If you can, I recommend getting at least this one issue as it really was quite awesome.
There's been a few big changes in the last year or so:
- First, Simpsons went from monthly to 9 times a year (with Summer Shindig, Winter Wing Ding and THOH in the off months)
- Bart ended with #100
- Simpsons changed format slightly, instead of one long story each issue the last few have taken over Bart's format of several shorter stories
- As of this month, Simpsons has been upped to 11 issues a year. There hasn't been a Summer Shindig announced for this May, so I'm assuming Shindig and Wing Ding have also ended which allows for Simpsons publication to increase.
I don't really like the direction Bongo has taken the last few years, which is why I was so surprised at how great this issue of Bart was. Simpsons and Bart both used to be monthly, Futurama was every three months, plus 2 Super Spectaculars and one each of the three annuals. That was at least 33 issues of brand new material a year. I think it was sometime in 2014 that Super Spectacular was cancelled, Simpsons was dropped to 9x a year, Bart back down to 6x, Futurama stayed at 4x, One-Shot Wonders debuted with 4 then went to 3x, Simpsons Illustrated every 2 months, the three existing annuals plus a new one (Explosion). So we are now losing 6 issues of Bart and more than likely 2 of the annuals, and gain 2 additional Simpsons issues. That's a total of 26 Bongo comics a year, but only 19 are new material (Illustrated and Explosion are reprints). Plus the cover price has gone up $1 with less content (it used to be 32 pages plus the cover, now the 32 includes the cover, so technically only 28 interior pages).
EDIT: Just realised as well that there has been no One-Shot Wonder solicited since Grampa that was released a couple months ago. It's supposed to be every 4 months but since the current solicits are out to May, that's something like 5+ months without an issue.
Link to Post: https://bongo.babysimpson.co.uk/index.php?msg=16140