NoTV: Groening Ends 'Hell'

[Mark Jeffries]

"LIfe in Hell," the sardonic alt-weekly comic strip that led Matt Groening to create "The Simpsons" (when he refused to let "Hell" be animated on "The Tracey Ullman Show" because 20th-Century Fox wanted to own the characters), is ending its 32-year run, due to Groening losing money on the strip (thanks to the woes of alt-weeklies, it's now in only 38 papers, way down from over 375 papers in its heyday) and his wanting to do other things besides having to come up with a new idea each week:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/life/comics/story/2012-06-19/matt-groening-life-in-hell/55698336/1

 

And the annual "Forbidden Words" strips, my personal favorite "Hell" strips (along with the mock magazine cover for "Performance Artist Monthly"), will continue to appear in the "Simpsons" annuals.

[Kevin M.]

In college, I used to read it religiously in one of the Pacific
Northwest freeps (forget which one) and enjoyed it, but the sense of
humor, the art, and the panel arrangement weren't conducive to a
mainstream comic section of a newspaper. Shocked it lasted as long as
it did without undergoing drastic changes (i.e. any other old farts
seen MAD Magazine lately?).

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Joe Hass]

At the age of 14, I purchased a series of smaller (40 or so pages) themed collection of Life In Hell strips. When my father and future step-mother found the books, they took the books away and gave me my money back. As you can guess, I simply repurchased the books and kept them at my mom's house (where I usually stayed).

I remember when the Metro Times (the Detroit alt weekly) dropped it, arguing that it had gotten too main stream. To which they received a boatload of letters saying, "If it's so damn mainstream, why don't we think either the Free Press or the News will pick it up?" Of course, neither did.

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