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Justin Horton
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When you create a superb, enduring TV series, you win a bunch of Emmys and become wealthy. When the comic book broke into the American scene at the turn of the last century, it was brilliantly imaginative: comic book artists were brave explorers charting the new continent. By 1980, it had grown so popular underground that the Los Angeles Reader picked it up, and has only grown in popularity since.
It is a shame the comic is difficult to find, as its punk attitude about refusing to accept the trivial smugness of contemporary life is still significant. It was Matt Groenings outlet for howling about the messiness of modern life, Matt Groenings space for his angst, self-loathing, and cynicism toward relationships, work, life, and death. Matt Groening was formerly known for his Life In Hell comic strips, an irreverent depiction of love, work, school, life and relationships, which are currently featured in over 250 newspapers around the world, as well as numerous books.
At the top of each strip, Matt Groening has rushed to spell out the words Life in Hell & Copyright by Matt Groening, as well as the year in which it was made. In an 1991 interview on The Simpsons, Groening said Life in Hell was done completely by himself, described the comic book as Matt Groening Pure and Simple, and explained the strips were often strange or completely different every week due to how he was feeling at the time the strip was created. In the late 1980s, Matt Groening did some press ads for Apple Computer as the comic Life in Hell.
An editor at Wet Magazine bought one and liked it, offering a place for Groening in the magazine; Life in Hell debuted soon thereafter in 1978 as a comic strip in avant-garde magazine Wet, for which Groening made his first professional comic book sales. Originally published in The Los Angeles Reader, where Groening was a columnist, Life in Hell moved to The Los Angeles Weekly in 1986 after a fight with LA Reader management. Life in Hell crept into the world in 1977 as a self-published book Groening, who had just moved to L.A. from Portland to pursue his writing ambitions, was going to distribute among friends.
In November 1984, Groenings then-girlfriend , Deborah Kaplan, decided to publish the collection of Matt Groenings comic strips as a book entitled Love Is Hell. Following the success of Love is Hell, Deborah Caplan, who would become Groenings wife, published Work is Hell and two calendars, one with comics artist Lynda Barry. In 1985, Groening was asked by producer James L. Brooks whether Groening wanted to convert his scratchy, bitingly satirical strips featuring overbite-and-existential-dread anthropomorphic rabbits into a series of animated shorts that would run on The Tracy Ullman Show.
The multiple-panel strip, which analyzed certain aspects of contemporary life with a clear, grammar-free high-school-textbook diction--Groene was, and remains, the master of mimicry--was becoming less common, replaced by the single-panel, jumbo-jab-style strips. Meanwhile, the steady demise of post-millennium alternative newsweeklies meant the underground strips market was in permanent decline. The Los Angeles Weekly cancelled the strips in 2009. Even though Matt Groening was the man behind The Simpsons, the circulation for Life in Hell had shrunk to just a few newspapers, which only earned Groening $18 per strip...probably not time well spent by the multimillionaire.
By 30, comics pages were providing compelling storytelling, helping distract the nation during the Great Recession. We debated about our favourite Groening tropes--I, for one, was a sucker for Groenings mock periodicals and any strip focusing on the strange, flaky connection between the adult bunny Binky, who had been grossly outmatched by life, and her bastard son Bongo, whose youth offered little protection from the corroding realization that he was fixed. Personal favorites Akbar and Jeff were seemingly introduced so Groening could include the actual conflicts he had with his girlfriend into Life in Hell without making it too apparent who was who.
Other regulars included Akbar and Jeff, a matching pair of Fez-wearers, constantly fighting each other, often over the topic of Akbar and Jeffs relationships. Akbar & Jeff has operated a number of businesses over the years, including Akbar & Jeffs Tofu Hut, Akbar & Jeffs Earthquake T-Shirt Hut, and Akbar & Jeffs Bootleg Akbar & Jeffs T-Shirt Hut.
Matt Groening, the creator and executive producer of the Emmy-winning series The Simpsons, created a landmark in television, returning animation to prime time and creating a family with no death. Life in Hell is a comic book series created by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Mist, that was published weekly from 1977 to 2012. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Mist, created The Simpsons from 1977.