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  • Matt Groening: Digital Media Killed His Comic Strip

    Matt Groening, creator of the hugely successful shows “The Simpsons” and “Futurama”, is seeing his comic strip of 30 years die off with print as digital media consumes the world of newspapers.

    The comic, “Life In Hell”, had a long and popular run among paper strips in L.A. Weekly and The Village Voice, but in a world where everyone has just about any information they want right at their fingertips, newsweeklies are having a tough time staying afloat, and keeping the comic going has become more and more of a struggle, only earning around $18 for each issue. Groening made the tough decision to retire the comic after three decades and 1,669 strips.

    “I’ve had great fun, in a Sisyphean kind of way, but the time has come to let Binky and Sheba and Bongo and Akbar and Jeff take some time off,” Groening said.

    The strip ran in about 380 newspapers after Groening formed the company Acme Features Syndicate in the early ’90s, which syndicated it. Now, less than 40 papers run the strip. However, it has been anthologized in the books Childhood Is Hell, School Is Hell, The Big Book Of Hell, and The Huge Book Of Hell.

    Some comics have found successful homes online, worming their way around the evolution of print to find a whole new market, such as Penny Arcade; but Groening seemed more willing to retire the comic strip than move it to the web, perhaps because after 30 years, it was just its time to go.

    “I was hoping that he would never end it, that he would keep up, but with the way the newspapers are in today’s world, it just wasn’t profitable,” Sondra Gatewood, the strip’s syndicate manager, said. “It wasn’t like back in the day.”

    As evident by the reaction on Twitter, “Life In Hell” will be dearly missed by those it inspired and brought humor to.

    Image credit: Matt Groening

  • Simpson’s Creator Matt Groening Helps Sell Macs to College Kids in the 80’s

    As Holy Kaw and Comics Alliance points out, Matt Groening once did a promotional pamphlet for Apple in 1989. It was first posted Reddit, whose users never skip a beat when it comes to pop culture curation.

    The brochure is titled “Who needs a computer anyway?” and in 1989, that question was justified. The brochure itself alternates between Groening’s one panel comics and an extended sales pitch as to why you need an Apple personal compter. Here, some of the more boring parts of the sales pitch are left out, but you can see the brochure in its entirety here.

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    This is probably the most telling panel of all. In 1989, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was a big deal. Apple touts something that we now all take for granted with “instead of having to type out a long string of computerese, you can tell Macintosh to do anything-even the most complex procedures – merely by using a mouse to pull down a menu of commands and point to the one you want.”

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    Macintosh actually financed their own computers in 1989. It makes a big difference when you are a fresh company trying to get new people to jump in on this whole new “computer” thing, verses people lining up around the block and following rumors months in advance to get their hands on new Apple products.

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    What is clear is that Apple tried to market itself to young people and the artistic community from the very beginning. A trend that has paid off well for the company in recent years. Groening didn’t do too bad himself. This was published in the same year that the Simpsons made its network debut. Groening made a little money off that project.