Al Jean Shares the Artwork Matt Groening Gave Him for His First Day on ‘The Simpsons’
When Matt Groening welcomed the inaugural creative team of The Simpsons to their first day of work, he gave them a token of appreciation that definitely wasn’t the unused and unsellable back-stock merch from his other gig.
Along with his creative partner Mike Reiss, Al Jean was the one of the first two writers hired by Groening, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon for their new show The Simpsons back in early 1989. While that original writers’ room would later become the single most influential creative team in TV comedy history, at the time, Jean and Reiss had reason to be skeptical about The Simpsons’ future. As Jean has since admitted, his friends didn’t think that a cartoon that didn’t cater exclusively to children could last long on the air, and many comedy writers Jean knew at the time turned down the chance to become a Simpsons OG.
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Today, Jean still serves as a part-time show runner, producer and writer on the series that proved to be the biggest break of his — or anyone else’s — whole career, and, in a recent nostalgia post on Twitter, Jean recalled the welcome gift that Groening left for his newest staffer that reads as less of a “Welcome to The Simpsons” present and more of a “Welcome to Hell” warning.
The above calendar — delivered more than three months into the year — comes from Groening's pre-Simpsons project, the comic strip Life in Hell. The weekly four-panel comic that Groening started in 1977 tackled topics like life, death, sex, existentialism and alienation using a cast of anthropomorphic rabbits and gay lovers, and in case the above gift seems like an odd token for a boss to give his newest hire on a completely different venture, it’s worth noting that Groening likely understood Jean to be a huge Life in Hell fan.
In a conversation with The Television Academy back in 2014, Jean discussed his earliest exposure to Groening’s work and admitted of his decision to join The Simpsons, “It was pretty low money, but I thought Life in Hell was really funny. I thought it would be great to work with Sam (Simon), whom I’d known but not worked with, and especially with Jim Brooks, who I thought did the best television of all.”
“I don’t know if we knew the show was going to be a hit, but I thought it was going to be very special,” Jean said of his original hopes for The Simpsons. “When I was a kid, there was no animation on (primetime) television. This Simpsons show was going to get a lot of attention, and it was by these great people, so why not try it?”
More than 35 years later, the risk was clearly worth the reward — and I’m not just talking about the SWAG.
