When Steve Willis, a McCleary, Wash., cartoonist and librarian, thinks of his former Evergreen State College cohort and now-famous Simpsons animator Matt Groening, a recurring image comes to mind.
It is of Groening, who was then editor of the campus newspaper, bent over his desk, head in his hands as though suffering from terminal depression, repeating over and over, “I didn’t mean for it to come out this way.” If the situation were to be depicted in a cartoon, it might bear the caption: Groening groaning.
It would happen in the aftermath of a Groening cartoon in the campus newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal. In those mid-’70s days, Groening constantly was sending up some aspect of Evergreen’s piously progressive educational philosophy. One cartoon showed a cereal box labeled “Evergreen Flakes” with a collection of Grateful Dead lookalikes huddled around a bowl of “leisure cereal of the state of Washington.” Their motto: “Achievement Without Effort.”
The unsuspecting Groening anticipated that Evergreen’s enlightened students, an untraditional amalgam of post-hippie, ex-urban, laid-back experimentalists from throughout the country, would chuckle with knowing amusement at such satiric excursions, while the faculty and administration would be mortally offended.
Instead, the faculty would snort with laughter and post the cartoons on bulletin boards and classroom walls, while self-righteous students would write letters to the editor such as the one from Terry Wright, published in the Feb. 10, 1977, Journal, thanking Groening for making the Journal so bad that Wright would never again have to be distracted from his studies by it.
“After a cartoon of Matt’s satirized communes, 100 students signed a protest petition and sent it in as a letter to the editor,” recalled Leo Daugherty, a literature professor and Groening mentor who still teaches Shakespeare at Evergreen. “It said, ‘Dear Mr. Groening: Communal struggles are not funny!”‘
Pompous snits like this are mother’s milk to most cartoonists. But Groening took them personally, to the point of hours-long soul-searching sessions with Daugherty over where he was going wrong. “He was always surprised and sad and a bit worried that this would affect his peers in such a negative fashion,” Daugherty said. “I could tell a mile away when Matt had had one of his run-ins. But I always looked forward to the ensuing conversation because I knew it would be interesting.”
Things are not much different today. As illustrator and a creative force behind The Simpsons, the hit cartoon series on the Fox TV network, Groening finds himself under fire for such vague crimes as undermining American values and spoiling The Youth of Today — even as the saucer-eyed clan in dire need of orthodontics cavorts on the covers of national magazines.
A popular T-shirt of the notorious Bart (an anagram for “brat”) carrying the slogan “Underachiever and Proud of It, Man,” was banned in Ohio, California and Kentucky by school principals who called it damaging to pre- adolescents’ self-esteem. And drug czar William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, advised recovering addicts not to watch The Simpsons — although he recanted when Bart’s popularity became obvious.
At 37, with an income approaching seven figures, a Life in Hell cartoon empire embracing 300 newspapers and 22 new episodes of The Simpsons on tap, Groening no longer buries his head in his hands when opposition such as The Simpsons backlash strikes. But echoes of regret lace his tone when he talks about adult repression of American youth reflected in the controversy.
“What bugs me about it is that it’s the kind of petty, stupid exertion of authority by intellectual boneheads that kids encounter every day,” Groening says. “The real tragedy is that it breaks the spirit of a lot of them. I was lucky, with me it just made me more set in my ways.”
It seems to be Groening’s destiny that for every cartoon he draws, some element of society will denounce it as offensive. It was thatisplayed in record stores, although it was unclear whether that meant they liked it or hated it, Groening points out.
Then there’s Bart, who Groening denies is a Young Matt surrogate but who has his same penchant for obstreperousness. Growing up, Groening repeatedly crossed swords with authority figures, who somehow immediately divined his unwillingness to knuckle under.
At age 5, Groening was chased by police officers through Portland’s Washington Park after they spotted him riding an abandoned flatcar. In sixth- grade he was sent to the principal’s office for throwing an encyclopedia out the window.
