to the wider comics world rather than just creators whose credits are for Simpsons comics.
It opens with Evan Dorkin who at first seems to be adapting one of his Eltingville plots as Bart, Milhouse and Martin Prince buy a Radioactive Man rocket car kit, then argue about constructing it. Dorkin, though instead shifts the plot into the problems of unsupervised use of superglue and climaxes with a finely choreographed cart down the hill gag. As well as his usual one-pagers featuring Maggie Simpson, Sergio Aragonés produces a funny longer wordless piece about Maggie’s day at the nuclear power plant. It’s an effective fusion of his own art style with the Simpsons template, and he moves even nearer that with another strip about Bart having to produce a cube for school. It’s weird, but a rare misfire from Aragonés.
Peter Kuper, yes, the Pulitzer Prize nominated Peter Kuper, sends Bart and Homer to Mexico where they meet Aztec counterparts of Springfield’s residents who identify Bart as their god. It’s functional without ever hitting the highspots, and the art is a compromised middleground between Kuper’s usual style and the standard Simpsons style.
Recasting the Springfield residents in other roles is attempted again and more successfully in Tony DiGeralamo and Nina Matsumoto’s ‘Gamemaster Lisa’. The dungeons and dragons version is elevated by the genius idea of not just having the nerds involved, but revealing local bully Dolph as an enthusiast. There’s a second very good fantasy tale from Chris Yambar and Scott Shaw!, but this time having Bartman team with Radioactive Man to outwit aliens Kronos and Kang.
Having Bart behave well and thus shocking all around him may be an obvious idea, but Paul Kupperberg pulls it off via a joke-packed script as the good behaviour is sustained while not revealing why that’s the case until the end. James Lloyd on art (sample spread left) draws some nice panels set at night with shadows across faces from the street lights. His neat version of the house style appears on more stories in this volume than any other artist, but it’s Phil Ortiz who gets to draw Arie Kaplan’s great script about Bart pulling one hell of an ugly face and then having it freeze in place. It’s straight from the Big Daddy Roth catalogue.
This is one of those Bart Simpson collections sitting above the median quality line, packed with interesting ideas and good art. Suckerpunch is next.
