Matt Groening on how he got his start in alternative weekly newspapers

GROTH: What was your frame of mind during this period when you were engaged in all these wretched jobs? What were you looking for or striving to do or become?
GROENING: I was floundering. I didn't know exactly what it was I wanted to do. I was drawing little cartoons that I'd Xerox and staple together to send to my friends back in the Pacific Northwest. The name of my comic book was Life in Hell, which was mainly about my reaction to living in Los Angeles.
I was so depressed I didn't even know it. I guess I could have been called desperate except that it felt more like being stuck in a tar pit. In fact, I lived near the LaBrea Tar Pits. I walked by them every day.
GROTH: Symbolic geography.
GROENING: I didn't know what I was striving for. I thought possibly that I wanted to get into television or movies, but I didn't know where to begin. The walls of the studios were too high to climb over, and I just didn't know how to sell myself or even what to sell.
One thing I did know was journalism, so, in 1979, after year and a half lousy jobs, the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Reader were started at just about the same time. I did paste-up at the L.A. Weekly for its pilot issue, and showed the editor my comics. He wasn't impressed. Then I showed them to the editor of the Reader and he was impressed.
That was James Vowell, who hired me, first of all, to deliver newspapers, and then I got to be "Operations Director," which meant I was the third I person in the office: the publisher, the editor, and me. My job was to answer the phone, paste-up ads, type up anything that anybody called in about, and deliver the paper on Thursdays. I would drive around with 40,000 newspapers in the back of my car. I'd pick them up from the printing plant in Glendale and drive them from downtown L.A. to Malibu, dropping them off in bundles of 25 to 50 papers at stores and cafes and restaurants.