by John Ortved
Originally, Binky the bunny (Groening’s mouthpiece) was condescending and preachy, but Groening altered him to be more of a victim with forces working against him, like Reaganite social values, the religious right, commercialism, teachers, and bosses. The cartoons reeked of depression, death, and fear, but there was fun to be had, ironies and insights in the commentary that people related to. A classic strip has Binky bound and gagged in an empty room. Two eyes peer in through a slit in the room’s only door and a menacing voice intones, “Are you ready to embrace family values yet?”
MATT GROENING (to the Portland Oregonian, March 25, 1990): The more horrible things I did to that rabbit, the more people liked it.
“Today ‘hell’ is such an ingrained part of the American lexicon that it’s hard to remember a time when it was considered unprintable on a par with the ‘f’ word,” wrote Paul Andrews in The Seattle Times. But Groening’s comic reconstituted the meaning of “Hell,” taking a word from the Bible and throwing it in the face of the Me Decade and all its emptiness, with the word’s new countercultural undertones. “‘Life in Hell’ was every ex-campus protester’s, every Boomer idealist’s, conception of what adult existence in the ’80s had turned out to be.”16
Life in Hell was first published in 1978 by Leonard Koren’s Wet magazine, an alternative, artsy periodical centered on the concept of “gourmet bathing.”
GARY PANTER, cartoonist, friend of Matt Groening: Leonard Koren showed me Life in Hell for the first time. He was really impressed with it and I was too. And I’m under the impression that Matt was working at a copy shop because he made really fancy minicomics, with lots of pages and color changes and foldins and all kinds of stuff. His drawings were really ambitious, but also very simple and beautifully designed. It has clarity, which is what you need to communicate visually with comics. He’s a great writer, and he understands human psychology, so he can be very effective in whatever medium he’s using.
One thing Matt was always mentioning was to make the drawing funny to start with. If the drawing is funny, then the ball’s already rolling. There has to be some way to invite people into your comic. He also said he was surrounded by really good drawers in high school, and he felt he didn’t want to compete with them, so he made his work simple.
But simplicity in comics is a really powerful thing. If you pick up certain comics like Dick Tracy or Krazy Kat, they may be the greatest comics ever made, but it takes you a minute to adjust to their vocabulary. Comics these days are really much more simple.
In high school, the animals Matt had drawn for his friends had been unrecognizable, except for his rabbits. Groening also liked it that there is a distinguished history of rabbits in pop culture—“Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Rabbit Redux—the John Updike stuff—Crusader Rabbit,” he told Playboy.
JAMES VOWELL, editor in chief, LA Reader: I was the founding editor of the LA Reader back in 1978. Very shortly after we got the first issue out, maybe in the next week or two, Matt called me, probably in November of 1978. He was looking for writing and editing jobs in LA. And we just got to talking.
JANE LEVINE, former publisher, LA Reader: Matt came in with these silly cartoons with the rabbits with one ear. And showed them to James. I was the publisher; I was the money person. James was the editor. Matt leaves. James comes out of his office and says, “That guy is gonna be famous someday.” And I look at these flipping rabbits, you know, and go, “Whatever, James.” But I’ve since learned that James was right about a lot of people, not only Matt.
JAMES VOWELL: The first story of his that got published was in something like February 9th or 10th, 1979. It was a very interesting story about how people put the signs up on Sunset Boulevard and how they painted them; he covered the whole scene.
He kept doing minor assignments over the next few months and then the publisher hired Matt as our distribution manager. Free newspapers, you have to go out to find places to put the racks; you have to make deals with merchants. So he went all around LA, he did some of the delivery himself.
He was a full-time employee, writing more features. Very shortly after that, maybe within six months or so, I was able to convince Jane Levine to let him be my assistant editor. He was my assistant editor at the LA Reader for two or three years.
The Reader, which was even smaller (and more alternative) than its competitor, the LA Weekly, gave Groening an income, a forum for his writing, and an official entrée into the underground music and arts scenes.
GARY PANTER: Punk rock was happening, so there were shows all the time. And Matt and me and everybody went to these shows. And a lot of the same bands would play, they became very famous, and it was really creative. Punk rock in LA was a lot of people out of art school, doing creative things, making publications and clothing and music and so on. We were part of that. And the idea that we could get things into the LA Reader and then have them be blowing down the street, weeks later, seemed like some sort of interesting accomplishment, to impact the landscape somehow. And I think Matt and I were both interested in doing that. We were both interested in entering into culture somehow. It’s interesting if the individual can have an effect in culture, that’s an interesting problem.
Matt fell in love with the punk scene that was blooming in LA. He reviewed unknown bands in the Reader, then a week after the review had been published would check in with the record store, only to find that they hadn’t sold a single copy. “So,” Matt told NPR, “I wasn’t that good as a rock critic.”
JANE LEVINE: Oh, God, it [LA Reader] was so cool. It was an alternative weekly, as if the Village Voice had a baby. It was very small, but it always had incredibly high standards of literary journalism and, these are such difficult words, hipness and alternativeness. In ’78, the calendar section of the LA Times was an amazing fat arts and entertainment section, but the line hadn’t blurred between mainstream and alternative journalism to the extent that it has now.
