Zippy the Pinhead
Encyclopedia
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
created by Bill Griffith. The character of Zippy the Pinhead initially appeared in underground
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...
publications during the 1970s. It is distributed by King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...
to more than 100 newspapers, and Griffith self-syndicates strips to college newspapers and alternative weeklies.
Origin
Zippy made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix #1 in March 1971. The strip began in The Berkeley BarbBerkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the...
in 1976 and was syndicated nationally soon after, originally as a weekly strip. In a 2008 interview with Alex Dueben, Griffith recalled how it all began:
- I first saw the 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks in 1963 at a screening at Pratt InstitutePratt InstitutePratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
in Brooklyn, where I was attending art school. I was fascinated by the pinheads in the introductory scene and asked the projectionist (who I knew) if he could slow down the film so I could hear what they were saying better. He did and I loved the poetic, random dialog. Little did I know that Zippy was being planted in my fevered brain. Later, in San Francisco in 1970, I was asked to contribute a few pages to Real Pulp Comics #1, edited by cartoonist Roger Brand. His only guideline was to say "Maybe do some kind of love story, but with really weird people." I never imagined I'd still be putting words into Zippy's fast-moving mouth some 38 years later.
Zippy has a cult following
Cult following
A cult following is a group of fans who are highly dedicated to a specific area of pop culture. A film, book, band, or video game, among other things, will be said to have a cult following when it has a small but very passionate fan base...
, but some other readers remain confused, prompting the official Zippy website to feature a tutorial on understanding the strip. When William Randolph Hearst III
William Randolph Hearst III
William Randolph Hearst III became president of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation in early 2003. Son of William Randolph Hearst, Jr...
took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1985, he offered Griffith an opportunity to do Zippy as a daily strip. Several months later it was picked up for worldwide daily distribution
Daily strip
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays....
by King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...
in 1986. The Sunday Zippy
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...
debuted in 1990. When the San Francisco Chronicle canceled Zippy briefly in 2002, the newspaper received thousands of letters of protest, including one from Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
, who called Zippy "by far the very best daily comic strip that exists in America." The Chronicle quickly restored the strip but dropped it again in 2004, leading to more protests as well as grateful letters from non-fans. The strip continues to be syndicated in many newspapers but often ranks at or near the bottom of reader polls.
The strip is unique among syndicated multi-panel dailies for its characteristics of literary nonsense
Literary nonsense
Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that uses sensical and nonsensical elements to defy language conventions or logical reasoning...
, including a near-absence of either straightforward gags or continuous narrative, and for its unusually intricate artwork, which is reminiscent of the style of Griffith's 1970s underground comics.
The Zippy website allows readers to scroll through thousands of Zippy daily and Sunday strips. A "Strip Search" feature also allows search by title, date or key word(s).
Characters and story
Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by the microcephalicMicrocephaly
Microcephaly is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which the circumference of the head is more than two standard deviations smaller than average for the person's age and sex. Microcephaly may be congenital or it may develop in the first few years of life...
Schlitzie
Schlitzie
Schlitzie , possibly born Simon Metz, and legally Schlitze Surtees, was an American sideshow performer and occasional actor, best known for his role in the 1932 movie Freaks and his life-long career on the outdoor entertainment circuit as a major...
, from the film Freaks
Freaks
Freaks is a 1932 American Pre-Code horror film about sideshow performers, directed and produced by Tod Browning and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a cast mostly composed of actual carnival performers. The film was based on Tod Robbins' 1923 short story "Spurs"...
(which was enjoying something of a cult revival at the time) and P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum
Phineas Taylor Barnum was an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the circus that became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus....
's sideshow performer, Zip the Pinhead
Zip the Pinhead
Zip the Pinhead, born William Henry Johnson , was an American freak show performer famous for his oddly tapered head.- Early life :...
(who may not have been a microcephalic, but was nevertheless billed as one). (Coincidentally, Zip the What-Is-Its real name was William Henry Jackson or Johnson (according to various sources); Griffith's full name is William Henry Jackson Griffith, after his great-grandfather
William Henry Jackson
William Henry Jackson was an American painter, Civil War, geological survey photographer and an explorer famous for his images of the American West...
, the noted photographer.) However, Zippy is distinctive not so much for his skull shape, or for any identifiable form of brain damage, but for his enthusiasm for philosophical non sequitur
Non sequitur (absurdism)
A non sequitur is a conversational and literary device, often used for comedic purposes. It is a comment that, because of its apparent lack of meaning relative to what it follows, seems absurd to the point of being humorous or confusing....
s ("All life is a blur of Republicans
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
and meat!"), verbal free association
Free association
Free association may refer to:*Free association , a clinical technique of psychoanalysis devised by Sigmund Freud*Free Association, a musical group formed by David Holmes for the Code 46 soundtrack...
, and the pursuit of popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
ephemera. His wholehearted devotion to random artifacts satirizes
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
the excesses of consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...
