Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Before Matt Groening entered the general public consciousness as creator of the animated TV series The Simpsons and Futurama, he was best known for his comic strip Life in Hell which appeared weekly in The Los Angeles Reader from 1980 and went on to syndication in almost 400 alternative newspapers. Through that decade Life in Hell became a comedy juggernaut that spawned many books and a tidal wave of merchandise. The Big Book of Hell was a supersized, best-of compilation/retrospective of strips selected from the seven book collections Love Is Hell and Work Is Hell (1986), School Is Hell (1987), Box Full of Hell and Childhood Is Hell (1988), Greetings from Hell, and Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life (1989) plus strips never published before. As a record of the pop culture of the 1980s in the USA, The Big Book of Hell is an amazingly funny read of lifestyles, ideas, trends and memes, some of them Groening was himself responsible for. It still holds up today as completely wonderful entertainment.
Seven years later came another large book The Huge Book of Hell, this one compiled from How to Go to Hell (1991), The Road to Hell (1992) and Binky’s Guide to Love (1994). This assortment is not sequential by original publication date but is arranged into thematic groups: Dreamland, Creative Juices, The Law of the Briny Deep, Life’s Little Burdens, Parlor Tricks (two sections, both called Parlor Tricks for some reason, perhaps a metajoke) Soup du Jour, The Big Picture, The Learning Experience, Enlightenment is Hell, Let’s Dance and Happily Ever After. You won’t get far into this collection without realising there is little or nothing connecting the strips together, and that aimless quality is reflected in the content.
It would have been asking a lot to expect Groening to maintain the inhumanly high standard of the first compilation and sadly, what this book documents is the disengagement of someone who has largely run out of things to say. Groening is also resentful and stressed out by the pressure of public life, and is feeling the weight of fan expectation (lots of strips reference the toll The Simpsons success has taken on him). There is a lot of leaning on rehashed jokes that worked first time around, lots of self-referential jabs at the problems of being an artist, and perhaps too many ‘kids say the funniest things’ diary comics that wouldn’t have made the grade a decade earlier. Everything looks fine on a craft level, after all he’s a professional who has many years of experience, but the drawings are just empty placeholders with only an occasional flicker of the brilliance they used to contain. Overall The Huge Book of Hell is not worth your time or money and is best avoided. Stick with the first collection and pretend you’ve never heard of a second one.
