Caricaturist and American cartoonist, creator of the cartoon series The Simpsons. Matt Groening was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1954. His father, Homer Groening, was a professional cartoonist, which no doubt encouraged little Matt to follow in his footsteps.
In fact, he spent hours drawing classes, which caused him to visit the director’s office too often. His experience at the institute was not too different; Still did not attend the explanations of his teachers and drawing, and he encouraged to collaborate in the newspaper of the institute, of which they finished throwing him. Shortly thereafter, he and his hippie friends created their own political party, The Teens for Decency, creating confusing political slogans that earned them many enmities.
Due to his poor grades, Matt Groening finished at the public university of Olympia, where they were not very demanding, receiving classes of several artistic disciplines. He finally graduated in 1977, the year in which he decided to leave for Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a professional writer.
His early experiences in Los Angeles were disappointing at all levels; Lived in a small and noisy apartment, the city was overwhelming, had bad professional experiences and the only job he found was to write the biography of apathetic and octogenarian film director famous for his bad films.
That terrible experience took him one day to write a letter to his parents, but not a conventional letter. It was a comic in which he narrated the hell he was going through.
This was the origin of what would be his first successful work: a series of comics entitled “Life in Hell”, which was initially published in the Los Angeles Readers weekly, of which Groening was editorial coordinator, and Which narrated the misadventures of a rabbit named Binky, an anthropomorphized, solitary and absolutely necrotized being, who soon enjoyed a certain success in the panorama of the American underground comix. Over the years, “Life in Hell” went from being edited in a small weekly to appearing in a total of 200 newspapers around the world, their stories being compiled into several books.
In 1985 Matt Groening received a call that changed his life. James L. Brooks, a reputed director and producer with several Oscars and Emmys under his belt, had read “Life in Hell”, and wanted Groening to come up with an idea to create animation shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. This hugely successful variety show was introduced by British singer and actor Tracey Ullman, looking for characters to turn them into the protagonists of the curtains that had to happen before and after the publicity.
According to the legend (Groening never denied it) it was fifteen minutes before his appointment with Brooks when the creator of The Simpsons sketched in a paper the five components of a family. It was the father (Homer), the mother (Marge), two daughters (Lisa and Maggie) and a son (Bart). Groening sought the names of his characters among the members of his family: Homer was the name of his father; Marge, his mother’s affectionate nickname, and Lisa and Maggie the names of their little sisters. Brooks and his team liked the idea and the forty-eight shorts he wrote began to be broadcast in 1988.
The executives of Fox, a television channel that emitted The Tracey Ullman Show, proposed to Groening and Brooks to turn these personages into the protagonists of a series that, at the moment, would have thirteen chapters of half an hour. As they say, the rest is history.
Since the 1989 release of The Simpsons, its success would only grow, with hundreds of chapters taking place. In fact, The Simpsons is a series of animated but directed to the adult public, in which Homer is a lazy of low lights, alcoholic for more signals, that works in a nuclear power plant, surrounded by the members of a very unconventional family.
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Marge, the mother, is a sentimental eccentric with a blue hairstyle whose shape resembles that of Frankenstein’s girlfriend and with cold blood that astonishes; Lisa, the eldest of the daughters, is the rare avis of the family nucleus, an intelligent person and even something pedantic, with emotional problems, that in no way resembles its parents; The little Maggie, almost a baby, is practical and peaceful in all her actions, and Bart, the mischievous Bart, is a little monster that sows chaos and bewilderment wherever he goes.
