Well, today is Groening’s 69th (nice!) birthday, and to honor our favorite geek elder, we’d like to share our favorites from the infinite list of memorable moments his myriad creations have provided us over the years… 69 The First ‘Life in Hell’ Comic
And ever since, Groening has been able to make pretty much anything he wants, and if anyone questions it, he can point to his closet full of awards and his Great Pyramid-sized pile of branded merchandise and say, “Oh, I think I know what I’m doing here.” That pitch only became the biggest TV show in human history. Groening didn’t want to lose the rights to his comic-strip characters, so he mostly ad-libbed a pitch about an animated cartoon family named The Simpsons. Until one day, a TV producer called him up and offered him a chance to adapt his work for television. Eventually, Groening found a way to combine his art and his prose in a still simple yet increasingly sophisticated version of Life in Hell and did so subsequently in his extremely great, miracle-of-popular-culture cartoon show, The Simpsons.It’s hard to believe that 38 years ago, Matt Groening was just a simple cartoonist with a syndicated comic strip.
Groening worked for a dinky giveaway newspaper, the Los Angeles Reader, where he started drawing the barely stick-figure panels that became his comic strip Life in Hell, and reviewed records in a column called ”Sound Mix.” But because the local music was so lousy, Groening soon began writing about his quirkier musical passions (Frank Zappa, world music, and, er, Frank Zappa) and then started spouting opinions on stuff that had nothing to do with music - or rather, everything to do with good music: sex, politics, sports, etc. But a rock critic was what Matt Groening (see?) was - sort of. punk was mostly awful - the children of Hollywood trying to co-opt British youth rage - it was not a good time to be a rock critic. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to Matt Groening in a second.) Because L.A. Back in the early ’80s, Los Angeles discovered punk rock.
0 kommentar(er)
