I recently conducted a phone interview with Matt Groening for an upcoming MSN feature. He was a pretty cool guy and I lived for a time in his home town of Springfield, Oregon (though long after he had left), so we reminisced about the town and talked movies and DVDs and TV and such. And then, as we talked blogs and newspapers and such, he asked about my blog, and then realized that he’d found it. Here’s the excerpt of the original interview where, in the midst of drifting off into all sorts of detours, Matt Groening gave me my first celebrity endorsement!
Thursday, February 19, 2009, phone interview.
I lived in Eugene, OR, for years and worked in Eugene even when I lived in Springfield, and I read “Life in Hell” in the local art weekly. I moved to Seattle 14 years ago and none of the papers – neither the two dailies nor either of the two alternative weekly papers – carry “Life in Hell.”

Matt Groening (image from his Wikipedia page)
Yeah, I got kicked out of whatever paper I was in up there. I think Seattle Weekly was a little too yuppy for my stuff. I’ll tell you something, the alternative newsweekly community is a real heartbreaker if you’re a cartoonist because times are tough for newspapers and alternative newsweeklies in particular. They’re running out of money and it’s really sad. In fact, next week is my final week in my local paper, the LA Weekly. They’re dropping all the cartoonists, they can’t afford them. And who knows, maybe they’ll bounce back, but I don’t know.
I’m a freelance critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and it will likely be shut down in a month.
Oh, my God. Is the Seattle Times still around?
Yes. They are, however, deeply in debt.
God, it’s so crazy.
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