Before his work in television, he created the syndicated cartoon Life in Hell[?], which is still carried in many weekly newspapers and has been anthologized in a series of books, such as:
His most notable works include animated TV shows The Simpsons and Futurama. The Bart Simpson character derives from the earlier comic strip.
He grew up in Portland, Oregon, and seems to have found names for some characters from major Portland street names such as Flanders, Lovejoy, Powell, Quimby, and Terwilliger.
He named the main family Simpson characters after his own family (he was not feeling very creative that day).
http://www.portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=12392
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump