This blog has lately been looking at Matt Groening and his seminal alt-weekly strip Life in Hell, thinking about his place in contemporary cartooning and about the mechanics of his strips and his humour; this will be the third and last instalment. Last time, I ended up thinking that Groening’s brand of relentless non-humour, when it masks a kind of nonchalant despair, can often prove liberating. But if Life in Hell arrives at its sense of humour by coming unmoored from all hope, it’s at its most humourous when it floats free of all logic as well. For Groening, childhood is the least hopeful, least logical time of life—and so, it’s the time that yields up the most to his brand of humour. His funniest book through-and-through is his first in ten years, Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe, comprising cartoon transcriptions of conversations with his young sons on topics ranging from violence to monsters to girls to birthdays. The evident and deep affection for Will and Abe on display here can’t help but leaven the tone of the typical Life in Hell strip of decades past—indeed, Groening says the strip has lately been retitled Life is Swell (though I haven’t been able to come across any other evidence of this).
The drawing here shows Groening at his funniest, too. Youngest son Abe’s pug-nose and innocent smirk make him the perfect counterpart to older brother Will’s constant crazy-eyed bucktoothed scowl. More than that, the intimate knowledge the proud papa brings to bear on the slightest of each boy’s expressions and gestures helps reveal just how attentive a cartoonist Groening actually is. Stripped down to a spare talking-heads format throughout the book—no backgrounds, few characters other than the occasional guest appearance by Dad—each strip’s sense of flow becomes dependent on the drawings in sequence, on the subtleties of interplay between Will and Abe. Here we see why Jeff and Akbar don’t quite succeed: their whole shtick is that they’re identical and perform identically, which pushes their interactions into an airy, conceptual realm, lacking as they do any grounding in their physical presence as characters.
Will and Abe, on the other hand, are very much alive, though Groening’s impersonal page layouts may not show us as much at first glance. As we begin to read one panel after the next, however, we see the boys’ movements, attitudes, and—hilariously—faces, all alter according to circumstance. To communicate mounting rage with one brushstroke as an eyebrow lowers, or with one dab of ink as Will’s pupils creep further apart in preparation for a fit—these are the marks of a cartoonist who has purged his toolkit of all but the most basic implements, the ones that can perform their tasks quickly and with a minimum of fuss. Groening’s invisible skill not only keeps us reading, establishing a firm sense of character along the way, but it also lands joke after unexpected joke.
Though those jokes may be a bit more lighthearted in this latest incarnation of the strip, nevertheless the basic Life in Hell M.O. still holds true. Try as we might to understand or explain it, Groening tells us, life is fundamentally, unfairly illogical. Will’s bouts of anger and imperiousness are hilarious and a bit disturbing because they have so little basis in rational thinking: “Why do people go to Dracula’s house?” he asks. Dad answers, “Because he invited them.” “But why do they go??” “Because they didn’t know he was a vampire.” “BUT HIS NAME IS DRACULA!!” Also, the boys’ lives, like Bongo’s and young Matt’s in previous strips, are governed by rules they must obey without understanding why they exist—why are there bullies, why is there bedtime, why do things die? Dire importance and consequence attach to every activity, every question here, no matter how incongruous—so that is indeed real, desperate relief when Will hears that clouds don’t die (“YAYYYY!!”), and that’s real anguish too when he realises Abe gets all his toys if he should pass away (“NOOOOOO!”).
Groening has a gift for recalling the immediacy and intensity of every childhood experience, in Will and Abe as much as in School is Hell and Childhood is Hell. This gift likely plays a part in why Lynda Barry enthuses about this latest book so much, and excerpts it in her recent entry in the Best American Comics series: the two cartoonists share an uncanny ability to replicate a child’s manner of thinking and speaking, a grammatical instability and unpredictability that suggests an unfiltered experience of childhood rather than a mere recollection of it. As in Groening’s stronger autobiographical strips depicting his own childhood, Will and Abe are not simply kids as the cartoonist remembers them being, or even as he remembers himself being, but as they actually are, moment to moment, as though their life and viewpoints are being directly transcribed onto bristol board and newsprint.
The act of recollecting has its merits, too, of course, and permits much of Life in Hell’s vicious pessimism: his siblings lie to young Matt (“Yes means no and no means yes. Do you want me to hit you?”), or Bongo endures parental brain-twisters (“I hope you have a kid just like yourself”), or he discovers God doesn’t answer prayers. But when Bongo tells his father, “Picture this: row after row of kids cheated of enlightenment, numbed into submission by tedium and blandness,” that’s the Peanuts version of childhood, the adult reflection on times past that remains true enough, but connected to memory rather than experience. Compare these uses of Groening’s amazing, resentful memory with the advice that he records Will giving to Abe in a strip celebrating the younger son’s birthday: “I lost a couple of friends because I didn’t play with them and they didn’t really like me. To know if people like you, look at every move and every sound and every thing they do.”
Absent, here, is any sense of adult spite or grudge-bearing. Instead, we have a kind of melancholic wisdom, hard-won, wide-eyed, and not yet disappointed enough to become the sort of cynicism on display in others of Groening’s books. It’s a rare tone to capture, and an indication of how Groening’s bleak and uneasily funny worldview can often be tempered, maybe—maybe—by the obsessive hope that people will like you, or that you will like them. Recall the strip where Binky the rabbit comforts his son Bongo by assuring him that everyone gets to be dead forever. Groening updates that scenario in his new book, and it’s as good an example as any of how the strip has matured, and how a pleasant sense of fellow-feeling now can soften the harsh blows that life in hell can deal. In that strip, young Will looks up and says to his Dad, “I want to die with you and Mommy and Abey. Can we die together??”
Dad’s off-camera, voice-of-God reply: “Maybe.”
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