The Big Picture
- Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell served as a creative outlet for him before The Simpsons, and he continued it alongside his mainstream animation career.
- The strip features a main cast of characters, including the anxious Binky, his girlfriend Sheba, as well as Akbar and Jeff.
- Life in Hell explores themes of death, the monotony of everyday life, and existential questions, all while also showing compassion.
Everyone knows that The Simpsons is what made Matt Groening one of the most iconic names in animation history, but he actually got his start writing a weekly comic strip titled Life in Hell. This comic ran from 1977 to 2012 and, for decades, was the purest way to tap into Groening's biting, satirical sense of humor. As he made the jumps into mainstream animation, his name would be more often associated with a more accessible, broad style of comedy like in The Simpsons and Futurama, but not with Life in Hell. While funny, it's also a commentary on the mundanity of life, philosophy, relationships, death, and nihilism, all through the lens of human-sized rabbits and a couple.
What Is Matt Groening's 'Life in Hell' Comic Strip About?
Back in 1977, when Matt Groening started drawing Life in Hell, he found the strip to be the perfect creative outlet, so much so that when The Simpsons came along, he latched on to it even harder. In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, Groening said, "I’d think about the comic strip all week, spend a day drawing it, and then start thinking about the next one. It was my complete and total focus. Then The Simpsons came along to preoccupy me, and I decided to see how long I could keep the comic strip going... I also liked the idea of having one slice of my creative output being completely solo, unlike TV animation." That quote perfectly sums up what this comic is. Amidst creating the biggest animated show of all time and becoming filthy rich, more than anything, Groening still just wanted to be an underground comic writer.
Life in Hell follows a pretty contained cast of characters but finds itself occasionally breaking off into a wide plethora of faces. That said, the main crew in Groening's strip is a constant, all the way through its run. There's Binky, the main rabbit of the strip, who perfectly embodies everything that Life in Hell is about. He's anxious, his life sucks, but occasionally, things will look up for him. Apart from Binky, there's Sheba, his girlfriend, and Bongo, who may or may not be his son and rocks only one ear above his head. Then of course, there's Akbar and Jeff, an identical pairing who looks kind of like if someone had only seen a picture of Charlie Brown once in their life, and tried to recreate that image, but put fezzes on top of their heads. Sometimes they're referenced as brothers, other times as a couple. Regardless, it's always fun when Akbar and Jeff show up.
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While reading Life in Hell, you get that feeling that Groening really loves what he's creating. A lot of it looks like The Simpsons, but it doesn't occupy the same sweet space in your brain as the iconic series. Where that show looks back and taps into our nostalgia, feelings about everyday suburban life, and largely wraps all of this up in a friendly sense of humor, Life in Hell does the opposite. (Real shocker with a title like that, right?) Groening's strip faces death, the tiring day-to-day nature of a 9 to 5, and existential questions, but also finds itself falling into a bit of Groening's sweet side, with occasional strips reminding us of the things adults say and do with their loved ones to get through the day. In the very same 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Groening cited Charles Schultz's Peanuts strip as a major source of inspiration, with its representation of "neurotic turmoil" (as evident in the Peanuts holiday specials), being the thing he brought to his own strip.
Matt Groening Originally Self-Published 'Life in Hell'
Life in Hell started out being self-published by Groening in a zine, being given out to his friends, and selling copies from the record store that he worked at off Sunset Boulevard. The strip ended up being picked up by underground publications that were a bit bigger than Groening's hand-made zines, and the word started to spread about our little rabbit friends. Eventually, mainstream publications even began picking it up. As it began making its way into the mainstream, the unfiltered raunchiness of it all was scaled back a bit, but only so that Groening could get away with other aspects of the strip.
Matt Groening's move to give the strip the slightest push towards being a little mainstream, making it easier to run in popular newspapers and publications, was a wise move. Sometime in the mid-80s, filmmaker James L. Brooks was looking for someone to come along and make animated bumpers (another word for shorts) that would play between segments on a program that he was producing: The Tracey Ullman Show. During this period, Brooks was given a copy of a Life in Hell strip titled "The Los Angeles Ways of Death," which moved him to call Groening in for a meeting about the Tracey Ullman bumpers.
Matt Groening’s Meeting With James L. Brooks Led to ‘The Simpsons’
On the way in, instead of pitching Life in Hell animated shorts, he sketched out quick drawings of a family that the show would be centered around. This resulted in the bite-sized The Simpsons shorts that would play in between segments on Brooks' show, shorts that played over so well that the shorts spun off into their own primetime series. Brooks might have made a genius move to handpick Groening, but had it not been for Groening's commitment to keeping his comic strip rabbits to himself, then Life in Hell might have remained in underground comic obscurity forever.
Of course, now, Matt Groening has moved on to loads of other projects. The Simpsons has been a constant now for just under half of his lifetime, currently in Season 34, and is already guaranteed Seasons 35 and 36. If the series has proven anything, it's that things don't seem like they'll change any time soon for our friends over in Springfield. Groening's massive success with The Simpsons would lead to other animated ventures like the sci-fi comedy Futurama and Netflix's animated medieval comedy Disenchantment (the show that probably closest resembles his signature sense of humor). You hardly ever see artists take the world by storm like Matt Groening has -- the man has done it for decades now! But even with all the success that he's seen, you can never take the underground artist out of Groening, and you can never discount the impact of Life in Hell.
