That Bart is a cartoon character — a sheaf of drawings animated by smart writing and the unique vocal stylings of Nancy Cartwright — makes him both "real" and surreally supple. Cartoon figures can do more things, endure more knocks on the noggin, get away with more cool, naughty stuff than the rest of us who are animated only by a telltale heart. The face-offs of Bugs and Daffy in Chuck Jones' cartoons of the '50s involved many shotgun blasts and rearranged duckbills, but the humor and humiliation, the understanding of failure and resilience were instantly translatable to kids and adults alike. The pain was fake. The suffering, pal, was genuine.

Suffering and failure are at the core of The Simpsons, which was created by newspaper cartoonist Matt Groening as crudely drawn filler material for the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, then went weekly in 1990. A Honeymooners with kids, the series features a man in a deadening blue-collar job (Homer, the nuclear-plant safety inspector), his epochally exasperated wife (Marge of the mountainous blue hair) and three conflicted kids. Bart, 10, is clever and cunning but addled in class; Lisa, 8, is a near genius whose intelligence deprives her of friends; year-old Maggie expresses frazzled wisdom beyond her years with the merest suck on her pacifier.

Springfield boasts a teeming gallery of low- and medium-lifes — surely the densest, funniest supporting cast since the '40s farces of Preston Sturges. The church, school and pub are places of refuge and anxiety. But home, 742 North Evergreen Terrace, is where the show's heart is, where everyone's despair is muted by familial love. Homer (whom the writers hold in a sort of amazed contempt) bumbles into some egregious fix. Marge fusses and copes. Lisa sublimates her rancor by playing her sax. And Bart is ... Bart.

Lisa, when not condemning Bart and all his works (she once called him "the devil's cabana boy"), tries to explain him. "That little hell-raiser," she recently ranted, "is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart is not to blame. You can't create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings." Nice try, Lisa, but not quite. He's not Bartzilla. The kid knows right from wrong; he just likes wrong better.

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Dec. 31, 1990

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