Married with Children

Yes, Married with Children 2099

In Married With Children 2099, we meet a barely-parody of everyone’s favorite dadson Nathan Christopher Charles Askani’son Dayspring Grey Summers named Cord, fight Doom 2099, and witness the Punisher 2099 working general security for a Terminator parody, all while a Princess Leia parody is sexually harassed. In Married With Children volumes 1 and 2, we get such stories as Peg Bundy nagging her serial killer kidnapper into leaving her alone, Peg’s mother being kidnapped to some grim fate by long tentacled aliens, and many, many, many jokes about stereotypes of all shapes and sizes, few of which have aged especially well. See the margins, folks. NOW Comics is a publisher probably fairly well known to many who've scrounged through a dollar box at their local store, and discovered the late 80's and 90's comic adaptations galore of everything from Speed Racer, Mr. T & The T-Force, Ghostbusters II, and of course, Married with Children. Previous Next When it comes to the Married With Children books themselves, there are no fewer than thirty six individual issues of Married with Children comics, the majority of which were illustrated by Tom Richmond, with a much wider variety of writers varying from series, to one-shot, to mini-series (yes, there are several of these comics which actually feature an ongoing story, and it is every bit as buck-wild as you would expect, imagine, or fear. Take your pick).

Married With Children, similar to Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, and Watchmen, despite being a wonderfully awful sentence I doubt anyone in the total course of history has ever uttered or even considered bringing into this world before, is yet another series with an ironic protagonist, who gains strong, loud, vocal unironic support the longer that time went on. It’s not a show I’ve personally ever held a fondness for, in either of its meanings, but it defined a lot of what was going on in its era, had some decent jokes here or there, and hey. Am I the sort of person to let an ellipsis in an official title go unappreciated…? So this might raise the question on why I would choose to read a comic book adaptation of a show I haven’t seen much of, don’t hold a particular attachment to the publisher of, or even go around and throw together this little write-up in the first place. The answer, simply, is the fact that once I discovered that Married With Children 2099 actually existed, there was nothing that could stop me from giving myself enough of a primer to jump right the hell in. I will admit my honest surprise on not only the appearance of Punisher 2099 multiple times in the 2099 segment of these bizarrely plentiful comics, but the absolute elation at the presence of that delightfully wide Cable parody Cord, as well as just… Doom 2099! Existing in his freakin’ entirety, man. It’s just him. Blue cape and everything. The standard issues, of which take up the majority of this series, are kind of admirable, in terms of taking that old Archie style of story, that really would always compliment the sitcoms we’ve been watching in modern times for years, and just escalating it, again and again. Once more, I have no idea why I read these. But you know what, buddy? That’s comics. That’s comics a lot of the time, really. Reading something, and just picking it up for better, or worse. Especially when you’ve read a chunk already, even if I do have my DC leaning bias, if there’s something weird out there, I wanna see what the hell it is. Case in point, 36 issues of Married With Children comics. I’m not really sure what this piece is, and you can probably grasp that lack of direction from the few panels and pages I’ve tossed up to the sides here-- but again, isn’t that comics, in a way? You start off with something, and give it a shot. Sometimes you come out on the other end with context! Sometimes, you’ll understand it. You’ll have a greater story, you’ll have greater characters. You’ll have a taste for something that didn’t seem palatable at first, but you get it now! You understand where it’s coming from, and you’ve figured it out. It wasn’t that bad, and now, you can go forward with an even more open eye. Sometimes, you’ll get Doom 2099. And, really, I’m okay with that.