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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.

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The Family Circus, 7/24/04

The culture war for the soul of America rages on in The Family Circus. Who are you going to believe, Billy — Mommy, or the secular humanist park ranger who’s no doubt determined to undermine your family’s most cherished beliefs? That ranger was probably appointed under Bill Clinton’s watch anyway. You can get the real scoop from the park bookstore if you’ve had enough of the Park Service’s so-called “science.”

Today’s fun Family Circus fact: did you know that in Latin, the word circus originally just meant circle? The Romans also used it to describe the circular arenas where horse-racing, beast-fighting, and gladiatorial combat took place, which is where we get our meaning of the word from. So, you see, the name of the cartoon is in fact a bilingual pun, since the panel is always circular. Pretty clever, huh?

The Roman arena is also where many early Christians were sent to their death, so maybe there’s some symbolism there. These martyrs were massacred — just like Billy, Dolly, and Jeffy massacre the English language! OK, I’ll stop.

Incidentally, my friend Dalton has uncovered a vast conspiracy involving The Family Circus and Amazon.com. Click on the link to find out more — but prepare yourself emotionally for what you’ll learn!

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Boy, do I have prompt and responsive readers! For those of you who have been on tenterhooks about the career paths of the Apartment 3-G girls, but too lazy to read the comments, my plea to the public has been answered. A reader who goes only by the gender-ambiguous name of “Robin” says: “Tommie is a nurse. Margo is in PR or marketing or something like that. I *think* Lu Ann is a teacher.” That all sounds right to me (as Robin says, “Isn’t that all just painfully obvious, when you think about it?”), and if I had even the vaguest desire to do fact checking, I wouldn’t have posted the question to begin with, so I’m declaring Robin the winner, with the prize of getting his/her name published in the blog. You go, Robin!

Robin also points out that Lu Ann and Margo’s facial expressions would make much more sense if the art (but not the dialog) for the second and third panel were switched. If you look at the strip with this in mind, it’s so striking that I have to believe that somehow the panels got swapped during production. It’s just more proof that comics ought to be drawn, written, and composited in unionized facilities right here in the good old U.S. of A., rather than in poorly-ventilated third-world comics sweatshops.

There were also alternative suggestions as to what’s in Lu Ann’s cereal box, but they’re far too vile to report here. Have you people no decency?