I read a story in my paper about the last Simpsons episode (because of the mention of Albuquerque several times). Anyways, they said that that episode was done 9 months ago. So can anyone tell me how they get out so many episodes of a cartoon in a year? Do they have several teams working together all the time on different episodes or what?

Yes, there's more than one team working on the series. For example, "Clerks" had three teams of animators for the 6 episodes it had. I'm unsure what is common for a full season run.

JoeC

lotsa people in japan working round the clock.