AVC: When you were doing shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show, did you worry about extending The Simpsons to episode length someday?
MG: Not at all. The characters were created with the idea that they would become a TV series. It was on The Tracey Ullman Show for three years. The very first season, I just kept the characters in the house and tried to figure out how to do quick sight gags in the 15 seconds I had for each segment. Then I gradually moved them outside in the second season; then I added more characters in the last season before it went on the air as a series. Krusty The Clown and Itchy & Scratchy were all part of the Tracey Ullman shorts. That was very much inspired by SCTV, with all the characters in Melonville interacting. And I thought that with an animated show, we could not only show our main characters, but also show the products they were consuming and the TV shows they were watching and all their various neighbors and co-workers. It turned out to have gone beyond even my expectations, to where we have 300 or so regular secondary characters.
AVC: Did you have any notion that people would embrace the whole Simpsons universe the way they have?
MG: I thought it would be successful, but I didn't realize that it would be quite as big as it turned out.
AVC: Is it true that James L. Brooks originally wanted to adapt Life In Hell for The Tracey Ullman Show, but you refused because you would have had to relinquish your rights to the characters?
MG: No, it was that I had this good gig going with my weekly comic strip, and I was actually afraid that if the animated cartoon didn't work out, there would be a taint on my weekly comic-strip job. So I created The Simpsons on the spot, thinking that if it did fail, I could just go back and draw rabbits, and no one would be the wiser.
AVC: Do you think a Life In Hell cartoon would have taken off the way The Simpsons did?
MG: I think human beings probably resonate with audiences more than bunnies, but who knows? One of these days, I'll get around to animating Life In Hell. I still draw it every week, been doing that for the last 25 years. I'm just now putting together, for the first time, Life In Hell toys. Yes, I'm finally selling out.
AVC: When you started out with Life In Hell, it seemed very directly autobiographical. Was it a way for you to work out your feelings about Los Angeles?
MG: It's a little bit about me, a lot about the things my friends were going through. Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I'm in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline is very negative and sour. If I'm in a very bad mood, the comic strip starts out in a sour, negative way, and the punchline is generally a positive switch. That's the secret, if you want to know what's going on behind the script.
AVC: Aaron McGruder says the comic strip is a dying art form. Do you agree?
MG: I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it's as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium. They're printing the comics so small that most strips are just talking heads, and if you look back at the glory days of comic strips, you can see that they were showcases for some of the best pop art ever to come out of this country.
AVC: Your Wikipedia entry says that when you moved to Los Angeles, you worked as a biographer for an elderly director. Is that true, and if so, what was it like?
MG: Yes, I worked for a 93-year-old guy. Calling him a movie director is probably a little exaggerated. It's true, he directed a few B-Westerns, but he was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy in various guises. He didn't have much of a career.
AVC: So how did you become his biographer?
MG: There was an ad in the Los Angeles Times: "Wanted: Writer/Chauffeur." [Laughs.] And I'd seen Billy Wilder's movie Sunset Boulevard, so I knew what I was in for. I got the job.
AVC: Was he a Norma Desmond-like figure?
MG: Well, a little bit. I remember buying him his nightly steak at the Gourmet Chalet on the corner of Sunset and Fairfax, and paying more for the piece of meat than I made in two days.
AVC: Did you ever think about substituting a cheaper piece of meat and pocketing the difference?
MG: No, he was pretty much like Mr. Burns, which I guess makes me Smithers. [Laughs.] He would shuffle along beside the grocery cart that I pushed. Then again, this was one of those high-end grocery stores, so it was one of those mini grocery carts, which makes you feel like a fool.
AVC: Why did you move to Los Angeles in the first place?
MG: I went to college in Olympia, Washington, a fine little progressive school called Evergreen State College, state-funded, no grades, no hard courses. I highly recommend it to all self-disciplined creative weirdoes.
AVC: It sounds like a hippie utopia.
MG: Yes, and it still is. When it came time to leave, there were three possible destinations: Seattle, which is where most of my pals went; New York, which was where the rest of them went; and Los Angeles. And I just thought Los Angeles would be the warmest, so that's where I headed.
AVC: There was no ulterior motive?
MG: I had a plan to try to see if I could sneak my stuff into pop culture and subvert it from the belly of the beast, and so I did. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I'm pretty satisfied with the way it turned out.
AVC: You wrote a music column for the L.A. Reader back in the early days.
MG: I was given a music gossip column to write, and I didn't know any music gossip, so I found it very annoying to interview rock stars. But even more annoying than rock stars were would-be rock stars—that is, people who were in struggling bands, but who were acting with arrogance befitting the stardom they so richly craved. And then I was writing about bands and music that didn't have wide appeal to my audience.
AVC: So you have fairly obscure musical tastes?
MG: Yes. [Laughs.] I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.
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