Matt Groening: Cartoon hero

It is a year of round-number anniversaries for Matt Groening. In 1977, just graduated from the north-west's most progressive, hippie-ish college, in Olympia, Washington, the young man who went on to create The Simpsons was newly arrived in Los Angeles, and looking to settle into the role of "struggling writer and cartoonist". During the height of the punk era, he would wait tables at musicians' hangouts and work behind the counter at the Licorice Pizza record store, purveying drug paraphernalia alongside the 45s and keeping an eye as the punks tried to shoplift the photocopied cartoon zine he had put on sale.

Forward 10 years, and his "Life in Hell" cartoon strip had become a cult hit, thanks to its angsty take on relationships and modern life in LA, drawn through characters such as Blinky the depressed rabbit and the couple Akbar and Jeff. Appearing weekly in an LA newspaper, and already having spawned a spin-off book, it tickled the fancy of James Brooks, a Hollywood producer working on The Tracey Ullman Show, who wanted a series of cartoon shorts to bridge the English comic's own skits and the ad breaks.

And so, on 19 April 1987, The Simpsons arrived on prime-time TV, and the world's perception of the Middle American family would never be the same again.

For Groening, too, the snowballing success of The Simpsons was transforming. The full-length show, 400 episodes and 18 years old, is close to becoming the longest-running programme in American television history, and among the most widely syndicated ever, raking in more than $2bn annually for Rupert Murdoch's Fox network, which makes it. To say he is comfortable would be to underestimate the scale of the wealth Groening has accumulated, his cut of the multimillion-dollar merchandising industry that has put the images of Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Marge and Homer on to everything from chess pieces to asthma inhalers to pop tarts, and which even put Bart Simpson at No 1 in the UK pop charts.

Now, to mark the 20th anniversary, there is the movie - an opportunity, Groening says, for him finally to sit among his audience and watch them belly laugh. And it's a guaranteed giant doughnut-sized banker, too.

Life for Groening is a lot less like hell, now, particularly since LA gets much more bearable as you move closer to the sea. Long gone are the manic work-till-you-drop days of the early Simpsons years, which led to the collapse of his 13-year marriage to Deborah Caplan, a colleague he had met when a rock critic for the LA Reader - a divorce he still describes, from this distance, as "baffling".

Padding around his giant house, opening directly on to the Pacific Ocean, Groening is a contented, amiable, still modest man, a power player in the media industry, but one whose creation retains flecks of subversive humour. Growing portly, with a goatee beard and giant hands, he is looking more and more like one of his more avuncular characters, say those who meet him.

Even the name of that original comic strip, 30 years old and now being syndicated to newspapers around the globe, has been junked. Earlier this year, to mark the political resurgence of his beloved Democrats, who have just taken over Congress and look hot favourites to reclaim the White House, Groening has been subtly inking a new, optimistic name in the top corner: "Life Is Swell".

While Groening has been intimately involved as executive producer of The Simpsons movie, he has not taken a role in the day-to-day running of the television series for more than a decade, dropping in as a creative consultant only. He is happy to bat about potential storylines and jokes, but aware that there is a whole machine of scriptwriters and editors and producers and animators in place that have long since put the show on auto-pilot.

"If I got hit by a truck tomorrow," he told the Los Angeles Weekly a few days ago, "The Simpsons would continue on indefinitely. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight. And sometimes, you know, I go, 'Is my work redundant? Am I just doing the same thing again and again and again?' But I feel like every week I learn something new - I learn something about writing. I learn something about other people. I learn about storytelling, I learn new jokes. And it's entertainment, for me. I get to be on the scene where these brilliant people are making this amazing show, and, oh yeah - I created it! That is to say, I got the ball rolling, and now it's a snowball that keeps on picking up speed."

Groening often need not cast around very widely for his inspiration. "Life in Hell" has long featured Will and Abe, his two sons, represented in rabbit form and using dialogue noted down directly from their squabbles and their questions to their parents.

And as he was knocking up his first draft of The Simpsons family, moments before going into a pitch meeting at Fox, he hastily named Homer after his dad, Marge after his mother Margaret, and Lisa and Maggie after two of his four siblings. He blanched at the narcissism of calling the trouble-making whirlwind at the centre of the family Matt, and so chose Bart as an anagram of brat. Many of the peripheral characters are named after streets in his native Portland, Oregon, although the Simpsons' home town of Springfield was chosen, he says, because it is one of the most common in the US. Last month, 14 of them were competing to host the US premier of the movie. The eventual winner of an online vote was Springfield, Vermont. The Oregon town close to Portland didn't get a look in.