So when we wrote about punk rock in Chinatown it wasn’t something that everybody was writing about. And we wrote about the city as a city, as a place to live, and not about the industry. And James Vowell collected this amazing group of writers and illustrators like Matt, but also like Gary Panter, Steve Erikson, the crazy Richard Meltzer, Richard Gehr—these really, really great writers
Known as the “father of punk comics,” Gary Panter went on to be a seminal figure in the new-wave comics movement, with his drawings published in The New Yorker, Time, and Rolling Stone. He designed the set for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, for which he won three Emmys. His work has been displayed, alongside that of Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, in the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition. Steve Erickson went on to be a hugely successful surrealist author. His novels, like Rubicon Beach, have won him acclaim from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Richard Meltzer is a seminal rock critic and the author of fifteen books, including a collection of his writing, A Whore Just Like the Rest. Gehr was an editor and columnist at Spin and has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. He also wrote The Phish Book, in collaboration with the jam band.
JANE LEVINE: It was also this totally fun time in LA. The late seventies, early eighties. Punk rock. X. The band X. And it was just like all those romanticized stories about how this little group of us did this thing and hung out together. You know, worked a million hours a week, and the hours that we weren’t working, we hung out together.
It was this little tiny office. The circulation director and the publisher were in the same office. I told him I felt like I’d found another member of my family. Another sibling. Just the ease of talking to each other.
Levine and Groening began a relationship that would last several years. She would leave the Reader in 1983 but continue to work with alternative weeklies until 2004, when she stepped down as publisher of the Chicago Reader. “I think got out of alternative newspapers when the getting was good. It’s so hard now,” she says.
JANE LEVINE: H
e made me insane, just generally fomented dissent. He saw the world with malicious frivolity. And I was earnest. You know, I was the evil boss in the Work in Hell strips. He was the guy who brought his copy not after deadline but like nine seconds before the thing was going to the printer.
JAMES VOWELL: [Matt was] just a great guy. Hardworking. Give him anything to do and he’d work on it. Ask him to do a certain story and within a few hours, or a day, he’d do a bunch of interviewing; he’d pull it together. Very careful. Very conscientious. He was so much fun to be around—turn around and there’s a joke. In fact, what I learned from Matt is how to tell jokes. He even explained to me what a joke is: a joke is what somebody doesn’t expect.
On Tuesday night we’d go up to Hollywood where the typesetter had his operation and pick up stuff to proof. Often we got hungry and went off and had supper and proofread. Matt was always trying to sell Life in Hell as an idea to me for a weekly cartoon in the paper. And he’d draw these little pictures on paper napkins, just ballpoint pen stuff, and occasionally I’d say, “Matt, why don’t you make that chin a little smaller.” I was trying to edit his cartoons, but he didn’t need me to edit his cartoons, I guarantee you.
In April 1980, we published the first weekly newspaper version of Life in Hell.
GARY PANTER: Matt’s earliest comics were about language. That was the major theme of his early minicomics, and I think it went into Life in Hell. He did a whole series of Life in Hell called “Forbidden Words.” Before I met him, I thought, Oh, this guy seems very critical and tough, because he would just name all these words that were overused in culture and forbid them from being used again [these included “ambience,” “bummer,” and “boogie”].
Groening’s cartoon was popular at the Reader, but the strip really caught on once Matt hooked up with Deborah Kaplan, the tiny paper’s ad sales representative and his future wife (and ex-wife).
MATT GROENING (to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, April 29, 1990): Everyone I know goes, “Well, if I had a Deborah, I could be a success too.” And they’re right.
DEBORAH GROENING, Matt Groening’s ex-wife: I came to the Reader in 1981 and I got a job as a sales rep. One of the things I discovered was that Matt’s cartoon was a major selling point when I was going around town. My beat was Melrose, which at the time was where all the fashion, music, sort of the hip street.
I would look through the archives and bring the coolest issues, [including] one that Matt wrote, a cover story called “Hipness and Stupidity.”
When I met [Matt], he was on Valentino Place, formerly Mary Pickford’s apartment building, next to Paramount Studios, in a really seedy part of Hollywood. [Matt’s neighborhood was so bad, Deborah would not visit after dark.]17 I mean, he was hunting for quarters in his ugly orange shag carpeting. He had checks, $10, $15 checks that were, like, three years old, from some paper somewhere. So we made an amazing team. You know? Because I really appreciated the artistic aesthetic, but I had a natural instinct for business so—it was really kind of an amazing ride for around ten years.
JAMES VOWELL: The thing about Life in Hell was people really related to it. People don’t know what Life in Hell means, in terms of the title. The real meaning of Hell is LA. It was really life in LA Hell. So it connected with the people.
