Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
After exploring a world populated by “anthropomorphic rabbits and a pair of gay lovers” for over 30 years, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening is putting down his pen and ending his highly acclaimed comic strip, “Life in Hell.” 
  
 The last “Life in Hell,” Groening’s 1,669th strip, was released on Friday, June 15. For the next four weeks, editors will have their choice of strips from Groening’s extensive archive before they close up shop in July on Friday the 13, which seems oddly appropriate. 
  
 “I’ve had great fun, in a Sisyphean kind of way, but the time has come to let Binky and Sheba and Bongo and Akbar and Jeff take some time off,” Groening, 58, said by email. 
  
 “It’s hard to imagine how the business model that sustained alternative social-commentary and political cartooning for two decades (and is now all but dead) would have evolved had papers not discovered the power of Groening’s strip and its ability to attract readers,” said syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall by phone. 
  
  
  
 The popularity of “Life in Hell” opened a path for a new breed of alternative cartoonists to appear in alt-weeklies across the country, cartoonists like Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Ward Sutton, Keith Knight and Rall. It also showcased the power of sharp, biting cartoons to editors looking to attain and grow a new group of readers. 
  
 “Groening is modern cartooning’s rock God, a Moses who came down from the mountain (or the East Village office of the Voice) and handed us the rules we followed,” said Rall. 
  
 “Life in Hell”‘s newspaper count has dwindled over the years as cutbacks and consolidation forced out many features. Syndicated by Acme Features Syndicate, which Groening created, the strip hit a peak of nearly 380 papers in the early 1990s. In recent years, the strip appeared in less than 40. 
  
 One high-profile cancellation came from LA Weekly, which removed the strip back in 2009 due to budget cuts. Pandora Young, an editor for Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA (and a former LA Weekly staffer), was incensed by the news. 
  
 “Groening has been good to the Weekly over the years — making himself available to the staff for interviews, illustrating covers for the Weekly for the paper’s small standard fee despite his enormous success, and continuing to read the paper itself,” Young wrote when she found out. 
  
 “Dropping the cartoon seems incredibly short-sighted, so it’s probably safe to assume it was a decision made by the corporate offices in Phoenix.” 
  
 “Life in Hell” actually earned Groening his big break in Hollywood. It started running in Wet Magazine in 1978, then moved to the now-defunct LA Reader, where Groening worked. The strip eventually made its way to LA Weekly. Its popularity grew, amassing a client list of more than 250 papers, when producer Polly Platt noticed “Life in Hell” and showed it to actor/producer James L. Brooks. 
  
 Brooks contacted Groening and wanted him to develop a series of “bumpers” based on “Life in Hell” for “The Tracey Ullman Show.” Groening was a bit apprehensive at the thought of handing over the rights to his characters, so he created the Simpsons to fill the slot. 
  
 For Sondra Gatewood, who has handled syndication duties for Groening over the years, the end of “Life in Hell” is bittersweet. 
  
 “It’s been a delight working for Matt Groening for the past 24 years, and the ending of ‘Life in Hell’ leaves me with mixed and melancholic feelings,” said Gatewood by phone. 
  
 “I’ve thought about comic strips every day for the past 24 years. How does it get any better than that?” 
  
 This is the final “Life is Hell” strip, which ran Friday, June 15. 
  
 Rob Tornoe is a political cartoonist and a Poynter contributor. See more of his work at RobTornoe.com, and follow him on twitter @RobTornoe. ||||| Crudely drawn rabbits Binky, Sheba, and Bongo, and their little gay pals Akbar and Jeff, never achieved the notoriety of the Simpsons. But unlike the no-less-crudely drawn Springfield crew that debuted on Fox in 1987, they belonged to Matt Groening free and clear in the panels of Life in Hell, the syndicated weekly comic strip that the part-time cartoonist discontinued last week after 32 years. With a new season of Futurama starting on June 20th and more than 500 episodes of The Simpsons in the can, the question isn't so much why Groening is quitting Life in Hell, but rather how he kept it so incisive and funny for so long. 
  
 Why pull the plug on Life in Hell now? Did you simply run out of jokes? 
  
 It's pretty obvious that I ran out of jokes a couple of decades ago – but that doesn't stop any cartoonist! 
  
 Seriously, though, what drove you to keep drawing it week after week for all those years? 
  
