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''Life in Hell'' was a weekly comic strip by Matt Groening, creator of ''The Simpsons'' and ''Futurama'', which was published from 1977 to 2012. The strip featured anthropomorphic rabbits and a gay couple. Groening used these characters to explore a wide range of topics about love, sex, work, and death. His drawings were full of expressions of angst, social alienation, self-loathing, and fear of inevitable doom. ==History== ''Life in Hell'' started in 1977 as a self-published comic book Groening used to describe life in Los Angeles to his friends.〔 It was inspired by his move to the city that year; in an interview with ''Playboy'', Groening commented on his arrival: "I got (Los Angeles ) on a Friday night in August; it was about a hundred and two degrees; my car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway while I was listening to a drunken deejay who was giving his last program on a local rock station and bitterly denouncing the station's management. And then I had a series of lousy jobs." In the comic book, Groening attacked what many young adults found repellent: school, work, and love. He described it as "every ex-campus protester's, every Boomer idealist's, conception of what adult existence in the '80s had turned out to be."〔 Groening photocopied and distributed the comic book to friends.〔 He also sold it for two dollars a copy〔 at the "punk" corner of the record store in which he worked, Licorice Pizza on Sunset Boulevard. ''Life in Hell'' debuted as a comic strip in the avant-garde ''Wet'' magazine in 1978, to which Groening made his first professional cartoon sale. The first strip, entitled "Forbidden Words", appeared in the September/October issue.〔 Popular in the underground, ''Life in Hell'' was picked up by the ''Los Angeles Reader'' (an alternative weekly newspaper where Groening also worked as a typesetter, editor, paste-up artist and music critic) in 1980, where it began appearing weekly. Then-publisher of the ''Reader'' Jane Levine said Groening arrived at editor-in-chief James Vowell's office one day, showing him his "silly cartoons with the rabbit with one ear." After Groening left, Vowell came out of his office saying, "This guy is gonna be famous someday."〔 The strip was frequently a serial, discussing various topics such as "Love is Hell", a 1984 "13-chapter miniseries" pontificating on love and relationships. In November of that year, Groening's then-girlfriend (and co-worker at the ''Reader'') Deborah Caplan offered to publish "Love is Hell" in book form. The book was an underground success, selling 22,000 copies in its first two printings. Soon afterward, Caplan and Groening left the ''Reader'' and put together the Life in Hell Co., which handled syndication and merchandising for Groening’s projects. ''Life in Hell'' reached the attention of Hollywood producer James L. Brooks, who received one strip—"The Los Angeles Way of Death" from 1982—as a gift from fellow producer Polly Platt. In 1985, Brooks contacted Groening with the proposition of developing a series of short animated skits, called "bumpers", for ''The Tracey Ullman Show''. Originally, Brooks had wanted Groening to adapt his ''Life in Hell'' characters for the show. Fearing the loss of ownership rights to his characters, Groening instead created an entirely new batch of characters, the Simpsons. As television began to place more demands on his time, however, Groening came to almost exclusively feature single-panel strips or 16-panel grids in which Akbar and Jeff exchange terse jabs. This later period also saw the increase of autobiographical strips, perhaps because Groening was influenced by this burgeoning trend in alternative comics. Television has also made the strip "safe enough for a number of newspapers to print", according to Groening, who claims that he has not "toned the strip down at all, other than no longer using profanity" as a concession to daily papers that carry the strip. On December 7, 1998 Groening registered the domain mattgroening.com to publish ''Life in Hell'' online; however, the Web site has remained in its "under construction" state since then, although Groening insists he'll "get around to it ... (he's ) ready to wade in on a regular basis." As of May 3, 2013, the domain has expired. Groening decided in 2007, in the wake of the 2006 U.S. election results, to write "Life Is Swell" above the comic instead of "Life in Hell". Though Groening had previously stated that he would never give up the comic strip, in 2009 he indicated that due to troubling times for print newspapers and constant involvement with ''The Simpsons'' and ''Futurama'', he would likely one day drop the strip. Three years later, Groening announced the strip's conclusion and the final new strip ran on June 16, 2012. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Life in Hell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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