City in boredom
Zippy the Pinhead, 7/25/04
Zippy the Pinhead is living proof that middle-of-the-road treacle isn’t the only thing that syndication inertia maintains past its sell-by date. With lots and lots of words, a cast of annoying and largely indistinguishable characters, and an unrelentingly negative attitude, Zippy is the Cathy of the surrealist/postmodern set. Occasionally I find the strip interesting and funny — I’ve particularly liked the daily strips for the past couple weeks, with various modern artists’ works on display in a high-falutin’ freak show. But more often the strips just feature Zippy having inane conversations with various enormous fiberglass roadside statues, or, even worse, Griffy simultaneously railing against the commercialization of art and whining about his inability to land an animation deal. If you’ve ever seen Wonderland, a fascinating documentary about Levittown, you know that Bill Griffith, who grew up there, is a bitter, bitter, bastard, and more and more that’s been coming through in Zippy the Pinhead. Usually, he’s just bitter about the world around him, but lately he seems to be increasingly bitter that his readership hasn’t taken his strip as a manifesto to, like, fix it or something. Today he seems to have reached a breaking point, declaring that running a bag factory would be better than continuing with the strip.
I’ve always why Zippy doesn’t take up more space in the Sunday paper than it does. Maybe it’s so darn anti-establishment that it can’t be held back by your rules that say that the Sunday comic is supposed to be bigger than the daily strip, maaaan. I should also mention in this context that, when I was a kid, a friend of my mom’s spotted a graffito under a bridge in Buffalo that read “ZIPPY THE PINHEAD — CITY IN FEAR,” and seemed to think it was a harbinger of a gang-ridden urban apocalypse, a la The Warriors. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
MC Slim JB
December 17th, 2004 at 11:57 pm
It’s funny: until I read your rant on Zippy, I had been reading Bill Griffith for years, rather uncritically, because I can remember a time when he was fresh and funny. His drawing has always been and remains among the best on the Boston Globe comics page. But you’re right: he hasn’t made me laugh in a long time. I guess I want him to succeed. He seems of a piece with that great underground comic art tradition that entranced me year ago, in Crumb’s halcyon days. Funny how easy it is to read a strip every day for years, even when it kind of sucks, the way I’ve been doing with Zippy for a couple of years now, without ever thinking about it. Maybe I’ll just stop reading hist text, and just appreciate his excellent renderings of fading roadside architecture.
Pseudo Kojo
January 20th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
I am less familiar with Zippy than I perhaps should be, but the figure in the driver’s seat of the truck in the last panel looks for all the world like a red-tinted klansman to me. What is that supposed to indicate? Am I insane?
Brucker
January 28th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
The figure in the truck is Zippy the Pinhead, poorly colored and inked too small to make out well. I have no idea what he’s doing there, since one would assume that upon Griffy dropping the strip, Zippy would cease to exist…
ranwulf
March 7th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
Sorry, but Zippy has always had the same effect on me that the winged monkeys from the Wizard of Oz had – utter and complete willies. Never understood the appeal.
Sal
March 16th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
Zippy has always deeply un-nerved me, as a good underground comic should. Years ago I spent a whole afternoon looking through a stack of old “Heavy Metal” magazines, and I was so creeped out that I can remember certain stories to the letter even today. Zippy will always be famous for the immortal quote: “Are we having fun yet?”…Well, are we?
Sherwood
June 1st, 2005 at 12:33 pm
This is about the dumbest strip in the universe. I’m irritated by Bill Griffith’s *chronic* assumption that if you don’t like the strip, it must be because you don’t “get” it. I get it AND I think it’s stupid!
Zippy: Talking to large fiberglass animals, wow. Mighta been funny the first time… isn’t funny anymore on the hundredth repetition. (I could say the same about the relentless non-sequiturs of early Zippy, but I think the strip actually had fans back then.) Where’s the creativity? WHERE?