 When I started doing the comic strip, it was a great forum for all of my creativity. I'd think about the comic strip all week, spend a day drawing it, and then start thinking about the next one. It was my complete and total focus. Then The Simpsons came along to preoccupy me, and I decided to see how long I could keep the comic strip going. Actually, a TV producer sneered at the strip and said, "Why do you bother? Give it up." Because of that, I dug in my heels and kept it going two decades longer than I might have. I also liked the idea of having one slice of my creative output being completely solo, unlike TV animation. It's very satisfying to sit down at a drawing table by yourself and solve a puzzle with a deadline. 
  
 How many papers were you in when you called it quits? 
  
 Thirty-eight. Weekly papers are having a tough time because of the Internet and all the problems of print journalism. I was proud to be in those papers, and I wish I could continue, but I gave it a shot for 30-odd years. I want to see if I can use the time I spent working on the strip to do something else creative, maybe something more ambitious. The comic strip kept me tethered to the drawing table every week and it will be nice to see what happens without it. 
  
 How many newspapers printed Hell at its peak? 
  
 It was in 250 papers for a while. I remember walking down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles with Gary Panter one day, and both of us being thrilled when we saw our strips soaking in the gutter. We were part of the landscape! 
  
 How many Life in Hell strips have you drawn altogether? 
  
 I don't know. Around 1,700 or so. 
  
 How has it changed over the decades? 
  
 It's gotten simpler. I stopped drawing backgrounds around the time I got into TV animation and began to focus on characters and dialog, with some exceptions. I didn't feel like I had to make a grand statement the way I did in some of my earlier strips. 
  
 Any plans to do anything with the Hell characters elsewhere? 
  
 I'm probably going to continue to do calendars, and there are many, many strips I haven't collected in books. I've toyed with the idea of putting out a complete edition. I may even do the strip again, I don't know. But probably not. 
  
 What are Life in Hell's biggest artistic inspirations? 
  
 First would be Charles Schultz's Peanuts, a strip about neurotic turmoil that was drawn very simply. As astute followers of Life in Hell will notice, Akbar and Jeff wear the same striped T-shirt as Charlie Brown. Peanuts was very important to me. I remember one comic in which Lucy makes a row of sand sculptures with her bucket and then stomps each one in succession. She looks at Charlie Brown and says, "I am torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy." As a kid I thought, "That's me! I can relate!" There's also Jules Feiffer, because he was able to do a weekly comic strip in the Village Voice as well as books and screenplays and everything else. He was a great role model. And then of course my former Evergreen State College classmate Lynda Barry, whose Ernie Pook's Comeek didn't treat the comic strip like old-time vaudeville. It wasn't setup, setup, punch line. She's an underacknowledged pioneer of a lot of things people are doing in graphic novels and graphic memoirs. 
  
 Which Hell strips are you proudest of? 
  
 I like all of the early relationship strips that were collected in Love Is Hell, where I pretended to be an expert in relationships and did comics like "The Nine Types of Boyfriends," "Sixteen Ways to End a Relationship," "Twenty-Four Things Not to Say in Bed," and other arbitrarily numbered lists. My very favorite strips over the years, however, were the self-indulgently parental ones in which I tape recorded and then illustrated my kids' arguments and stories. Now they say, "We're not funny anymore, Dad. And neither are you." 
  
 How did you wrap it all up? What happens in the final "Life in Hell"? 
  
 Binky says to his girlfriend, "Just once I want to hear the three sweetest little words in life come from your lips." She says, "I forgive you." And he says, "Close enough!" |||||
A:
Matt Groening has decided to pull the plug on acclaimed comic strip Life in Hell, 34 years after he started it and many years after its anthropomorphic rabbits and gay lovers were eclipsed by his other creations. Groening, 58, started the strip when he was a struggling artist in 1978 and kept producing it weekly even after becoming a multimillionaire, although cuts to comic pages nationwide saw its circulation fall to fewer than 40 publications from a peak of 380. In the mid-80s, Groening was asked to animate the strip's characters for the Tracey Ullman Show, but, unwilling to hand over the rights to his creations, came up with new characters—the Simpsons. In a Rolling Stone interview, Groening says he kept doing the strip because he enjoyed "one slice of my creative output being completely solo," and because he "dug in his heels" when a sneering TV executive asked him why he bothered to continue with it. "I’ve had great fun, in a Sisyphean kind of way, but the time has come to let Binky and Sheba and Bongo and Akbar and Jeff take some time off," Groening tells Poynter. The final Life in Hell strip, the 1,669th, was released on Friday. Click here to see it.