If At First You Don't Succeed -

I Like All Of The Early Relationship Strips That Were Collected In 'love Is Hell,' Where I Pretended To Be An Expert In Relationships And Did Comics Like 'the Nine Types Of Boyfriends,' 'sixteen Ways To End A Relationship,' 'twenty-four Things Not To Say In Bed,' And Other Arbitrarily Numbered Lists.

The Conundrum That I Face On A Daily Basis Is That I Have Two Sons Who Have Grown Up Watching 'the Simpsons,' So They Know Exactly What Buttons To Push. They Know How Bart Irritates Homer, And They Use These Lines Against Me To Tell Me That I'm Not Funny Anymore.

Since I Was There In The Very Beginning, I Know The History Of The Characters. So, I Make Comments About The Tone And Sometimes Remind The Writers That We've Done That Before.

I Had Been Drawing My Weekly Comic Strip, 'life In Hell,' For About Five Years When I Got A Call From Jim Brooks, Who Was Developing 'the Tracey Ullman Show' For The Brand-new Fox Network. He Wanted Me To Come In And Pitch An Idea For Doing Little Cartoons On That Show.

The Nice Thing About 'futurama' For Me Personally Was That It Was A Way To Honor Some Of The Traditional Ideas In Literary Science Fiction, Not So Much Movie Or Television Science Fiction - Although We Have That Too, Obviously. Our Situation, A Workplace Comedy, Led To All Sorts Of Stuff.