Bart Potter wrote this profile of Matt Groening for The Olympian, January 20, 1987.
Due to my dithering along aimlessly and quitting a couple times, Matt got out of Evergreen a couple years ahead of me. During that time he sent me his Life in Hell self-pubbed comix in the mail before it had morphed into a strip. Matt's talent wasn't something that grew and developed to professional level while at TESC in the 1970s. No. Rather he was already an excellent cartoonist from the minute I first met him, when we became neighbors in 1974.
To me the format and distribution of the Life in Hell photocopied books in the 1977-1979 era qualifies Matt as taking part in the Newave genre, although he probably didn't know that was what it was being called at the time.
Well, come to think of it, neither did I.
