Matt Groening and 'Life in Hell' Strip, 'Simpsons' Producer Calls it Quits
"The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening has officially announced that he will be quitting "Life in Hell."
A successful cartoonist, producer, and screenwriter Groening achieved his first published work with "Life in Hell" in 1978 at Wet Magazine. The comic strip series was inspired by "How to Go to Hell" in Walter Kaufmann's book Critique of Religion and Philosophy in addition to a mix of real life events.
"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 told Poynter in an email Wednesday.
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"Life in Hell" made its official debut as a comic strip in the Reader on April 25, 1980, almost ten years before Groening's hit primetime show "The Simpsons" became a success.
At one point, Groening's comic strip was being published in over 380 papers marking the cartoon's highest point of success. The comic strip peaked at the same time that "The Simpsons" did, somewhere in the '90s.
Now however, the strip is only in 40 publications and after nearly 35 years of commitment, Groening is ready to move onto something new. Weekly publications and newspapers have also taken a hit by the economy and comic strips in the Sunday paper may soon be a thing of the past.
"With budget cuts, with drops in advertising due to Craigslist and with no more personals because of Match.com alternative weeklies have had to really, really scramble to reinvent their budgets," Sondra Gatewood, who managed the strips syndication, told The Wrap.
Gatewood admitted that she was a bit disappointed.
"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," she said.
