GRAPHIC Festival Is Bringing Matt Groening To Australia For The First Time

Out of our way, jerk-asses, because celebrated cartoonist and pop-culture titan Matt Groening will make his maiden voyage to Australia for this year's GRAPHIC Festival and pretty much nothing else matters today.

Oh, fine; there's actually some other really awesome news wrapped up in the annual event's latest announcement, such as the inclusion of The Good Times Are Killing Me scribe and artist, and Groening's college friend, Lynda Barry — one of the most revered US cartoonists of the modern age in her own right, mind you — who will also make her Australian debut this November.

Meanwhile, George Lucas' directorial debut, THX 1138, will be given a live re-scoring by Asian Dub Foundation and lauded author Neil Gaiman will beam in digitally to introduce the Australian premieres of Dream Dangerously and Likely Stories. Plus, Aussie cartoonists Michael Leunig and First Dog On The Moon have been announced atop the bill of speakers giving free talks.

With no disrespect to those creative icons intended, it's Groening who will undoubtedly prove the major drawcard here given his indelible contributions to contemporary Western pop-culture through his animated creations The Simpsons and Futurama, not to mention his cult-classic comic series Life In Hell — and he seems to be acutely aware of just how revered he is, even half-a-planet away from Springfield.

"The most intense Simpsons fanatics I've met are from Australia, so I'm coming to Sydney to check out all you lunatics," Groening said in a statement. 

"I'm going to share stories of the making of The Simpsons and show embarrassing home movies and rarely-seen animation, including oddball outtakes and uncensored Itchy & Scratchy cartoons." 

His GRAPHIC talk will be titled Secrets Of The Simpsons, And A Couple Of Milhouse Fun Facts, while he and Barry will conduct a conversational session called Love, Hate & Comics: The Friendship That Would Not Die.

"GRAPHIC exists to highlight and champion those singular voices in comics, animation, illustration and contemporary music that are capable of producing great art, but are usually passed over in traditional arts conversations," GRAPHIC co-curator and Sydney Opera House head of contemporary music Ben Marshall said in a statement. "I think there’s no better embodiment of this idea, dead or alive, than Matt Groening — which is why we’ve been chasing him to appear at GRAPHIC for six years. We can’t quite believe the moment’s finally here and doubly thrilled it’s with his close friend and cartoonist extraordinaire Lynda Barry.

"One of Matt’s many feats has been to smuggle the subversive underground/cartooning idiom of Crumb, Spiegelman, McCay and countless others into the ultimate mass-market vehicle of a TV family sitcom that also doubles as one of the most sophisticated (and warm) critiques of modern life imaginable. The huge successes of Futurama, Life In Hell and especially The Simpsons also give the lie to H. L. Mencken’s cutting line that ‘nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public’.

"The entire festival’s ticketed and free program is a labour of love by [co-curator] Jordan [Verzar] and me exploring this notion of overground/unground voices striking powerful notes in popular culture — enjoy."

GRAPHIC Festival 2016 will be held at various venues across the Sydney Opera House from Friday 4 to Saturday 5 November.

Tickets go on sale for the general public from 9am this Friday, 16 September, via the Sydney Opera House.

For more information, see GRAPHIC Festival's website.