Every (working class) artist has to pay his dues, and The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is no different.
Tales have long been told that cartoon king Groening was once contracted by Apple to draw up a brochure and a few promos for the computer company. Groening might have continued working for Apple, but the same year he was doing so — 1989 — marked the auspicious start of his animated series for which he'd be known forever more.
The fruits of Groening's work at Apple turned up on Monday, March 4 via website VintageZen.
VintageZen, where founder Linus Edwards claims to bring readers "[t]echnology stirred with pop culture muddled with history and philosophy and garnished with a bit of the absurd," states that Groening's work for Apple was directed at college students the computer company wanted to lure toward Macs.
Groening had already gained fame by 1989 as the creator of the cult comic series Life in Hell, which began in 1977 as a self-published book before being picked up and launched into larger fame by alternative paper The Los Angeles Reader in 1980.
Characters developed for Life in Hell — Binky the slack-jawed rabbit and homosexual couple Akbar & Jeff — were incorporated into Groening's Mac college-targeted brochure entitled Who Needs a Computer Anyway?
"It apparently was distributed amongst college bookstores and was obviously trying to use Groening's cachet as an underground comic artist to attract hip, young co-eds," VintageZen says.
The brochure is a breakdown of various college student archetypes — "The Stressed," "The Overwhelmed," "The Procrastinator" et al — done up in Groening's classic Simpsons/Hell style. The pages alternate with slyly sardonic advertorials that nonetheless appear all business and promulgate Apple's wares to the young university-bound.
"If you'd like to learn more about how helpful Macintosh can be," the last page of Groening's brochure states, "get your hands on one and try it out for yourself."
That's not all, folks.
In addition to Groening's Apple brochure, he previously created a poster for Apple — in exchange for a LaserWriter, according to Apple engineer Jeff Miller — that promoted "Akbar 'n' Jeff's Communications Hut."
The store advertised was presumably not real, but the iconic rainbow Apple icon at the bottom is, as is the Apple nod at top: "Looking for advanced communications between your Macintosh and that 'Big Blue' mainframe? Then bring your floppies down to Akbar 'n' Jeff's Communications Hut."
"David Multer (Akbar) and I were the engineers on MacAPPC, which was a mainframe networking standard championed by IBM," Miller says. "We couldn't convince David to change his name to Akbar, though."
Besides the brochure and poster, Groening designed an ornate college dorm room scene that yet again invoked his Life in Hell universe and plugged Apple. This design ended up on college bookstore windows, came along with the brochure and was also used on t-shirts.
"Macintosh," reads the poster. "Part of every student's wildest dreams."
Clearly, Groening's dreams were about to become even wilder in the years to come.
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