ART SPIEGELMAN, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: Life in Hell was neither mainstream nor underground, and at that point, that was unusual. There was the stuff that was totally unpublishable, outside the margins, and there was stuff like Cathy. There wasn’t yet a zone that wasn’t either of those things, that had its own voice and personality, that was interesting. It always struck me that he was a good writer; it didn’t feel like it was necessarily meant for Raw [Spiegelman’s magazine], because it wasn’t that visual, finally.
GARY PANTER: He drove around in his car, in his Volkswagen Squareback or whatever it was, with it piled full of Readers. And people kept breaking into it all the time, because they thought there must be something valuable in there. And he would lie on the floor [of his apartment] and pennies would fall out of his pockets. So when I went over to his apartment, I always felt like he had a lot of extra money because there was this change on the ground. And then I realized, from looking at his environment, mainly what he was doing there was lying in bed and reading everything under the sun. Also, he was writing novels—that was a main project.
And we were both interested in Frank Zappa. I think that idea that Frank Zappa [had], of giving reading lists to young people—if you give a young person the right reading list, a lot happens—I think you see that really built into Matt’s work. [Life in Hell, for all its dark humor, gave its readers something philosophical to chew on.]
DEBORAH GROENING: Jane Levine, she was my mentor. We were sort of all young and beautiful, and we were kind of aware that we were at the hub of the scene in the eighties in Los Angeles. And so, for example, Jeff Spurrier, who did the listings, and his girlfriend, Ann Summa, who did the photography for the Reader—we would all go to the same events. You know there was Raymond Pettibon, a punk artist, and he would have a show and people would go there. There was Steve Samniock, who was like one of the hipster organizers, and he would have something called “Steve’s House of Fine Art.” Now I realize it was like a renaissance, a burgeoning scene in LA that compared to New York in its sophistication.
The young, urban professionals—which we were, you know, highly educated, disposable income, all that stuff—turned to us and trusted our Reader. But also it was sort of a reaction to the hippies, so we were more cynical. Matt’s strip really represented that sort of “We’re wise. We’re not gullible. We don’t think the world’s going to change so easily.”
And so we wanted to become part of the establishment to make the changes happen. So it was sort of this thing, plus of course there was the extreme like punk and new wave music and all this stuff. And then of course it was the same way in fashion, restaurants, so my clients were like l.a. Eyeworks, Vertigo, Industrial Revolution, Grow-Design, all these really fabulous stores on Melrose. Melrose was it.
JANE LEVINE: Everybody was working so hard. And Matt was working really hard alongside of us. But did Matt work harder than James or, you know, ten other people? No. But he worked really hard. You know the way I mentioned him coming in with a column nine seconds before it had to go the printer? It wasn’t like he was screwing off. He was busy.
RANDY MICHAEL SIGNOR, editor, the LA Reader (to The Seattle Times, August 19, 1990): Matt didn’t particularly have a reputation for discipline. We’d have to call his answering machine and yell into it, “Can you hear! Wake up! Call in!”
DEBORAH GROENING: One day, Matt wrote a strip called “Isn’t It About Time You Quit Your Lousy Job?” By that time it was 1984 or ’83. And I was like, “Yeah!” You know? Because I realized I always wanted to sort of start my own business, and I realized I actually could do it because I’ve got a lot of confidence, and also I had learned I was the best salesperson there. I became sales manager, and I made the Reader kind of survive. Then I decided I would be an artist’s rep.
And Matt was going to be one of my artists.
Matt would defer to Deborah in all matters of business, telling Playboy that if it hadn’t been for her, he never would have made it big. They put out the book Love Is Hell for the Christmas rush of 1984. It sold twenty thousand copies.
JAMES VOWELL: Deborah Kaplan was a major driver in Matt’s early history, mainly because they were married, and they wanted to get things going, and she was more business-oriented. In terms of getting it syndicated originally, that was Matt; Life in Hell was already well on the way when they [got together].
JANE LEVINE: I don’t think Deborah gets the credit she deserves for Matt’s success. I mean, Matt’s talent is undeniable. Are there other people that talented? I don’t know. But Deborah was really the one who got other papers to run Life in Hell and started making calendars and greeting cards and all that sort of stuff. I don’t know what role she
played in getting him on Tracey Ullman. But I really think she was the push to make him successful. Obviously she wasn’t the push to make him creative. He just was. But I’m not sure he would have ever made himself the popular success he was without Deborah.
DEBORAH GROENING: The first thing I did was I started to organize Matt and syndicate his strip, and we created a company called Acme Features Syndicate (a reference to the Warner Bros. cartoons, where all the cartoons are branded Acme).
And it was a blast. I did all the business, and Matt just got to be the artist, the struggling artist. And it was a very romantic time for everybody at the Reader, and, you know, it was just a really amazing time.
So what we did was, we made deals every time we got [Matt’s strip syndicated in] a new paper. I went to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention and I created a publicity package. I created a product line [there were Life in Hell mugs, calendars, greeting cards, T-shirts, and books], but these papers that were only giving him $15 for his weekly strip, so I negotiated free ads [for the merchandise]. And then I used those ads to capitalize on this audience that loved him.