Groening grew up in Portland, Ore., with a father named Homer, a mother named Marge and sisters named Maggie and Lisa. In high school, he drew cartoons for the school newspaper until he was kicked off the staff. He ran for student body president on the "Teens for Decency" ("If You're Against Decency, What Are You For?") platform, and regretted his victory immediately. Later, Groening attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., which was known for its extremely liberal (no grades, no core requirements) liberal arts program. He befriended fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry and, finding no real authority to rebel against, he turned to cartooning in earnest.

Choosing Los Angeles because it was the place where a writer was most likely to be overpaid, Groening answered a "writer/chauffeur wanted" ad in the L.A. Times. Soon, he was driving an 88-year-old movie director around by day and ghost-writing his autobiography by night while living upstairs from a nocturnal rock lover (whose ceiling light he eventually dislodged with a plunging cinderblock). After graduating to a job at a record store called Licorice Pizza, whose gimmick it was to give away licorice to its customers (but whose employees often found themselves providing free licorice meals to the indigent instead), Groening began drawing "Life in Hell," a self-published, xeroxed comic book starring Binky, a lonely, alienated rabbit living in low-income Hollywood hell. Groening started sending the comic back home to friends in Portland in lieu of doleful letters about his miserable life. By installment No. 6, the list of recipients had grown from 20 to 500. "Life in Hell" was also sold in the punk corner of the store, where the punks sometimes ripped them up.

"I showed it to the editor of the Los Angeles Reader," he once told an interviewer, "and he hired me immediately -- to deliver newspapers." Groening worked at the Reader for six years, as a typesetter, editor, paste-up artist and rock critic. The paper offered him a cartoon strip in 1980, and, surprised, Groening accepted. "I never saw anything as crude as my stuff getting published," he has said.

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Six years later, after Groening penned an angry letter to the editor over the dismissal of a writer, the paper fired him by replacing his strip with another cartoonist's work while Groening was out of town on a book-signing tour for "Work Is Hell." Groening found out the way everybody else did, by picking up the paper. By then, however, "Life in Hell" was running in several other alternative weeklies, and soon the L.A. Weekly brought him on board. In 1987, Groening married fellow Weekly staffer Deborah Caplan. A few years earlier they had set up their own syndicate, ACME Features, to distribute the strip. A self-published anthology of "Love Is Hell" led to a deal with Pantheon Books, and eventually Caplan began running Life In Hell Inc. The goal of the company, she told Newsweek, was to "keep the machine of Matt going." (After 13 years of marriage, Caplan filed for divorce in March 1999, the same month as Groening's second show, "Futurama," premiered. They have two sons, Homer and Abe, now 13 and 10.)

In the mid '80s, renowned producer James L. Brooks approached Groening about using the characters from "Life in Hell" on a new show he was developing for comedian Tracey Ullman. Groening knew this would have meant losing ownership rights to his characters, so he decided to start from scratch. As Groening told Spin magazine. "Who knew if this TV thing would pan out?" Needless to say, it panned out.

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