We traded them, quoted them, pushed them on strangers. These were the sacred texts of my college years. Beginning in 1986, themed collections appeared in bookstores with titles that perfectly encapsulated the strip's gleefully defiant defeatism - Love is Hell, Work is Hell, School is Hell, Childhood is Hell, etc. Meanwhile, the Life in Hell strip took off. Groening, wisely, knew that doing so would relinquish his ownership of the characters, and pitched a series of cartoons based on his own family instead: Keep the overbites, the dread, the satiric impulse, but lose the rabbit ears and add a bit more heart (Brooks' influence). Brooks asked Groening if he wanted to turn his scribbly, scathingly satiric strip starring anthropomorphic rabbits with overbites and existential dread into a series of animated shorts to be featured on The Tracey Ullman Show. I put it to you that if Groening's weekly alt-comic Life in Hell, which ended last Saturday after 1,669 installments, had given the world nothing else but "At night, the ice weasels come," it would have been enough.īut of course, over the course of its 34-year syndicated lifetime, it gave the world much, much more.
Say that last bit out loud: At night, the ice weasels come. "Love," wrote Matt Groening, "is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, trapping you underneath. Detail from the final Life In Hell (click to see the full strip).
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