“Life in Hell” is the comic strip Matt Groening wrote and drew prior to his work on “The Simpsons” following the introspections
of a cartoon rabbit called Bongo, his son Binky, his girlfriend and the identical fez and shorts wearing Akbar and Jeff.
The style of humour is similar to that of “The Simpsons”, though often far more childish in form and consistently more adult in its content. Unlike “The Simpsons” each comic is a one shot, one page, stand alone piece on a particular theme, stories rarely extend beyond a
single strip and are never continued over more than can be counted on a single hand., if you’ve read “Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life” or the little one page deals between stories in the Simpsons
comics books you’ll know the kind of thing to expect. I really ought to stop mentioning the Simpsons in this abstract, the comics have so many of their own qualities to recommend them, but it’s just such a convenient reference point to use, you can easily recognise that the one grew out of the other. Ah well, no more shall the S word pass my lips.
What I look for in an ideal comic is poetry that has been transferred and translated into pictures, “Life in Hell” doesn’t quite meet this criteria, but I’d hesitate to say that it fell short of it. It can be very moving, full of depressing insight and the kind of idea that you’ve thought a thousand times but never quite known how to put across, but communicated in such a punchy, offhand way that the material just doesn’t feel the same way it does when you normally come across it. The sort of book that gets you laughing on the outside and crying on the inside, just like mummy taught you to so all the other kids would like you, and never quite being sure what it is you’re feeling. It’s an existential crisis in cartoon form, that’s the best way I can describe it.
And now you see why I kept talking about the Simpsons…