Griffy: What a whiner. (Now, you COULD make a whiner character engaging on some level — but this one isn’t.) For some reason he’s outraged by the modern world’s taste for commercial schlock, even as he moons nostalgically over the commercial schlock of his youth. (And the point is what, exactly?) I think his nadir was when he was tearing his hair over a popular Monet exhibit — WHAT do those uncultured hordes GET out of Monet’s sunflowers? Um, what do YOU get out of ‘em, Mr. I’m-So-Special Griffith?
Yeah, we know — humor isn’t the main point of the strip… the characters represent existential Angst. Zippy is the free-flowing id, Griffy is the contorted ego, hag-ridden by the superego. Yeah, right. In order for that to work, we’d need a little more Zippy/Griffy interaction — there’s practically none — and some sense of who the hell Griffy IS underneath that mantle of kvetching. But there is no underneath. That’s his whole personality. One-dimensional, boring, unattractive, and embarrassingly self-revealing, if you happen to be Bill Griffith…
Sheila
June 3rd, 2005 at 6:37 am
You know what gets to me is the writer’s habit of writing “the” as “th’”. WHY???? He does it in places where you couldn’t possibly contract “the” to “th’”. Try it sometime. (”Th’ earth” is possible, “th’ bologna” isn’t. You need an initial vowel.) Is there some kind of secret signaling going on here, that’s lost on poor little me?
Brucker
August 3rd, 2005 at 12:36 pm
The strips definitely have been bogged down for several years now on the whole obsession with giant fiberglass statues. Used to be pretty much just the Doggy from S.F., but it eventually got out of hand.
I think about a year ago there was a short string of strips where Zippy’s friends did an “intervention” or something like that to deal with his obsession over the things, and I thought it would lead to an end of that sort of thing, but in a few weeks, he went right back to it.
BTW, Sheila, I actually say “th’ bologna” and can’t seem to leave the vowel out of “th’ earth”, so I disagree on that particular point. I don’t know why Griffith insists on writing that way, though. So people talk that way, nobody else bothers to write that way.
Steven
December 5th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
#4
Zippy…had appeal?
BTW, Zippy isn’t past the sell-by date. He started out stale AFAIK and hasn’t improved since. For reference, my first exposure to the Pinhead was when our college newspaper replaced Bloom Country with it. Everyone loved Opus, and dispised Zippy.
Hope that tells you how long the sour-puss attitude has gone on for.
Deckard Canine
August 1st, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I hadn’t realized how negative Griffy had gotten. Maybe I was too distracted by the silliness. Or maybe my interest in the comic was never strong enough for me to notice much in the way of trends. Nowadays, it takes an especially interesting drawing to get me to look at it again.
J H
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:10 am
To me, Zippy is ALWAYS worth reading because it always makes you think. There is always a deeper purpose served by the juxtapositions and non-sequiturs, and it’s nowhere near as “relentlessly negative” as Funky Winkerbean or For Better or For Worse. In sending up the emptiness of much of pop culture and the commercialization of everything, Zippy has made me laugh a heck of a lot more than just about any other comic strip. Zippy is true comic art, with a deeper message, that is actually funny to a lot of people. I know it is baffling to many and ripe for criticism, but I hate to see Zippy get mercilessly bashed offhandedly! (speaking of relentlessly negative…) It’s one of the few strips worth reading today.
Bentan
December 26th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Yeah and I can’t stand Bill Griffith’s whole attitude in slamming other comics that are more successful than his e.g. Dilbert. Arty-farty assholes like him should go live in a hole and stop “regaling” us with their pointless platitudes and unfunny strips.
Kevin Moore
July 12th, 2008 at 3:34 am
That Zippy the Pinhead graffiti was on a train trestle over Main Street near Hertel Avenue. I remember it vividly, because I lived nearby and passed under that trestle in my mom’s car as we drove around doing errands and whatnot. For my child’s brain it was like some weird calling to subversion, even though I had no idea what it meant. All I knew is that Zippy the Pinhead must be some radical leader of social anarchy — and not, say, a daily strip from the same syndicate that runs Beetle Bailey.
To be fair, in the 70s and 80s, ZTP was fucking brilliant.
Billy Freid
December 7th, 2009 at 3:57 am
R. Crumb loves Zippy. I love Zippy. You have to be intelligent to get it.