Review by Frank Plowright

Every volume of Bart Simpson contains a random selection of strips, but the process throws up the occasional weird anomaly, and excepting members of the Simpson family, Professor Frink appears in more stories here than any other character. Who in the name of Glavin would have thought that!

It’s harder than you might think to write a good Simpsons story in the spirit of the TV show. The jokes come thick and fast, and here several strips work toward a good ending, but don’t manage a high joke ratio in arriving there. Ian Boothby, though, is an always reliable laugh-generator, and shines on two strips. ‘The Martin Chronicles’ has Martin Prince realise he can graduate from being the least popular kid in the school merely by supplanting the second-least popular, which means replacing Milhouse as Bart’s best friend. Boothby’s other contribution is the better of two Bartman strips, in which a broken Apu turns to crime, weaponising his eight infants. Mike W. Barr should be noted firstly for taking the unusual step of selecting Todd and Rod Flanders as his subjects, and then also packing in the jokes.

Carol Lay is also always reliable, both writing and drawing her strips, and coming up with some of the trippiest art in the collection (sample left). It’s usually only Sergio Aragonés given licence to depart from the house art style, but here so does Dean Rankine, bringing a rougher underground look to the cast. Otherwise you’d be hard pressed to identify one artist from another without the credits. They’re all good, though, with John Delaney’s work slightly more rendered. Nina Matsumoto draws more pages than anyone else, and her sample art is from Eric Rogers’ good tale of Bart being co-opted into Fat Tony Jr’s Legitimate Businessmen’s organisation.

Breaks Out opens with Pat McGreal’s Stand By Me pastiche, which sadly takes a wild turn into a pie-eating contest, and other subjects include Lisa behaving badly, Bart and Homer staying up all night, and Bart trapped in the school library.

This isn’t quite the laugh fest of some earlier volumes, but when it’s good, it’s very good indeed. It’s also the last of the Bart Simpson collections to date, despite the comics running on for another seventeen issues.