Matt Groening

NEWS CORP. NEWS

fox newsLast week’s Simpsons episode featured a Fox News helicopter adorned with the slogan “Not racist, but #1 with racists.” Everybody liked this joke so dang much, especially smug schmucks who proudly buy coffee mugs that say “FAUX NEWS” on them, so The Simpsons just had to do it again this week. If you haven’t seen the show after they went high-def, they now have a “cloud gag” where something WACKY flies by show’s title, destroying Matt Groening’s original intention of it being a transition from the real world to the Simpsons’ world. This time, another Fox News helicopter flew by, with the slogan “Unsuitable for Viewers Under 75.”

But if you’re too cool to watch TV shows on TV at their correct bat-time, and opted instead to watch it Monday morning on Hulu (which is directly helping keep the show on the air, so knock it off), you didn’t get to see this ever-so-precious sight gag; instead you got Homer as King Kong (one of those depressing “hey guys, remember this thing from back when we were funny?” callback gags for the “old school” fans).

Blogs like Mediaite and Think Progress were immediately suspicious: did Fox News, which according to the liberal hivemind is responsible for Everything Bad In The World, exert their vast influence within News Corporation to force their corporate cousins The Simpsons and Hulu censor a mildly critical jape at their expense??? Is Fox News leading an assault on comedy??? Is Bill O’Reilly going to tear out Doonesbury from everybody’s newspaper???

No, says The New York Times‘ ArtsBeat blog, which actually bothers to ask the show’s producers about these things:

The “Simpsons” producers could not let that remark stand, so they rushed their second Fox News joke into Sunday’s episode — so late in the production process that the gag could only be inserted into the version shown in North America, but not into versions shown in foreign markets or on the Internet.

I remember feeling super-special when I watched “Trilogy of Error” for the first time and noticed that the closed captioning was occasionally different from the spoken dialogue, because they had changed jokes at the last minute, after the episode had already been sent to closed-captioning factory (or whatever, I don’t know it works). I was getting bonus jokes! This silly non-conspiracy is just the same thing, just on a larger scale. So while it’s tempting to believe Fox News, the Koch brothers, and Satan are all cruising around in a Halliburton blimp, snatching up people in their tractor beams and throwing them down the memory hole because they criticized Sarah Palin’s choice of eyewear on their Tumblr, it’s important to remember The Simpsons hasn’t been controversial in about a decade. [ArtsBeat]

BART ART, MY TWO CENTS

If you were one of the people watching The Simpsons last night (sucker), you may have noticed something a little different about the opening sequence!

The “couch gag,” if one could call it that, was storyboarded and directed by the pseudonymous Britain street artist known as Banksy, whose distinctive graffiti has shown up across the UK and the US, and whose work has been auctioned off for millions of dollars to limousine liberal luminaries like Brangelina.

Showrunner-for-life Al Jean told the New York Times he seeked out the ostensibly underground (despite having a publicist) “art terrorist” and asked him, via a series of messengers, if he’d do the opening, later receiving the storyboards without ever meeting the mystery man. Although 5% was cut out by request of Fox Broadcast & Standards, Jean insists the final product was as close as possible to Banksy’s original intention.

The response has been enormous – Banksy became a “Trending Topic” on Twitter last night (which is, like, super-important and stuff) and there are currently hundreds of news stories about it – which I’m sure makes up for the 29% decline in ratings from last week. It’s to quantify these things, but I think it’s safe to presume this will get more attention than other recent Simpsons “viral” stunts, from the godawful Ke$ha thing to the Itchy & Scratchy parody of Koyaanisqatsi (in the old days, The Simpsons usually generated buzz with actual episodes instead of context-free YouTube clips, but I guess that’s the way things are now in the New Media Landscape).

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BONGO BEAT

bongo logoBongo Comics, the independent comic book company owned by Matt Groening, has finally joined the 1990s and will launch a website tomorrow, which will feature news items, blog posts, and, most amazing of all, a list of “all Matt Groening’s comic-book, trade-book, and calendar publications.” Bongo, which publishes Simpsons, Futurama, and NewsRadio comics, has owned the domain www.bongocomics.com since 1996 but until now only used it for e-mail purposes.

Still no word on the long-dormant MattGroening.com, which has been “under construction” since 2000. [The Beat]

BONGO BEAT

JASON HONOTE: This manga review is courtesy of our news partner, AnimeJihad.

