The Daily News-Journal from Murfreesboro, Tennessee • 98

mm The Simpsons are a family asf amilies really axe: Dad Homer is in a continual state of exasperation. BY KIRK NICEWONGEK Groening in a soft, friendly voice, "is that I've been spying on them." Groening is also a cartoonist whose comic strip, "Life in Hell," traps our dark, 2 a.m. suspicions that existence is a cruel cosmic joke at our exclusive expense. He drags those fears yowling and slavering out into the open, then paints a clown's Iaceoa themJha re suit is a kind of wincing wit that has proven popular: Four book-length collections of "Life in Hell" strips have been published. The common message of both "Life in Hell" and "The Simpsons' seems to be that, we all share in this seething bouillabaisse of the.

Simpsons and the Andersons on 'Father Knows Best live in a town called Springfield." Your days are numbered. Its later tten you think. We're all doomed. Have a nice day. Matt Groening, "Work Is Hell" "I think that most of the humor about childhood mines the same territory over and over again," Groening says.

"And I've tried to write about stuff that's a little darker, I think we all have that in common. 1 mean, I'm watching my child, and you think of a baby's life as being idyllic, but he's got two main moods: ecstatic joy and screaming unhappiness, I think that we tend to forgeWthe screaming." We ask Groening when the insight first flashed that life is fraught with the hellish. "It first hi! me in the fifth grade," he says, "when I had to sit in the corner for being unfairly accused of dropping an encyclopedia on the floor." -Growing up-inPprtlandrOreGroen--ing, 34, "started drawing on the first day of the first grade," he says. "Basically, I cannot remember a time in school when I wasn't drawing. I went through all sorts of different stages, drawing all the things that kids draw: tanks and dinosaurs and monsters especially.

But I wasn't very good. At around the fifth grade, I hit upon the style that I've kept to this day." Groening admits that the time pressure of juggling his comic strip and "The Simpsons" "is a problem right now, and I don't see a solution. "I get a little tired sometimes, but I'm having a blast. This is just like playing. I'm doing what the teachers used to rap me on the knuckles for." Does he believe that the travails of childhood he describes are inescapable? Or does he hope for better for his son? Groening considers a moment, then says, "I've doodled myself into a corner on this one, because I can't allow myself to do the same things to my kid that I've written about.

I no doubt will make mistakes, but I hope when my kid is an adult, he will be very forgiving." Then Matt Groening does what you would expect him to do in the face of such a touching hope for a kinder childhood. He laughs, softly. Why is TV so cool? It allows several people who hate each other's guts to sit peacefully together in the same room for years on end without murdering each other. Matt Groening, "Childhood Is Heir To some viewers, one of the best parts of Fore's "The Tracey Ull-man Show" was the commercial breaks. That's no knock on the talented Ull-man.

It's just that each set of commercials was preceded by the antics of the Simpsons, the animated family created by cartoonist Matt Groening whose playlets were hilarious dispatches from the front lines of the ongoing war between parents and their children. We haven't seen much of the Simpsons lately. The quiet is due not to a truce, but to the preparation of a new offensive. The Simpsons will soon debut in their own Fox series, probably, next month. And on Sunday, Dec.

17, Fox will air "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," a holiday special starring dad Homer, mom Marge, brother Bart, sister Lisa and baby Maggie. (Repeat showing: Saturday, Dec. 23.) In the special, Homer moonlights at a second job his real job is safety inspection at a nuclear power plant to earn extra money to buy Christmas presents for the family. In true Simpson fashion, however, everything goes wrong, until Homer is saved by "Santa's Little Helper." Just don't expect anything like "A Very Brady Christmas." The Simpsons are a family as families really are. Homer is in a continual state of low-level exasperation, with the threat of full magma-spewing eruption always lurking just below the surface.

Marge is the jumpy peacemaker, bearing a quivering white flag back and forth between the battle lines of Homer and the children. And the kids are like the first mammals in the age of the dinosaurs, peeping from the underbrush at a world of behemoths, pausing in their torture of each other only to unite against the threat of its interruption by lumbering adults whose seeming sole purpose in life is to ruin any hope of having fun. "The most common thing people tell me," says Simpsons creator Matt I fc 1 tart agSZi. The Simpsons and their creator (inset): dispatches from the front. childhood rejections and daily, vivid adult humiliations.

And, like helpless Oliver Twists, we hold out our little bowls and ask for more. "I take incidents from my own childhood for the Simpsons," Groening says in response to the obvious question (doubly obvious due to the fact that all the Simpsons have the same names as members of Groening's family). "It's a combination of my family, my friends, my current life I'm a new dad; I have an 8-month-old son. And part of it isa reaction to the situation comedies I watched while I was growing up. Both 4 DAILY NEWS JOURNAL.