In 1977, at the age of 23, Groening moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. However, on the way there, his car broke down in the fast lane of the Hollywood Freeway. He found work for a time as a chauffeur and "biographer" for an unsuccessful 88-year-old movie director. He described life in Los Angeles to his friends in the form of a comic book, and called it Life in Hell which was loosely inspired by a chapter entitled �How to Go to Hell� in Walter Kaufmann's book Critique of Religion and Philosophy.

Groening started the comic in 1977 by photocopying and distributing it in the book corner of Licorice Pizza, the record store he was working in. He made his first professional cartoon sale to the avant-garde Wet magazine in 1978 (the strip, entitled �Forbidden Words�, appeared in the September/October issue), and by 1980 the strip had become so popular in the underground that it was picked up by the Los Angeles Reader, where he also delivered papers as well as some editing and paste-up.

In 1982, the editor of the Reader gave Matt his own weekly rock �n� roll column, "Sound Mix". However, the column would rarely be about rock �n� roll, as he would instead write more about his life and childhood, his pet peeves, and even things he found in the street. �I think the people who ran the Reader felt so guilty about how little they were paying people that they let them write about whatever they wanted,� Matt later reflected[2]. In an effort to add more rock to the column, he would often simply make up stuff, writing reviews of fictional bands and non-existent records. The following week, he would confess to fabricating everything in the previous column, then swear that everything in the new column was true. Finally, he was asked to give up the "music" column and perhaps write a humor column under a different title.

Matt met his wife, Deborah Caplan, in 1980 at the Los Angeles Reader (they divorced in 1999). In late 1984, she published Groening�s first cartoon book, Love is Hell, which was a big underground success. Soon afterward, they left the Reader and put together the Life in Hell Co., which handled syndication and merchandise for Groening�s projects.

The strip is still carried in many weekly newspapers and has been anthologized in a series of books, including School is Hell, Childhood is Hell, Work is Hell, The Big Book of Hell and The Huge Book of Hell.