“He had some problems adjusting to school, mostly because the teachers weren’t very sympathetic to his cartooning,” says Matt’s father, Homer Groening (pronounced “graining”), a former cartoonist and advertising executive who still lives in Portland with Matt’s mother, Margaret.
Overall, his parents recall Matt as a good student, and the record shows he was student body president at Lincoln High School in Portland, where he ran a parody campaign on the Teens for Decency ticket under the motto, “If you’re against decency, what are you for?”
But for Groening, the childhood memories that stand out most — as they do for many of his generation — involve “my history of getting into trouble,” he says.
In a way, his comic strips, from the guilt-plagued Bongo, abnormality.”
There was little indication that success loomed anywhere on Groening’s horizon after he left Evergreen for an uncertain future in Los Angeles. “We knew Matt would choose a creative line of work, because he was a creative person,” his mother says. “But cartooning … well, frankly, I would have been happier and more settled in my mind if he’d been a doctor or a lawyer.”
Groening started inauspiciously, his ’72 Datsun breaking down at midnight on the Hollywood freeway his first night in Los Angeles. He worked sporadically as a movie extra, a chauffeur and a free-lance cartoonist before latching on as circulation director with the Los Angeles Reader, an independent weekly. It wasn’t glamorous: Groening delivered newspapers in his own car, which had changed from a beat-up Datsun to a beat-up Dodge Dart.
It wasn’t long before Groening worked his way into a weekly rock column called “Sound Mix.” In April 1980, he produced the first Life in Hell panel starring a rabbit named Binky, a preachy, wordy, somewhat condescending punster who was more snide than funny.
But after Groening changed Binky to an angst-ridden questioner of Reagan materialism and the religious right, a cult following started to build. “I realized I had to make him a victim whom people could identify with,” he said.
It was at the Reader that Groening also met Deborah Caplan, a torial and advertising should be separate,” he insisted), they soon were romantically entwined. By 1984, Caplan put together a book, Love Is Hell, managing to sell 20,000 copies for the Christmas rush.
Not long afterward, Jane Levine, the Reader’s founding publisher who now is vice president in charge of marketing and advertising for Seattle-based Sasquatch Publications, left the publication. Others soon followed, including Groening and Caplan, who later wed and today have a year-old son, Homer.
The book’s success convinced Caplan to beat the syndication bushes for Life in Hell. Initially it met with little success, partly because of the name itself. “It turned off the conservative editors and stores,” she said. A Portland editor even suggested changing the name to “Life in Heck,” which Groening took seriously. Later the editor said she’d just been joking.
Today “hell” is such an ingrained part of American lexicon that it’s hard to remember a time when it was considered unprintable on a par with the “f” word. People talk about dates from hell, parties from hell, bosses from hell — but Groening’s series predated them all and even led the way to transforming the word’s meaning.
In one of his strips titled Life in Hell Explained, Groening calls it “a crude little comic strip full of alienation, angst, fear and grief, not to mention self-loathing and laughs” on some authority figures, particularly religious rightists “who keep trying to convert Matt because they’re worried he’s going straight to hell — the real hell,” Deborah Groening says. On the flip side are fundamentalists who actually like the strip because it raises issues surrounding the existence of God. “Republicans and religious fanatics don’t always get Matt’s intentions,” Deborah notes.
Groening has become so identified with The Simpsons that hard-core fans — many of whom cite The Simpsons as a pale version of the more eclectic rabbits in Hell — worry he will abandon the panel, or that it will suffer from inattention.
But Deborah, who already heads a Life in Hell syndicate staff of seven people (Fox owns the rights to The Simpsons) and a mail-order business in spinoff accessories, says The Simpsons’ success has rejuvenated interest in Groening’s panels. A new line of T-shirts and greeting cards is on its way.
“Life in Hell has never been better,” she says.
Neither has life on Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where Bart T-shirts are all the rage and the Groenings’ new home is under construction. “The goodlity.”(COLOR)
Matt Groening and his creation, Bart Simpson, make the cover of Newsweek magazine’s special issue on education.