バートシンプソンシリーズはMatsumoto Groeningにボンゴコミックスから発行され、通常のシンプソンズのコミックスよりも見た目若い読者のために意図。それはやや時代遅れのリトルルルのような過去の無害な少年漫画です。私は間違いなく、カバー、特に影響を見ることができます。この問題は、漫画の他の領域、それぞれ特定の描画スタイルシンプソンズの世界に適応し、それを様々な多くのことから多くのアーティストが含まれます。

SERGIO ARAGONES最初の話は、”サウンドとフラリー、”Carol Layに待ち伏せるサロンの漫画を行うために使用さによって行われた。その中で、バートはコミック擬音語のすべての種類 – ドンマーティン敬意を表し、おそらく書き留めばなりませんか？物語は継続ボンゴコミックス商標です私の趣味のための少し余りにメタ漫画でした。

GILBERT HERNANDEZ2番目の物語は、”マギーのベビーベッドは、”Sergio Aragonesのバートは、ステートフェアで楽しむことができるので、マギーは彼女のおむつをうんちが含まれます。それが面白い漫画だったし、マギーはショーがあるのを忘れ、実際の赤ん坊のように扱わ見ていいですね。

“ホーマーシンプソンは：チックマグネット”Gilbert Hernandezはラブ＆ロケッツによるホーマーは雛をたくさん集めについて奇妙な話でした。私はGilbert適応をoverbites彼のおなじみのスタイルを楽しんだ。プロットは少し（奇妙な関係漫画はまだありません再び）ですが、Gilbert’sにの対話タスクに上昇、私は特にビキニの女性とのシーンが好きです。

“おびえたTentlessは”かなり忘れChris YamberにとMike Kazalehのバックアップの話です。私はKazalehのインクのスキルが好きです。

[MONTHLY MANGA REVIEW: BART SIMPSON #52]

EXCLUSIVE

The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don’t count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there’s been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:

Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):

Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for “The Simpsons”? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[…]
Matt_G “The Simpsons” originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called “The Mean Little Kids” starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.

Interview with Robert William Kubey, published in Creating Television: Conversations with the People Behind 50 Years of American TV (Late 1991):

How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?

I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.

Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?

Yes, but they’ve been transformed.

Why didn’t you leave Bart as an adolescent?

TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.

Was Bart at the center all along?

Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

SUDDENLY SIMON

sam simonFrom a British tabloid article about WWE wrestler guy Glenn “Kane” Jacob:

One of Kanes [sic] finest hours was the 2001 Royal Rumble where he went an hour before sailing over the top. He remembers the occasion fondly, because he nearly killed celebrity guest Drew Carey.

“Two things I remember the most hitting Honkey with the guitar, I should have done the shuffle!! The Drew Carey deal was funny too.”

“He was there with Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, a friend of his and we were in the locker rooms, I was showing him what we were going to do with the chokeslam deal.

I grabbed him and picked him up and Matt starts yelling stop stop stop, and I looked up. The roof was so low I nearly put Drew Careys [sic] head through the ceiling. I almost became infamous for killing Drew Carey before he got out there.”

I am 99% certain that either Kane or the tabloid confused Groening with former executive producer Sam Simon, who was the 2004 World Boxing Manager of the Year and a producer, writer and director for The Drew Carey Show. That guy just can’t get credit for anything, can he? [Daily Star]

BONGO BEAT, THE INSIDE SCOOP

Lawyers for 20th Century Fox take copyright infringement of The Simpsons very seriously. During the early 1990s, lawyers were sent to vendors who sold bootleg Bart Simpson t-shirts. Towards the end of the decade, many Simpsons sites received cease & desist orders for the grave crime of hosting framegrabs. More recently, Fox lawyers managed to take down a series of Simpsons video parodies featuring OJ Simpson. Even creator Matt Groening, who has a collection of bootleg Simpsons merchandise, personally dispatches lawyers from time to time.

Ben Jones, an artist in the art collective Paper Rad, has recieved many acclaims for his work; Paper Rad’s avant-garde comics often appear in hip indie comics anthologies such as The Best American Comics and Kramer’s Ergot. Following the massive Kramer’s Ergot 7, of which Groening was a fellow contributor, Jones was asked to contribute to the upcoming Treehouse of Horror comic book. According to a 2003 Comics Reporter profile, this would not be his first Simpsons comic:

Effective as illustration, Ben Jones’ comics demand reading. As noted by several of his fellow cartoonists, on no planet should a comic about Simpsons characters Homer and Moe taking a walk, getting high and skinny dipping (“Ho and Mo”) work on any level for a single second, let alone be funny and affecting and a touch profound. In the Alfe stories, Jones’ most frequent recurring feature and among the first comics the artist tried to sell through Million Year Picnic, Jones uses a sizable, extremely odd cast to pay tribute to simple pleasures and the way kindness and patience act as buttresses against life’s intolerable cruelties. Jones is to the idea of friendship what the cartoonist Jack Jackson is to Texas history, its primary comics chronicler.

Additionally, The Simpsons is a recurring motif in Paper Rad’s ouvre, as evidenced by their website.

Yet, despite such egregious acts of copyright infringement, Jones and Paper Rad do not appear to have been punished for their actions. As far as I can tell from a Google search, the art collective has never received a cease & desist letter from Fox’s attorneys. In fact, with his contribution to Simpsons Comics, Jones appears to have been rewarded for his copyright infringement!!! He is being endorsed, at least implicitly, by Bongo Comics, Groening, and Fox, who are apparently turning a blind eye to his wholesale appropriation of their intellectual property. Is Jones receiving preferential treatment simply for being a celebrity? Is this really the message Bongo Comics wants to be sending to infringers?