Rhymes with raining
Back in September 1989 I was travelling around the US and ended up in LA, where I interviewed a few comic artists and cartoonists for UK magazines such as Speakeasy, if anyone remembers that.

One of them produced a newspaper strip called Life in Hell, and had got a job doing "the first animated sitcom on American TV since the Flintstones", as he described it. He was clearly a bit overwhelmed by the whole experience of working in TV, having a secretary and all the rest of that, and was very normal and down-to-earth as a result.

The interview was only supposed to be a half-hour but he stretched it to over an hour, and the only thing we didn't talk about was the TV series. He'd just had the first episode back from the animators in Korea, and apparently it was awful -- crude, cheap, they'd put in unscripted fart gags and stuff, and the studio had sent it back to be redone, from scratch, six weeks before the series was supposed to go on air. So this lovely bloke was staring at the fact his TV career was about to explode in his face, and didn't want to talk about it. So we talked about other comics and cartoonists, books, rock music (he used to be a rock journalist), and anything that wasn't the TV series, basically. And he was brilliant, funny, entertaining company, one of the nicest interviews I've ever done.

I was the first British journalist to interview Matt Groening, and we didn't talk about the Simpsons. I've never been able to sell the article. I still have the tape. I can't bear to play it.
(YojimboUK, Fri 26 May 2006, 0:45, Reply)