Don't have a cow, man, but Simpsons creator Matt Groening is worth half a billion dollars. As of next year, everybody's favorite cartoon family will have been on our screens and in our homes for thirty years. It seems difficult now to imagine life without them, but Groening didn't even think they were his best idea at the time he created them.
A long, long time ago, Groening was a struggling cartoonist who self-published a comic strip series called 'Life in Hell'. It found a fan in Hollywood producer James L Brooks, who contacted Groening and offered him a slot on the popular Tracey Ullman show. A paranoid Groening was convinced that Brooks wanted to take away his ownership of the 'Life in Hell' characters, and so pretty much came up with the Simpsons on the way to the meeting, naming the characters after his own family members.