. Zippy's unpredictable behavior sometimes causes severe difficulty for others, but never for himself.
Zippy almost always wears a yellow muumuu
Muumuu
The muumuu or muumuu is a loose dress of Hawaiian origin that hangs from the shoulder. Like the Aloha shirt, muumuu exports are often brilliantly colored with floral patterns of generic Polynesian motifs. Muumuu for local Hawaiian residents are more subdued in tone...
/clown suit with large red polka dots, and puffy, white clown
Clown
Clowns are comic performers stereotypically characterized by the grotesque image of the circus clown's colored wigs, stylistic makeup, outlandish costumes, unusually large footwear, and red nose, which evolved to project their actions to large audiences. Other less grotesque styles have also...
shoes.
He is married to a nearly identical pinhead named Zerbina, has two children, Fuelrod
Nuclear fuel
Nuclear fuel is a material that can be 'consumed' by fission or fusion to derive nuclear energy. Nuclear fuels are the most dense sources of energy available...
(a boy) and Meltdown
Nuclear meltdown
Nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
(a girl), both apparently in their early teens, and owns a cat named Dingy. He has four close friends: Claude Funston, a hapless working man; Griffy, a stand-in for Bill Griffith, who often appears in the strip to complain about various aspects of modern life; Shelf-Life, a fast-talking schemer always looking for "the next big thing"; and Vizeen Nurney, a 20-something lounge singer who, despite her rebellious image, has an optimistic and sympathetic nature. A humanoid toad
Toad
A toad is any of a number of species of amphibians in the order Anura characterized by dry, leathery skin , short legs, and snoat-like parotoid glands...
, Mr. Toad (less commonly Mr. the Toad) who embodies blind greed and selfishness, appears occasionally, as do The Toadettes, a group of mindless and interchangeable amphibians, who pop up here and there.
Zippy's angst-ridden twin brother Lippy also frequently appears. He is portrayed as Zippy's total opposite, often dressed in a conservative suit, thinking sequentially and avoiding his brother's penchant for non-sequiturs. In a daily strip dated 8 March 2005, he is depicted as being deeply moved by the poetry of Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
, the landscape paintings of Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery.-Life:...
and the music of John Tesh
John Tesh
John Frank Tesh is an American pianist and composer of pop music, as well as a radio host and television presenter. His 10-year-old 'Intelligence for Your Life Radio Show' reaches 14.2 Million listeners/week, and is syndicated by Teshmedia on 400 stations in US, Canada, and the UK...
.
Zippy's favorite foods are taco sauce and Ding Dongs.
San Francisco Zoo
The San Francisco Zoo, housing more than 260 animal species, is a zoo located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, California, between Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean along the Great Highway...
). The website encourages people to send photos of interesting places for Zippy to visit in the strip.
In 2007, Griffith began to focus his daily strip on Zippy's "birthplace", Dingburg. Griffith said, "Over the years, I began to expand Zippy's circle of friends beyond my usual cast of characters to a wider world of people like Zippy--other pinheads. I kept this up for a few months, happily adding more and more muu-muu-clad men and women until one day the whole thing just reached critical mass. The thought then occurred, 'Where do all these friends of Zippy live? Do they live in the real world which Zippy has been seen escaping for years—or do they live apart, in a pinhead world of their own?' Thus Dingburg, 'The City Inhabited Entirely by Pinheads' was born. It even had a motto: 'Going too far is half the pleasure of not getting anywhere'. The logical next step was to imagine Dingburg streets and neighborhoods—to create a place where Zippy's wacky rules would be the norm and everyone would play 24-hour Skeeball and worship at the feet of the giant Muffler Man. Zippy had, at last, found his home town."
His most famous quotation is "Are we having fun yet?", which has become a catchphrase. It appears in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, often simply called Bartlett's, is an American reference work that is the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotations...
. At the 2003 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, Griffith recalled the phone call from Bartlett's:
- When Bartlett's approached me in—I forget what year, five or six years ago—I got a call from the editor. And he was going to give me credit for the "Are we having fun yet" saying, but he wanted to know exactly where Zippy had first said it. I did some research (I had no idea), and I eventually found... the strip "Back to Pinhead, the Punks and the Monks" from Yow #2 in 1979... That's the first time he said, "Are we having fun yet?" Certainly not intended by me to be anything more than another non sequitur coming out of Zippy's mind.
Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!"
Appearances elsewhere
Following rumors of a Zippy movie project, Griffith devoted dozens of strips to his real and imagined dealings with Hollywood. An animated television series, to be produced by Film Roman and co-written by Diane NoominDiane Noomin
Diane Noomin is an American comics artist associated with the underground comics movement, best known for her character Didi Glitz. She is the editor of the anthology series Twisted Sisters, and one of the original contributors to Wimmen's Comix. She has also done theatrical work, creating a stage...
