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Matt Groening on Internet and Cartoons
prostoalex writes "Online Journalism Review posted an interview with Matt Groening, the mastermind behind The Simpsons and Futurama. Matt lists his favorite comic sites, talks about how Internet changed the cartoons, shares his view on Fox Network's idea to put Simpsons on cell phones, as well as his own plans for Web cartoons."
By which, of course, I mean I get all of my Futurama from KaZaA, rather than paying for them in any way.
It's been muttered about for years!
--is not to be confused with user #672982 - Bame Flait
Matt Groening is officially the last of the Web holdouts:
... I've reserved mattgroening.com. (Laughs) It's said "This Site Is Under Construction" for three years now. I'll get around to it.
MG: Um
I think he really took it down just before the interview, and it was full of Dancing Jesus GIFs.
"Ooh. They have the Internet on computers now."
-- Homer
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
Fox would C&D it faster than he could upload it.
Right Dennis?
Anyone who has owned a major Simpsons fan site should know what Im talking about....
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
They love! They share!
They share and love and share!
Love, love, love!
Share, share, share!
The Itchy and Scratchy Show!
My favorite web comics would probably have to be jerkcity, , and Leisure Town.
Anyone else really enjoy these? Most people either just think these are too offensive or just too far out there, but I think they're great.
Doh! Groening's Guide to Digital Cartooning
... I've reserved mattgroening.com. (Laughs) It's said "This Site Is Under Construction" for three years now. I'll get around to it. I know how disappointed I am when I go to a Web site and nothing has changed, and until I'm ready to wade in on a regular basis, I'm holding back.
Robert Abele
posted: 2003-01-09
Matt Groening's success as a cartoonist/animator may be the best counter we have to the old P.T. Barnum adage that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the public. From his early notoriety as the man behind the comic strip "Life in Hell" -- which he still produces weekly -- to his ongoing bastion of American satire "The Simpsons" and its skewed, sci-fi cousin "Futurama," Groening has shown that the comedy of dysfunction and disrespect can pull in a wide, devoted audience. But much has changed technologically in the 20-plus years since "Life In Hell" made its first appearance in an alternative weekly -- even in the 13 years since "The Simpsons" first revitalized and revolutionized animated television. Here, Groening offers his views on Web cartooning, digital vs. hand-drawn animation, and how technology has changed the way we view comedy.
Robert Abele: How has the Internet changed editorial cartooning?
Matt Groening: When I started "Life in Hell," I photocopied and stapled my own little issues of the comic book together and just handed it to people. I guess it was a zine, but this was before I knew of any other zines. The thing about the Internet is you have a forum for your stuff and you don't have to pay for Xeroxing and printing. You just give people your Web address and do a Web log or cartoon blog. You can read all sorts of cartoons on the Web. Sometimes they print them up as comic books. I think, why should I buy this? I can read it online. (Laughs) I think it's great. You can present yourself and live or die by your talents.
RA: Do you have favorite comics sites you go to?
MG: I love Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index on Slate.com. He's got cartoons lined up by theme, like baby dangling. You see the same idea done by different cartoonists. Then of course Lynda Barry, I check out marlysmagazine.com. I check out The Comics Journal Web site. There's a vituperative message board that amuses me. Also what the Internet does for me is it serves as a place to go to when something pops up in my mind. I go, "What about that comic book I read when I was ten years old and haven't seen since?" I have a fond memory of the Katzenjammer Kids, for instance, and yes, there is a Web site devoted to the Katzenjammer Kids.
RA: Do you feel the Web has allowed certain non-establishment cartooning to flourish?
MG: Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff out there. What I think is great, and it hasn't quite happened yet, is that entire archives of daily comic strips that have lasted for more than 50 years could be accessed on the Net. I imagine it will happen eventually, cause I fantasize about reading every installment of the great historic comic strips. Only the tip of the iceberg has been republished in book form. I think the major syndicates should do an archive. I'd pay.
RA: What steps have you taken with your own stuff in that regard?
