Thanks to a couple of other comic artists I admire stumping on his behalf, lately I’ve been revisiting and reconsidering Matt Groening’s cartoons. Not his television cartoons, mind you, but his pen-and-ink ones, which feature a rotating cast of doomed and bickering rabbits and have been appearing in alternative papers since the early ’80s under the name Life in Hell.

I’ve gone back to The Simpsons, too, but the episodes I’ve rewatched have for the most part confirmed my earlier opinion of the show as complacent, predictable in its unpredictability, far from pointed in its social commentary, and comforting and permissive where it wants to come off as damning and critical. I had feared I would find the same schmaltzy problems in Groening’s comics work. It seems that, in the years since Toronto’s NOW ceased publishing the strip, and in the absence of any online presence or new print collections, I’d allowed Life in Hell to become unduly blackened by the Simpsons associations sullying my recollection of it.

I’d also started accepting much of the received wisdom I’d hear about the strip — that it lost its bite after Groening went commercial (it didn’t), that it looked xeroxed or repetitive or lazy or favoured text over art (well, it does, but those aren’t bad things), and that regular characters Akbar and Jeff kind of suck (um, okay, so they kind of do). But talking recently with Lynda Barry, and reading Sammy Harkham’s latest volume of Kramers Ergot, had me ready to approach Groening’s work from more sympathetic, less dogmatic directions. Reading Life in Hell in the specific contexts those two cartoonists provide, I’ve been rediscovering an incisive, authentically bilious strip carried off in distinctive visual shorthand. I value the strip not a little, and have ended up with not a little to say about it: this will be the first of three posts I’ll devote to Life in Hell over the next week or so. This time out, we’ll start with my latest “in” to Groening’s work—namely, his Kramers Ergot page.

By rights, having Groening contribute to the monolithic new Kramers anthology, the current standard-bearer for lit- and art-comix, shouldn’t come across as such a bold move. The man’s underground pedigree, after all, is unimpeachable—graduate of the early ’80s L.A. DIY scene, groundfloor of the alternative weeklies movement, buddy-buddy with avant-hero and Rozz Tox mastermind Gary Panter—but I still can’t recall another venue that’s placed him in such direct dialogue with other cartoonists (barring Barry’s Best American Comics volume).

By inviting Groening to fill one of the 16×21 inch Kramers pages, editor Harkham encourages us to view Groening simply as a cartoonist among cartoonists, a practitioner of the art, rather than as some anomalous success story, or Life in Hell as another bit of toilet-reading sandwiched between Heathcliff and Love Is… on the bookstore Humour shelf. In these pages, Groening numbers among the oldest of the old guard, and if he’s a fresher hand perhaps than your ’60s underground icons like Kim Deitch, he’s still roughly a contemporary of your ’80s alternative stars like Jaime Hernandez, both of whom appear here too. Ranking Groening alongside such esteemed peers, as well as the usual Kramers upstarts and radicals, is an editorial decision that bespeaks a level of respect and admiration that almost dares readers to quibble with it.

That said, Groening’s Kramers page isn’t exactly a stand-out, though its gargantuan dimensions do help reveal several of his strengths. Entitled “Life in Heaven”—and not a strip so much as a type of map he occasionally turns to, where he charts out a brutalising territory of certain defeat his characters nevertheless must pointlessly cross—Groening depicts “The Road to Success” in agonising, soul-crushing detail. (Obstacles: unconscious self-sabotage, undiagnosed depression, general angst, and, uh, bad clams. Instructions: Run Til You Die. Yow.)

Seeing this entry in the Life in Hell saga in the midst of strips by other cartoonists—most in colour, and either classically cartooned, or considerably art-damaged—made me realise just what an affront to the eye Groening’s strips can be. Which isn’t to say they’re ugly; this Kramers page, like other Groening cartoons, is composed with a certain easy grace. Rather, it’s to remark upon the way that Groening’s art is at odds with itself, his thin and simple lines opening up generous white regions at the same time they cram the available space full of detail, or compulsive repetition, or text. So Groening’s cartoons appear to us alternately as vast empty areas, inviting our attention, or as chock full of pattern and noise, resisting careless reading. His approach to cartooning is one of maddening accumulation, and of deceptive simplicity.

Plopped in the middle of a book full of comics like this, or onto a newsprint page surrounded by ads and type in your weekly paper, Groening’s drawing can’t help but look confrontational, or at least vividly different. Like the defiant but trampled-down philosophising that goes on within its panel borders, Life in Hell at once stands out on the page, and then buries itself in all sorts of complications. If, per Karasik and Newgarden, you can read Nancy without realising you’ve read it, you often can’t read Life in Hell without fully committing to the task.

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Next, I want to look at how we read Life in Hell’s dense pictures and words, and how Groening understands the ins and outs of weekly strips. Part two will appear in a couple days.