Life In Hell

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening

Matt Groening ended his Life in Hell last week.

No, wait.  Sorry.  He ended his long-running comic strip Life in Hell last week.  I never read a lot of the strip, outside of the stuff I found in the collected editions in the kind of bookstores that never would've sold LIH had its creator not also been the co-creator of The Simpsons.  Indeed, if not for The Simpsons, I never would've known about it at all.  I was raised too far away (in both time and space) from the epicenters of the alt-weeklies that provided an understanding home for Binky, Bongo, Sheba, and Akbar and Jeff.  Even if I had been an adolescent/early-adult in the eighties in a town like Chicago or Seattle or L.A., I still probably wouldn't have been with-it enough to delve into them much.  Unless perhaps I stumbled upon them in some dusty comic book shop.  But who knows how long I would've stuck with them without a regular, pointed fix?  It's only now, as the age of those physical stores passes, that huge numbers of us are able to absorb this kind of darkly incisive and borderline subversive work as easily as we do (time and space are not excuses anymore).  And let us not forget how lucky we are for that. 

That's the beauty of the Internet, satisfying niches with large enough demand to make them shine for a brief, effervescent moment but are so small as to be unappealing to the publishers and producers that ran an ancient media era (and tenuously cling to their control still) and would therefore have hardly existed.  Life in Hell would go over just as well today as a web-comic as it did in the alt-weeklies 34 years ago.  The Oatmeals and the XKCDs that owe no small credit to Groening's sensibilities and influences would be endlessly compared to LIH, sometimes positively, sometimes not.  But LIH was accessible only to a few and at that time, that meant a kind of quality control you would never expect from mass-seen works, even if you sometimes got it.  If James L. Brooks hadn't been living and working in L.A. in the eighties (though I'm not sure where else an acclaimed film producer would be living), he probably never would have seen LIH.  In which case, he never would've called Groening in to pitch a TV show.  And without that pitch, we never would have gotten LIH's greatest legacy: the institution to which modern television and Internet humor in general owe their greatest debts. 

I have a lot to say about The Simpsons.  No, really, a lot.  That formless, word dump of a post about a hypothetical Justice League movie?  That was nothing compared to what I could write about the show that partly raised me (the first Tracy Ullman shorts aired just months after I was born).  There are very few topics you can throw at me that I can't somehow relate to one Simpsons moment or another.  I've established close, long-lasting friendships on an initial foundation of Simpsons quote-fests. The Golden Age--that's seasons 4 through 8--still informs sizable chunks of my philosophies on politics, religion, morality, writing, comedy, pop culture, and loads of other things I probably don't even realize.  And it's sad decline over the last decade-plus taught me the pitfalls of hero-worship and (along with the Cubs) how to love something while not letting that thing wholly define me, how to accept the imperfection of the things I love.  That probably sounds sad to people who weren't raised on The Simpsons.  And that's fine.  I'm sure whatever icon they were raised on is almost as good as mine. 

Those are thoughts better saved for their own post or posts.  There will always be more time for a show that's primed to go for a few seasons more, making for a psychologically satisfying 25... and no end in sight.  That's nine fewer than LIH had in its run.  I suppose that's something to think about, when I complain about how long The Simpsons has stretched itself.  But if I thought that the final episode of The Simpsons could buck the trend of the last ten seasons or so and be as true (and, therefore, poignant) to its original incarnation as the last edition of LIH was, then I probably wouldn't have a lot of reason to complain.