From The Comics Journal 114, February 1987

Rob Rodi on Matt Groening's Life In Hell

Comics have enough trouble coming up with convincing portraits of adult human beings; it may be asking too much to expect them to come within a country mile of an accurate reflection of our collective childhood. In comic books, only John Stanley, in his classic run of Little Lulu spanning three incredible decades, captured anything of the maddening, magical, irrational grandeur of just being a kid.

Stanley's vision has never been matched by any comic book creator. But if we expand our scope to include newspaper strips, he's not only been equalled, but surpassed. Two West Coast-based former "underground" strips, Matt Groening's Life in Hell and Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek have been picked up by the Acme Features Syndicate, which ideally means they'll be appearing more places around the country to the general betterment of mankind. (I've been reading them for years in the Chicago Reader, a free weekly paper that's generally dumped on city street-corners to be picked up by the avid and the curious alike.)

By far the bleaker--and the more conventionally funny-of the two is Life in Hell. Groening's characters are rabbits, working in the time-honored tradition of anthropomorphizing animals to make general comments on the human condition. The strip is significant in that Groening does not confine himself to identification with one central character; instead of an Everyman, he has both an Everyman and an Everyboy. Binky, the adult rabbit, is the receptacle for all his tortured wisdom about love, sex, work, and responsibility, while Bongo, the younger rabbit (Binky's illegitimate, one-eared son-"even more alienated than Binky" as Groening describes him) is Groening's focus for all of his anguished recollections of childhood traumas: humiliation by authority, the tyranny of public education, the oppression of independent thought, and the reduction of selfhood by parental figures-in short, the sheer helplessness of being a kid in a world of self-obsessed, power-mad, uncaring grown-ups.

In its early days, the strip dealt mainly with Binky's chaotic lunge through adult life, and there are two trade-paperback collections of those strips whose titles trumpet their prevailing themes: Love is Hell and Work is Hell. But Groening's next collection is to be called School is Hell, and judging from the last year of or so of his work, it's bound to be even more popular than its predecessors. After all, Groening's looks at love and the workplace were of the desperate, "Doesn't-life-suck?" variety whose humor is chiefly derived from how accurately he pinpoints our everyday desperations. Strips like "How to Kill 8 Hours a Day and Still Keep Your Job" brilliantly depict the appalling banality of modern life. Bong's trials in school, however, while sharing that flavor of painful recognition, do so with some gratifying distance. Even so, there's still sadness in these strips, as if this sort of ignorant mistreatment of kids is still going on, and will always go on. Of course, we, the readers, survived it (we're here, aren't we?), and we can look back and laugh, but there's a sense of loss that makes the laughter choke just a little. Human foibles and failings have rarely seemed so tragically, irresistibly comic.

Groening began this new "Bongo" period with an eight-part-series (similar to his earlier multi-part looks at love and work) entitled "My 5th Grade Diary." He announces, "Most of us have forgotten what it was like to be in school. I took notes," then launches into a virtual litany of petty humiliations and defeats that young Matt (as Bongo) undergoes within the formal education system. His hopelessness is devastating; "I wish I could beat up everyone who got me in trouble," he fantasizes at one point when his fate seems most unjust, "but I would just get in more trouble."

And yet the series is undeniably funny. You find yourself laughing at things the way you laughed at them as a kid. Throughout the series, Groening insists that the text is indeed taken from his own 5th grade diary ("Yes this is true," he says at the beginning of Part three, "except the names"), and the situations are so familiar that you believe him.

May 11, 1965. Today Spike got in trouble 'cause when we were watching a movie on Brazil they showed this picture of some pigs. Spike said, "There's Francine." Francine is real fat and Mr. Shute got real mad...'cause we saw a movie yesterday called "Other's People's Feelings." ..It was about this girl named Judy who had a bottle of perfume. When she went to school a boy bumped into her and she dropped the perfume all over the floor. Then he called her Stinky all the time. Finally she starts crying. Right during class. Then the stupid narrator says, "What should Judy have done?" Most everybody said pound the boy.

