After 35 years, Matt Groening — creator of “The Simpsons” — is retiring his acclaimed comic strip, “Life in Hell.” The final strip, Groening’s 1,669th, was released on Friday, June 15, 2012.

From Poynter:

“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.

Groening launched “Life in Hell” in 1977. Syndicated by Acme Features Syndicate — which Groening created — the strip appeared in nearly 380 papers and alt-weeklies in the early 1990s; however, recently, the strip appeared in less than 40.