Matt Groening

Matt Groening
Matthew Abraham Groening (pronounced GREY-ning) is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell and television series The Simpsons , Futurama and Disenchantment. Groening made his first professional cartoon sale of Life in Hell to the avant-garde Wetmagazine in 1978. The cartoon is still carried in 250 weekly newspapers. The Simpsons is his most successful subject, being the longest running American sitcom, beating the Western ''Gunsmoke. Life in Hell'' caught the attention of James L. Brooks. In 1985, Brooks contacted Groening with the proposition of working in animation for the FOX variety show The Tracey Ullman Show. Originally, Brooks wanted Groening to adapt his Life in Hell characters for the show. Fearing the loss of ownership rights, Groening decided to create something new and came up with a cartoon family, the Simpsons, and named the members after his own parents and sisters — while Bart was an anagram of the word brat. The shorts would be spun off into their own series: The Simpsons, which has since aired over 600 episodes in 29 seasons. In 1997, Groening got together with David X. Cohen and developed Futurama, an animated series about life in the year 3000, which premiered in 1999. After four years on the air, the show was canceled by Fox in 2003, but Comedy Central commissioned 16 new episodes from four direct-to-DVD movies. In June 2009, Comedy Central ordered 26 new episodes of Futurama, to be aired over 2 seasons. His advice to beginning cartoonists is to not care about what other people think and just try to make yourself laugh. He said that if he did not think up The Simpsons, he would probably be in a tire shop, drawing doodles of his boss on the break room wall. Groening has won 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, ten for The Simpsons and one for Futurama as well as a British Comedy Award for "outstanding contribution to comedy" in 2004. In 2002, he won the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for his work on Life in Hell. In Some Simpsons Comics, he gives himself a fake title, like Big Daddy (Taming Your Wild Child), Cartoonist Gone Wild (Bart's Beard), and Former Heartthrob (Faking the Band).