MG: Um
RA: Regarding animation, how do you feel about the hand-drawn versus computer-drawn?
MG: I think the timing is off, generally, in digital animation. Everything is too busy. Too much going on at the same time. I like the meticulous timing of classic Warner Bros. cartoons. Now it's all about constant dazzle and movement and shifting and swaying. I find that wearisome.
RA: How has computer animation changed your TV shows?
MG: "The Simpsons" is still hand-drawn, it's just inked and painted digitally rather than paint slathered on cells. But actual pencil drawings are scanned into the computer. With traditional animation there is an amazing history where you have the mark of brilliant artists, and what we try to do, at least on "Futurama" and now on "The Simpsons," is have it look as much like traditional animation as we can.
RA: What do you feel is a big story in entertainment not being addressed right now?
MG: As somebody who's a glutton for entertainment, I'm amazed that I can listen to Indian pop music on the Internet from New Delhi radio stations. Yet there are whole regions of the world that I can't easily access [when it comes to] DVDs and television shows. I bought myself an all-region DVD player so I can watch British TV shows that aren't broadcast over here. But you can't play them here [without it]. I don't know if that's a phenomenon, but I think it's overlooked.
RA: Fox is looking to put "The Simpsons" on everyone's cell phones. How do you feel about that?
MG: I think the quality is pretty shoddy. (Laughs) I hope people don't watch the show on their cell phones.
RA: How do you think technological advances have changed the way we view entertainment?
MG: I've noticed that people's ability to process information is at a much higher velocity than it used to be. In looking at comedy, contemporary comedy is so much faster paced than it was even ten years ago. Watching classic sitcoms on television, I'm amazed at how leisurely paced they are. And certainly going back to older movies, like Laurel & Hardy, they're glacial. And although I dig them, it drives the young people I've forced them on -- for instance, my children -- right up the wall. (Laughs) I think that's a diminishing return, however, in the way commercial television is heading, the relentless insistence on holding your attention with crawls across the bottom and a little bug in the corner, and faster cuts. It just makes your eyes glaze over. What ultimately catches people's eye and holds their attention is something that surprises them, and there's nothing surprising about quick cuts anymore.
One of the neat things about the Web right now is you can get into it as an entertainment medium. You can go online and play games and interact with kids. I think it's going to be a generational thing. It will take over kid culture, and people over a certain age will be completely baffled by it. My kids are very excited about online gaming, and I'm fascinated with it as a new form of storytelling. But I'm more old-fashioned and I'm more interested in the printed word, so I like going online and reading people's personal opinions about the things they come across. However, I don't want anyone to e-mail them to me. (Laughs) Let me find them on my own.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Having not seen Futurama at all, I decided to rent the Season 1 & 2 DVD box sets..... All I can say is that i think the quality of the show is JUST as good as The Simpsons.
;)
I hope The Simpsons & Futurama never gets axed
Anyone know what the British TV shows he watches are ?
Here
Contains lots of simpsons trivia
That site seem to have been made for IE's poor understanding of CSS rules. :-(
Readable on Phoenix, but it looks awful, and it would be surprising if Mozilla was wrong here, with IE being the browser that hasn't had any major improvements to the parser for years.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm surprised he didn't say more about how godawful the quality of syndicated comics is these days. They're so bland and unentertaining that it hurts to even look at them. I think the best thing the internet has done for comics is to allow some really great offbeat stuff (like Diesel Sweeties) to exist and get some recognition. In a print-only world some really good, funny comics would never be seen by most people.
In fact, I think the great thing about the internet in general, and something that still hasn't been fully embraced, is the ability to self-publish. In days gone by it was only possible to self publish in a small geographic region without spending a lot of money. These days I can self publish media of many forms online with no muss or fuss, and people from all over the world can look at my writing, listen to my music, or watch my home videos(heh, right..).
