'The Simpsons' Creator Matt Groening & More Coming To Australia For GRAPHIC Festival

The Sydney Opera House is set to play host to one of the biggest names in cartooning later this year – the creator of both The Simpsons and Futurama, Matt Groening – as part of the sixth annual GRAPHIC festival weekend.

GRAPHIC celebrates everything illustration, animation, music and graphic storytelling, and will throw down on Friday, 4th and Saturday, 5th November 2016.

The weekend will also feature a live re-scoring of the first film George Lucas ever directed, THX 1138, as well as author Neil Gaiman, the Australian premiere of a dual talk by Groening and Lynda Barry, and a series of talks led by the likes of master Australian cartoonist Micheal Leunig and First Dog On The Moon.

Securing Groening for his Secrets Of The Simpsons, And A Couple Of Millhouse Fun Facts is undeniably the biggest khoo for GRAPHIC 2016.

“The most intense Simpsons fanatics I’ve met are from Australia, so I’m coming to Sydney to check out all you lunatics,” says Groening 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.”

GRAPHIC 2016 co-curator Ben Marshall says organizers had been trying unsuccessfully to secure Groening for the first five years of the festival.

“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,” he says.

“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.”