A lot of people may not know this, but for a few brief years,...

A lot of people may not know this, but for a few brief years, the SIMPSONS had a Sunday comics strip in major newspapers around the world. It was immensely popular in some countries, if I remember correctly, a little less so in the United States, where it had some difficulty keeping papers. I think…memory might be a little hazy on that point.
It was a quality strip, drawn and written by the people who do BONGO COMICS, and one of my very first jobs was doing a few strips for this. I turned in my first scripts, I loved doing it, because it reminded me of things like Peanuts and Prince Valiant and all the other great comic strips that I had read in cherished collections.
I remember there had to be a gag in the first couple panels, and another big gag at the end, a punchline. But the first gag, while it had to relate to the overall strip, had to be completely removable for the newspapers that had less actual page space. So that was a bit complex…you had to essentially set up your strip twice and make it not seem redundant.
There were other restrictions, not evil ones, just things to keep the popular characters in front. They wanted us to have either Homer, Bart, Krusty, or (I think) Ralph Wiggum in every strip. I’m not sure why Ralph, but Ralph is a laugh machine on the show, when a writer is stuck they can always cut to Ralph.
I remember that my first strips were really successful, and I had JUST started writing for a living. The strips paid $200 each for the script, and at the time, I was doing haircuts for something like $20, before all the expenses were counted, so it took a LOT of work to make as much money in my own salon as it took to write one strip.
Bongo was really happy with my first scripts, even Matt Groening made a point of asking who wrote them. So they asked me to write s many as I could. And I thought YES!
The Bongo guys were SO great to me, they taught me the language of writing comics, they were supportive in every way, and were (and are) just generally wonderful.
I wrote quite a few, and some were experimental a bit, like some of my favorite comics strips. I had one where Homer walked in and out of the strip itself, explaining what the language of a comic strip was. I had a silent one following Santa’s Little Helper, I had Ralph Wiggum accidentally become a famous beat poet.
It was a blast, and I couldn’t believe my comics were going all over the world. What a joy!
The weird thing is, it got difficult. Bongo was having a hard time keeping the strip going because they weren’t getting enough great scripts…their best people were mostly being used for books and comics. And it got hard precisely BECAUSE it was such a small amount of space to tell a story and make it funny. People think writing the Simpsons is easy…until they have to do it. It’s tough, especially without the voice actors.
So I slowly stopped doing them to concentrate on longer stories. But that was so much fun. Eventually the strip stopped, and has not been collected, which makes me a little sad. For a while, there was a really funny, really well-drawn Simpsons strip in the funnies section, and it’s a shame that it’s gone.