The late Homer Groening - also a cartoonist, as well as a film-maker and writer - never much minded being the name behind America's most dysfunctional father, although his wife Margaret has taken to insisting that she never had the towering hair that is Marge Simpson's gravity-defying trademark. (Groening says there are photos to prove it, calling Marge a hybrid of his mother and the Bride of Frankenstein.)

The names may not have been changed, but any similarities between the Simpsons and the Groenings are non-existent. No throttling of the children, no neglect, no juvenile delinquency. Homer Groening never said "D'oh!". The only time he objected to any of his cartoonish alter-ego's behaviour, his son once told The Independent, was when Homer made Marge carry a flat tyre through the desert to a gas station. "He never minded when Homer strangled Bart. But he thought that was ungentlemanly."

Groening's second son, Homer Will, now 15, has not been so keen with the association and decided long ago to go by his middle name.

Politicians may have tried to use The Simpsons as a football, but it is they who have looked silly - and given plenty of ammo to the show, which never fails to bite back. The first president George Bush, in his disastrous re-election campaign in 1992, took to intoning that "America needs to be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons", prompting an episode in which the family watches the Bush speech on TV. "Hey, we are like the Waltons," Bart says. "We're praying for the end of the Depression, too."

You can't beat 'em, so now the politicians are queuing up to join them. Tony Blair took 10 minutes out of his schedule at Downing Street to voice his own character in an episode where he allows Homer out of jail and back to the US, only on the condition that he takes Madonna back, too. Al Gore, the former US vice-president, has voiced his own character, too, on Groening's other cartoon project, Futurama.

Michael Jackson, Sting, Tom Jones, Glenn Close, Sir Paul McCartney, Ricky Gervais, Mel Gibson - the list of celebrities who have appeared to voice their own caricatures is almost as long as the list of episodes. And the programme has spawned a dozen academic theses, and dozens more imitators on American TV. Having brought back the concept of a cartoon that would appeal to adults, programmes such as King of the Hill and, of course, South Park have followed in its wake.

In the end, the Simpsons exhibit only surface dysfunctionality. At their core, they are bonded together with genuine love and affection. How many other American families have managed to stay together for 20 years? They may be yellow, with preposterous overbites, but they are more real than the Waltons surely ever were.

The wealth they have created for Groening, and his resulting wealth of leisure time, has allowed him opportunity to indulge his passion for music, specifically obscure world music and the sort of experimental rock that wouldn't graze the charts. He owns thousands upon thousands of records and CDs. He was even allowed to curate an LA music festival - although poor ticket sales forced a rethink and he was persuaded to add a few household names to spice up the bill.

One of Groening's few professional frustrations has been that his most significant post-Simpsons creation, Futurama, failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. The adventures of a pizza-delivery man cryogenically frozen and then brought back to life in the 31st century, the show mines Groening's science fiction obsession and acts as a kind of warped parody of modern life.

Groening had to fight hard to persuade Fox to take up the show in 1999, and fought even more ferociously hard to keep it on the air, ultimately to no avail. Cancelled after four series, it nonetheless won itself a cult following that delights Groening and has enabled him to attempt a resurrection. New episodes are in development for next year, and with those up and running, and the movie-screen sized Simpsons finally being unleashed on the public next week, it might be time for Groening to resume his leisurely LA life. A spot of surfing, a lot of record collecting, and the "Life Is Swell" cartoon to funnel any angst into.

A Life in Brief

BORN: Matthew Abram Groening, 15 February 1954, Portland, Oregon.

EARLY LIFE: After an unspectacular school career, he attended Evergreen State College, Washington, where he edited the college newspaper and contributed cartoons. Moved to Los Angeles, aged 23, and produced a comic book for his friends called "Life in Hell", describing his life in LA.

CAREER: "Life in Hell" debuted in Wet magazine in 1978 and now appears as a strip in 200 newspapers worldwide. In 1987, producer James L Brooks offered Groening a short animation slot on The Tracey Ullman Show and The Simpsons was born. The family was given its own show in 1989. It is now the most watched TV show on the planet. In March 1999, Groening's show Futurama, about a delivery company in the year 3000, was launched. The first Simpsons movie opens next week.

HE SAYS: "Nobody thought The Simpsons was going to be a big hit. It snuck up on everybody."

THEY SAY: "Matt is a genuine comic artist. There aren't many of these guys. And this is something he wanted to do all his life." James L Brooks, executive producer