I guess at the end of the day it's about empowerment. The internet empowers me by allowing me to find what I want, to separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm certainly better equipped to do it than the suits who only look for the lowest common denominator and play to that. Also, of course, it empowers the artist to not only be able to create and publish, but to reach a large global audience without the aid of a middle-man. Overall, it's the removal of a rather shoddy bidirectional filter.
On the flip side, of course, the internet has caused the downfall of the community artist, and it's only going to get worse. Around here, local alternative press is all but dead. I mean, who wants to read poorly printed dead tree stuff when you can go to poorly designed websites instead, and for no money? And since that's the mentality, why pay to print it at all? The sad thing is, of course, that local "scenes" will continue to fade away like this, especially as music and movies become more easy to retrieve online, and to publish. I guess it's the death of the local community in order to give birth to the global.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
http://dabel.no-ip.com:8080/fusk/listor/
I bought myself an all-region DVD player so I can watch British TV shows that aren't broadcast over here. But you can't play them here [without it]. I don't know if that's a phenomenon, but I think it's overlooked.
[Jack Valenti mode ON]
Well, not only his shows are unamerican but he now admits to being a criminal! Fortunately for us, the MPAA shall remind him about the laws of this country with a copy of the DMCA tattooed on his forehead. Our business model is endangered by such evil communists!
[Jack Valenti mode OFF]
Gee, serioulsy, finally someone from the USA complaining about this absurd DVD region coding. It's basically a requirement to have a region-free player if you enjoy films and shows that weren't produced in your region of the world (or don't appeal to the General Audience - foreign stuff mostly). It's easy for big US media corporations to flood the world with their (mostly) crappy productions, but smaller european, asian or wherever-they're-from companies have no way to penetrate the North-American market. Say you're in the USA and wish to watch that great British humour DVD your european cousin sent you for xmas, you have to get a region-free player and thus perform an illegal operation. Mind you, if you can play all 5 regions the MPAA will even consider you got at least 4 illegal players, since that's the MPAA math nowadays. The same problem occurs if you dare travelling with your laptop and wish to watch a DVD you rented locally. Where's the sticker saying "this laptop only for use in USA, Canada and selected nations"?
I've noticed some DVDs have no region coding at all, mostly the ones from small, indie film production companies. I've tried and they play in any player. I hope we'll see more of those, now that ppl really seem to get pissed off by that region coding thing. It's maybe not too much of a problem in North America, but the rest of the planet isn't in Zone One and thus can't access such DVDs, and has to wait for the local copyright owner to allow distribution of said DVDs to your country of residence (you can just forget about it most of the time). C'mon, if I buy a DVD, I want to be able to play it wherever I goddamn want it! Hey, with the actual system I can't even buy a DVD and offer it to my cousins in the USA... How crappy is that? Wait, they want to extend the system to audio now... Next thing will be news, maybe. Given the fascist manners of the actual US government, we ain't too far from it.
Time to practice civil disobedience again, eh...
Cheers,
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Let me guess, "This page is best viewed in Internet Explorer." Mm hm.
I followed the link for the web design company and checked out some of the other sites they designed. I guess I need to "upgrade my browser" because Mozilla nightlies aren't cutting edge enough for these guys.
[rant off]
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
an article on science has in it: "I was just driving in my car, when I finally worked out the last part of this equation on the color of the universe vs sex with dolphins!"
you say:
"...I was driving in my car" GAS PRICES ARE TOO HIGH WE SHOULDNT GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ!!!!
that is fucking off topic. Even ignoring that the DMCA is too long to be tatooed to a forhead
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
in an ongoing effort to fulfill the knead for additional hobbyists to mock, we offer: khartouns.
tell 'em robbIE.
I'm surprised that they didn't bring up how rampant TV-show trading had become on the internet. Simpsons is probably the hottest ticket out there, and Futurama is a distance behind that.
Nice to see him giving the whole "region free" thing a nice kick. He's an actual major voice in entertainment, so it'd just be wonderful if he wasn't pro-MPAA. Since I already have the Simpsons Boxed sets, I'd like to see the rest go "any region"
What you did was focus on this single throwaway comment, and extrapolate it to a rant about the ??AA et al. Normally this may be acceptable, except that virtually every slashdot article ends up with this sort of rant in; what's the point of different articles if the same arguments come up in all of them?
