Bongo Comics Will Adhere To Creator’S Vision

Matt Groening, as he once told an interviewer, sees the world as split into two people: the Daffy Ducks and the Elmer Fudds.

He’s a Daffy, and everyone he wants to annoy is an Elmer.

Five minutes of any episode of “The Simpsons” television show demonstrates that. So does his newest television effort, “Futurama.” As does his comic strip “Life is Hell,” as well as the various cartoon books that his comic book company, Bongo Comics, has been producing since 1993.

Spokesman-Review readers not familiar with Groening’s work will get a chance to see for themselves when a comic-strip version of “The Simpsons” begins to run on Sundays.

Los Angeles-based Bongo Comics will churn out the strip, with the help of some 30 writers and cartoonists. But, says Bongo managing editor Terry Delegeane, the vision is firmly Groening’s.

“This is Matt’s company,” Delegeane says. “He makes sure to take a look at the stuff that we do. It’s got his seal of approval on it.”

The newness of the comic strip comes, of course, from the animated show that has been running on the Fox network since 1990 (a variation debuted as a series of shorts on the original “Tracey Ullman Show”). Since “The Simpsons” recently began a run on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s channel 4, its popularity in England has soared.

The London Times offered Groening and Bongo a whole page on which to run a strip version of the show. A strip was “something that we were toying with for a while,” Delegeane said, and the Times proposal “kicked it into gear.”

Since its launch in January, print versions of “The Simpsons” have spread to Italy and the Czech Republic. Universal Press Syndicate, the Kansas City-based company that distributes comic strips to newspapers nationwide, approached Bongo to make a deal. Some 80 U.S. papers, including The Spokesman-Review, will begin running “The Simpsons” today.

What to expect? Movie-poster parodies, puzzle pages, satires of puzzle pages that are impossible to solve, character-based strips such as Bart’s guide to how he gives people nicknames and a game shaped like Homer’s head (and involves his losing a plutonium rod and attempt to find it).

“We wanted to have some fun with the page,” Delegeane says.

And Groening, a Portland native who now lives in Los Angeles, is right in the middle. Despite being fully involved with “Futurama,” even going as far as criticizing Fox publically for not giving it the support he believes it deserves. And despite writing and drawing, as he has for 18 years, “Life in Hell.”

Why is that? Because to Groening, “The Simpsons” is something special. Always has been. Always will be.

“In `Futurama,”’ says Delegeane, “in the 30th century new episodes of `The Simpsons’ are still running.”

Got that, Elmer?