Groening, Matt

Matt Groening, (born February 15, 1954, Portland, Oregon, U.S.), American cartoonist and animator who created the comic strip Life in Hell (1980–2012) and the television series The Simpsons (1989– ) and Futurama (1999–2003, 2010–13).

Groening began drawing cartoons at an early age, but he focused on journalism while attending Evergreen State College (B.A., 1977) in Olympia, Washington. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles. While struggling to find stable employment, Groening began drawing cartoons featuring a pathetic oppressed rabbit named Binky, which he sent to his friends back home as a commentary on his dismal life in Los Angeles. After securing a job as circulation director at the Los Angeles Reader, he convinced the weekly paper to publish his cartoon, which he titled Life in Hell. He then expanded the strip to include other characters—Binky’s wife, Sheba; their one-eared son, Bongo; and the odd, cranky identical roommates Akbar and Jeff. Within three years of its debut in 1980, the strip was carried by alternative newspapers nationwide. In 1984 Groening released his first collection of strips, Love Is Hell; it was followed by Work Is Hell (1985), School Is Hell (1987), Childhood Is Hell (1988), and Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life (1989). After more than 30 years, Groening ended Life in Hell in June 2012, when the last strip appeared.

Homer Simpson

In 1987 James L. Brooks, then the executive producer of the television variety program The Tracey Ullman Show, asked Groening to create a series of short animated cartoons based on Life in Hell. Instead, Groening developed a new set of characters for the show—the Simpsons. An expanded half-hour program featuring the Simpson family—hapless father Homer; his blue-haired wife, Marge; and their three children, rambunctious Bart, precocious Lisa, and infant Maggie—premiered in late 1989 and became a weekly series in 1990. The Simpsons was widely considered to be one of the smartest programs on television because of Groening’s satirical humour and the complexity of his characters, and the show helped establish the fledgling Fox network as a prime-time presence. In 1990 The Simpsons won the first of its more than 20 Emmy Awards, and in 2009 it became the longest-running prime-time series in American television history. A feature-length Simpsons movie was released in 2007.

In 1999 Groening launched a new animated series, Futurama, about the adventures of a 20th-century pizza delivery boy who was transported to the year 2999. That show also was infused with Groening’s subversive sensibility, and, although it was canceled by Fox in 2003, robust DVD sales and a successful run in syndication spurred the production of new episodes, which aired on cable in 2010–13. Groening later developed a third animated series, Disenchantment, which premiered on Netflix in 2018. The show followed the escapades of the hard-drinking Princess Bean and her friends, an elf fittingly named Elfo and the demon Luci, in the medieval kingdom Dreamland.