So, any comment that isn't about the major point of the article (in this case online cartoons) is offtopic. Save this reference up for an article about the MPAA, and say "Look, even MG uses multi-region!" but it ain't on-topic here.
Well.
/. and thats why he so openly said his site has been under construction for the past 3 years?
I think he will get to know about us now...
Wait... could it be he already knows about
errera hunamum ets
Has anyone seen Love in Hell online anywhere? I get one or two cartoons in it a month in Cleveland's "Funny Times" (delivered up to me in Boston) but I think it comes out weekly, so I'm missing a lot...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I noticed in the last episode, Special Edna, it appeared to me that they are starting to use some of the Futurama computer techniques. I noticed several busy backgrounds with parallax scrolling and subtle shadows on the characters. Did anyone else notice it or was it just me?
I noticed it at the IMAX movie and at the amusement park.
What, me worry?
"When Noel Tolentino finished the first issue of his zine Bunnyhop, he sent a copy to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, along with a gushing fan letter. For the magazine's cover, Tolentino had used Binky from Groening's Life in Hell comic, and he assumed his hero would appreciate the homage. Shortly thereafter, Tolentino and co-publisher Seth Robson received a cease-and-desist letter from Groening's lawyers. Lacking the resources to fight, the Bunnyhop publishers were forced to destroyed the covers on all remaining copies. Although Groening personally apologized to Tolentino for the suit, he later defended his actions in a Mother Jones interview (May 1999), saying, "If I don't vigorously pursue my copyright, then other people can steal it." Groening did not comment on The Simpsons' habit of parodying everything from A Clockwork Orange to The Cosby Show. "
Why Matt, Why?
www.illegal-art.org
Actually, if you pay attention to the show, the websites they mention frequently really exist.
;-) ) because it wasn't running any obvious services, it did exist, which makes me wonder if it was deliberate or if the show's author's didn't consider that a randomly selected IP address stands a pretty good chance of existing now-a-days.
The one that leaps to mind is WhatBadgersEat.com used in the episode where the town is split in half and Homer is the mayor of the sucky half.
The TV show Alias set up a Followers of Rambaldi fake site, which I've seen but may not be working now. (Much info is on this fan site.) Also in alias they once mentioned an IP address directly, and while I couldn't determine what that computer was (legally
And I once located the source information for a quick display on the Egyptian god Seth used on Daniel Jackson's screen in Stargate: SG-1. It was actually from a wierd site that I assume is info for a role-playing game, though it gave no hint that the site didn't really believe it and it's sometimes hard to tell... I often wonder if the web site was told what use their text was put to.
Just wondering if anyone has read some of the stuff Matt did on textfiles.com? Not really sure if it was him, but theres some stuff there by a guy called Matt Groening (or however its really spelt).
Just love that stuff about why should anyone buy comic books if they can read them online. So Matt won't be expecting anyone to be buying any of the Simpsons comic books once I buy a few, scan them and stick them online?
Don't know how many of you have seen this, but it is funny. Apparently some animators made some drawings of the Simpsons characters doing scenes from pulp fiction.Simpson Pulp Fiction
'You can go online and play games and interact with kids.'
hmmm. doh!
I expected to go on there and find Matts coolest comics etc, but they are all editorial ones and not so good ones.
I also hoped he'd managed to stick Life Is Hell online somewhere. Being in the uk, you don't get it distributed over here, like _at all_.
I'll just have to put forward my daily comics browse... www.dilbert.com (of course, but both Luann and Get Fuzzy on there are good ones). www.goats.com is getting too infrequent for me. I love the bizarreness which is www.achewood.com and the www.wigu.com is one of the cutetest, and occasionally _extremely_ dark comics I've read.
From last night's show, has anyone emailed it yet?
Only a fool misspells "sentences".