Married… with Comics – Married… with Children: Bud Bundy, Fanboy in Paradise #1

I’ve never seen a single solitary episode of Married… with Children. I’m hoping that confession won’t brand me as a philistine for the rest of my days. I have a feeling it won’t. It isn’t any sort of aversion to the subject matter that spurred this nigh-absolute ignorance of the show. It’s more that in its heyday my family didn’t have cable or a satellite dish and there was no Fox affiliate within range of the good ol’ rooftop antenna. That’s the only real reason. So if I accidentally call Al Bundy Ted Bundy, don’t get too upset with me. It’s not my fault.

All that said, there’s one thing I do know: Christina Applegate was unbelievably hot back in the day. Oof…

This one-shot salvo (there were a couple of short-lived series and multiple one-shots) in the MwC comic book line strikes right at the heart of comic book fandom, as young Bud Bundy descends into the depths of a full-fledged comic book convention. He goes there to pitch a comic book he’s created, one that has plopped his nuclear family into the roles of comicdom’s most famous foursome:

Is it wrong to say that I find the thought of the Applegate-Thing disturbingly appealing? Wait — I guess the “disturbingly” kind of answers my own question…

Bud heads of to the conveniently local con with one of his buddies to sell the Quantum Quartet and make his fortune. There he comes across every (justified) geek stereotype that you can imagine, many of which can be glimpsed on the cover. There’s also some rather delicious commentary at hand. These few panels skillfully encapsulate so much of what was wrong with the comic book world in the ’90s:

Most of the skewering comes as Bud tries to hawk his idea to various personas and publishers. Perhaps my favorite is “Bobby Leftfield,” of “D.U.N.G.Blood” fame:

Poor Liefeld. The whipping boy of whipping boys. Have they ever had a dunking booth at a con? Wouldn’t Liefeld be the biggest request to be a dunkee?

Even more respected industry figures get tomahawked, like the nine-foot tall Jim Shooter:

This meeting goes south like all the others:

Bud meets with rejection after rejection from every thinly veiled proxy you can imagine, including one for Now Comics, the publisher of this very mag:

Hey! Mr. T is in this too!

So poor Bud doesn’t get his comic picked up, and the world will never know the joys of the Quantum Quartet, just like I’ll never know the wonders of his TV show. Life is cruel.

I’m probably never going to watch a single minute of the show. There’s too much inertia for to overcome for me to seek out a decades-old sitcom. I’ll keep my exposure limited to this book.

I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

(Married… with Children: Bud Bundy, Fanboy in Paradise #1 was scripted by Todd S. Tuttle and Geoff White, pencilled by Tom Richmond and inked by David Mowry. No sign of any involvement by Bud Bundy.)