Reply #10: And anotther point is we are all still living

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Matt Groening
By Alan Paul

"Life in Hell"

Matt Groening--creator and mastermind behind The Simpsons--gives a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of America's favorite dysfunctional TV family and expounds on the horrors of being a comic book publisher.

Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant past, Matt Groening was a fairly despondent young man. An aspiring music journalist working in a record store, Groening struggled to adapt to life in smoggy, cocaine-infested Los Angeles, where he had recently moved from the friendly confines of Portland, Oregon. To express his frustrations and fears, Groening began drawing cartoons which he sent to friends as letters. The Comic's running title -- `Life in Hell' -- pretty much summed up his situation. Groening's friends thought the cartoons, starting a scared rabbit named Binky and filled with bitter wit and pungent insight, were pretty damned funny and told him so. Thus encouraged, the amateur cartoonist printed up a zine of his strips, which he threw on the shelf alongside the punk magazines at the record store where he worked.

That was in 1977. By the following year, `Life in Hell' had been picked up by the LA Weekly, the city's alternative newspaper. Groening soon developed a rabid local following and the strip slowly spread to alternative news weeklies throughout the country. By 1986, `Life In Hell' was carried in a host of papers nationwide and had even spawned several books. That year, television producer James Brooks approached Groening about Binky, Akbar, Jeff and other `Life In Hell' characters for hort spots on Fox-TV's Tracy Ullman Show. Though Groening was very interested, he was also hesitant.

"I had never done animation before and I had a thriving career as a weekly comic strip artist with `Life In Hell'," he explains. "I was afraid that the experiment in animation might fail and I didn't want to subject my own characters to that failure, so I created new characters."

Of course, Groening's experiment in animation did not fail. By January, 1990, the Ullman show was cancelled, while the the cartoonist's new characters -- a family called the Simpsons -- had a show of their own. Today, six years later, every character on the most popular animated show in television history is a cultural icon. Bart, the only Simpson not named after a member of Groening's real family (it's simply a reworking of the word "Brat"), has become the patron saint of all juvenile delinquents, past, present and future.
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http://www.snpp.com/other/interviews/groening95.html