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Welcome to the behind the scenes look at the creators of the funniest
cartoon show around. Where these crazies get their ideas, I don't know.
However, in order to view their stats, there is a special way you can read
this page.... (figure it out)
Matt Groening
"Most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed I would
never forget," says the 43 year-old cartoonist. Although, he prefers to
think of himself as "a writer who just happens to be a cartoonist.
Matt Groening was born in Portland, Oregon on February 15, 1954.
The street he lived on was Evergreen Terrace. Streets in Portland
also familiar to Simpson fans include: Flanders Ave., Lovejoy St., Kearney Ave., and Van
Houten St. His father, Homer (no coincidence), a cartoonist himself, encouraged his son’s
primitive doodlings. Matt has four sisters: Patty, Selma, Lisa, and Maggie (sound familiar?)
and a brother Mark. Matt, the middle child, enjoyed drawing from an early age, but felt a
strong loathing for coloring books, mainly because he was not able to stay inside the lines. In
primary school, little left-handed Matt (ever wonder why so many characters on the Simpsons
are left-handed? That's why.) drew cartoons when he should’ve been paying attention, which
left strange gaps in his education. To this day, he does not know his state capitals, and don’t
bother asking him to multiply any numbers between 7 and 13. He’ll just stare at you blankly.
In high school, Matt continued to draw cartoons in every class, even Physical Education,
injuring himself severely while doodling on the parallel bars. Until he was kicked off the staff,
Matt drew cartoons for the school newspaper. Feeling the revolutionary enthusiasm of the
time, Matt and his hippie pals formed their own political party, the Teens for Decency.
Responding to the campaign slogan, "If You’re Against Decency, Then What Are You For?",
his confused classmates elected Matt Student Body President and immediately regretted it.
Matt attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, taking
full advantage of the school’s no-grade, no-required-courses policies. There
he met fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry (known as the "the unmistakeable
funk queen of the universe"), who inspired Matt to keep plugging away at
doing cartoons when he was unsure of himself. He graduated in 1977 and
drove to Los Angeles to become a writer, where his car broke down in the
fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway just above the Vine Street exit at 2 am,
later inspiring "Life in Hell", a comic strip.
But things didn’t happen quite as he planned. Instead of writing newspaper
or magazine articles, he worked as a chauffeur and "biographer" for an
88-year-old director of really bad movies. Groening drove the man around
and listened to his stories. In the evening, he typed up notes about the
stories. This was not a very good start for a hopeful writer.
He lived in a small apartment. The guy downstairs liked to play loud rock ‘n’ roll in the middle
of the night. At first, Matt tried to get back at him by blasting reggae music. He finally got his
point across by dropping a cinder block on the floor, which knocked out his noisy neighbor’s
ceiling light. But this small victory didn’t make up for his other disappointments. Matt couldn’t
stand the Los Angeles smog and unattractive vistas. And his lack of professional progress was
a big letdown.
So, for relief, he decided to send a message to his friends back home. It wasn’t a boring letter
telling about his unhappiness. Instead, it was a comic book about life in Los Angeles. He
called it "Life in Hell". The comic strip starred Binky, the lonely buck-toothed rabbit (In 1985,
he told Los Angeles magazine that Binky was the "stupidest" name he could think of) and it
soon became an underground success in L.A. Matt found himself making 500 copies instead
of 20. In 1980, the strip started to appear in the Los Angeles Reader, a weekly paper where
Matt worked as an editor/delivery man.
But many readers were annoyed by Binky’s habit of yelling about hip slang like "boogie" and
ambience." To stir more interest in the strip, Matt changed the rabbit from a grump to a victim.
"The second my characters began to be tortured and alienated, the popularity began," he told
Newsweek in 1987. "The more I tortured them, the more the readers loved me." The
adventures of Binky - and his girlfriend Sheba and one-eared son Bongo - struck a chord. The
strip isn’t the best-drawn in the world. That’s OK. The words are the real attraction. Groening
often crams every spare bit of space around his drawings with text.
The comic strip is still running and currently appears in about 250 newspapers around the
world, much to Matt’s amazement. There have also been eight "Life in Hell" books
published, all but one with the word "hell" in the title. The book Matt was recently working
on in the series is titled "Binky’s Guide To Love", a cynical view of love and human relations,
which is basically what the entire series is about. Matt currently lives in Los Angeles with his
radiant wife, Deborah Caplan; his sons Homer and Abe (sound familiar?); and more pet ducks
than you can shake a stick at.
Voices Nancy does on The Simpsons:
Bart Simpson, Nelson Muntz, Ralph Wiggum, Todd Flanders, Rod Flanders,
Kearney, and Maggie Simpson on the old Tracey Ullman Shorts.
Most Notable Roles:
Well, frankly, there's not too many places to catch Nancy in person. In my (altavista) search for more stuff about
her, I basically found only a few things that actually pertained to her (and not the philosopher who shares her
name.) Among the most interesting was the fact that she did a 'One Woman Play' called In Search of Felini which
apparently has earned critical acclaim. Back in 1985, Nancy appeared as a handmaid named Kathleen who goes
topless (!), in a demonstration of sex in a movie called "Flesh and Blood" (also known as 'The Rose and the
Sword"). You can hear her voiceover work in a few places though. Nancy and several other Simpsons cast
memebers have done voices on Animaniacs, with Dan Castellaneta doing Dracula, Nancy doing Mindy, Phil
Hartman doing Dan Anchorman, and Maggie Roswell (the voice of Mrs. Hoover) providing the voice for the
Princess of Props. Nancy also provided the voice of Fawn Deer in Disney's "Bonkers," and did Kip Kangaroo
on a show I used to watch but can't remember: The Shirt Tales.
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