Life in Hell

Hardcore Simpsons fanatics will know that Matt Groening cut his teeth drawing a cult classic newspaper comic called Life in Hell. In fact, he famously intended to pitch an adaptation of the comic to Fox before panicking about losing the rights to his creation and coming up with his life's work on the spot.

Unfortunately, the comic ended in 2012 and its book collections are long out of print, but some lovely Tumblr user has been kind enough to scan and archive many of them on this blog.

And boy, are they wonderful.

It's a wonderful strip, and shows a lot of hallmarks of Groening's sense of humor that would later come through in The Simpsons. It's sharply satirical ("How can we consider letting you out when you haven’t realized how much you deserve being in there?"), edgy ("Will Life in Hell offend me?" "We'll do our best"), and full of charming character designs. It's fascinating to see what Groening was working on when he wasn't busy changing TV comedy forever.

As a lifelong comics fan and amateur cartoonist, I think that the Life in Hell archive blog is one of my new favorite websites.