We get to know a full cast of characters in the course of this narrative, and they're characters we've all met before, in our own lives; Spike, the unstoppable, unrepentant ruffian and class cut-up; Francine, the token girl who gets into trouble; and, of course, Mr. Shute, the martinet teacher whose face wears a permanent scowl and whom Bongo detests with the intensity and focus of a laser-beam. When, at the end of the series, Bongo reiterates his hatred of Mr. Shute one last time and then races into summer with a cry of, "I AM FREE!!!!!," the reader's relief is inexpressible and genuine.

But while Bongo may be out of school, it's still in session for Groening, and his attempts to exorcise it take uncanny forms. Nothing it seems, is too trivial to call forth. He seems to remember, word-for-word, every playground parody song ever invented, from "Jingle Bells/Batman smells/Robin laid an egg" to "The Addams Family started/When Uncle Fester farted" and so on. Of course he recalls the most popular kid's parody song of all time, "Whistle while you work/Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie/Now it doesn't work," a carry-over from the second World War which was big even when I was in grade school in the early '60s. Groening transcribes the verse and adds the direction, "Repeat until spanked," and this seems to be his philosophy regarding his strips as well; he seems to be expecting someone in authority to stop him at any moment, before he gets it all down on paper. He's revealing too much of the natural anarchy of kids, and it often seems capital-s Subversive.

At his best, he's either celebrating this natural, Rabelaisian humanism in children or detailing the ways in which institutions seek to strip them of it; sometimes, however, he's too much the raconteur to fully succeed. For example, in one strip, "Teacher's Guide to Words That Make Kids Snicker," his point of view is lost. An oblivious teacher sends her class into fits of giggling when she says things like, "Perhaps the greatest enemy of the squid is the wily sperm whale." and "Who can tell us if there are rings around Uranus?" For awhile it seems like a mere exercise in progressive humor- how many of these double-entendres can he think off-until the last panel, when the teacher says, "As the Beatles once sang, 'All you need is love," and Bongo snickers into his hands. Well, what's that mean? Has Groening been blaming the kids all along for finding filth where none existed? Is he pointing a finger at society for making "sperm" and "anus" dirty words to be snickered at, and by extension making "love" the dirtiest word of all? And, most important of all, does it really matter? Is it enough that he observes, or must he analyze as well?

It depends on his goals, and how you define the role of cartoonist in today's world. For some people, and I think Groening is one of them (Lynda Barry too), anarchy seems the only responsible reaction to just about anything authority happens to dictate (Groening has"lampooned the Reagan administration and the Supreme Court), and what better vehicle for anarchy than a medium like the comic strip, which is so resoundingly popular, yet so institutionally ignored? So when Groening at- tacks, his targets should be evident.

To be fair, they usually are. But in dealing with childhood, the targets are often less decipherable. And even when they aren't, affection sometimes tempers outrage. For instance, when Groening relates "Lies My Older Brother and Sister Told Me." the shameless, blatant advantage his teenage siblings take of his gullibility is, granted, both hysterically funny and morally bankrupt. "There's some new toys for you down in the basement," they tell him. "You should go down there." He balks; "But last time you shut the door and turned off the lights." Without blinking, they reply, "This time we won't." The crisis is real, but in retrospect ridiculous. The strip is one of Groening's best, recalling so many of the maddening trials of childhood, and it has one of his characteristic payoffs: as adults, his brother and sister can't remember having done any of these terrible things to him.

In similar vein, Groening went hog-wild presenting three separate strips chock-full of "Parental Brain Twisters" (such as, "You feel bad? How do you think I feel?" and, "Well, you broke it. Now are you satisfied?"), and he occasionally dips into the deep, inexhaustible well of pre-adolescent intellectual inquiry ("Are there cavemen in heaven?") and theory ("If you eat a bunch of fizzies, then drink a glass of water, you will explode"). It seems that his interest in the mechanics of the child's mind is tireless; and since what we experience at that crucial stage never leaves us, since it predetermines every phobia and fantasy we have now, perhaps he's right on. Certainly his work bears this out. Groening's "Bongo" period has been one of his richest and one of his most poetic.

But where can he go from there, you might ask? l hesitate to say; but judging from two recent Life in Hell strips, the answer seems to be even earlier into our histories. The strips are entitled "What to Name the Baby," and "How to Understand Your Baby's Gibberish." Of course, if he keeps regressing, eventually he'll get back to the moment of conception, which will bring him back to the sex act, and he can begin the whole insane, arcane cycle over again. And this time, you'll be reading, won't you?