, was in negotiations from 1996 to 2001, but was abandoned due to lack of financing.
On July 9, 2004, Zippy made his stage debut in San Francisco in Fun: The Concept at the Dark Room Theatre. Bill Griffith approved of the adaptation, though he did not work on the project. Fun: The Concept was adapted by Denzil J. Meyers with Jim Fourniadis.
A collection of about 1,000 Zippy quotes was formerly packaged and distributed with the Emacs
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
text editor. Most installations of the "fortune" command, available on most Unix-type systems, also contain this collection. This gives Zippy a very wide audience, since most Emacs users can have a random Zippy quote printed on their screen by typing "M-x yow" and most Linux or BSD users can get a random quote by typing "fortune zippy" in a shell
Shell (computing)
A shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users of an operating system which provides access to the services of a kernel. However, the term is also applied very loosely to applications and may include any software that is "built around" a particular component, such as web...
. However, as a result of a decision by Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
motivated by copyright concerns http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-06/msg00290.html, these quotes have been erased for GNU Emacs 22 http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/emacs/etc/yow.lines?revision=1.11&root=emacs&view=markup.
Live action footage of an actor portraying Zippy (Ron Brannan) and singing a song about the character was included in the 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential
Comic Book Confidential
Comic Book Confidential is an American/Canadian documentary film, released in 1988. Directed by Ron Mann and written by Mann and Charles Lippincott, the film is a survey of the history of the comic book medium in the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s, as an art form and in social...
.
This song ('I'm Zippy') is available for free download on the official website (http://www.zippythepinhead.com/media/I_mZippy.mp3)
In the Seinfeld
Seinfeld
Seinfeld is an American television sitcom that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, lasting nine seasons, and is now in syndication. It was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the latter starring as a fictionalized version of himself...
episode "The Stall
The Stall
"The Stall" is the seventy-sixth episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld. It is the twelfth episode of the fifth season, and first aired on January 6, 1994.-Plot:...
" Elaine's boyfriend Tony (played by Dan Cortese
Dan Cortese
Daniel James "Dan" Cortese ; born September 14, 1967) is an American actor, director and spokesperson. He is known for his roles as Perry Rollins on Veronica's Closet and as Vic Meladeo on What I Like About You.-Early life:...
) falls during a rock climbing adventure with Kramer and George. In the aftermath of the incident Elaine says Tony might look like a monster; Jerry then says he might look like Zippy the Pinhead.
In 2010, The Theatre Project of Baltimore presented "Zippy the Pinhead: The Musical", co-produced, written and directed by Lorraine Whittlesey of Private Sector Productions. The show ran from November 14 to 21, 2010. Griffith was involved as creative consultant.
Books
- Zippy Stories. Berkeley: And/Or, 1981. ISBN 0-915904-58-6. San Francisco: Last GaspLast GaspLast Gasp is a book and underground comix publisher and distributor based in San Francisco, California.- History :Founded in 1970 by Ron Turner to publish the ecologically-themed comics magazine Slow Death Funnies, followed by the all-female anthology It Ain't Me Babe, Last Gasp soon became a major...
, 1986. ISBN 0-86719-325-5 - Nation of Pinheads. Berkeley: And/Or, 1982. ISBN 0-915904-71-3 Reprinted, San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1987. ISBN 0-86719-365-4 Zippy strips, 1979-1982.
- Pointed Behavior. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1984. ISBN 0-86719-315-8 Zippy strips, 1983-1984.
- Are We Having Fun Yet? Zippy the Pinhead's 29 Day Guide to Random Activities and Arbitrary Donuts. New York: Dutton, 1985. ISBN 0-525-48184-2 Reprinted, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1994. ISBN 1-56097-149-5
- Pindemonium. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1986. ISBN 0-86719-348-4 Zippy strips, 1985-1986.
- King Pin: New Zippy Strips. New York: Dutton, 1987. ISBN 0-525-48330-6 Zippy strips, 1986-7.
- Pinhead's Progress: More Zippy Strips. New York: Dutton, 1989. ISBN 0-525-48468-X Zippy strips, 1987-8.
- From A to Zippy: Getting There Is All the Fun. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. ISBN 0-14-014988-0 Zippy strips, 1988-90.
- Zippy's House of Fun: 54 Months of Sundays. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1995. ISBN 1-56097-162-2 (Color strips, May 1990 - September 1994)
- Zippy and beyond: A Pinhead's Progress - Comic Strips, Stories, Travel Sketches and Animation Material. San Francisco: Cartoon Art Museum, 1997.
- Zippy Annual: A millennial melange of microcephalic malapropisms and metaphysical muzak. ("Vol. 1", "Impressions based on random data".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000. ISBN 1-56097-351-X
- Zippy Annual 2001. ("Vol. 2", "April 2001 - September 2001".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001. ISBN 1-56097-472-9
- Zippy Annual 2002. ("Vol. 3", "September 2001 - October 2002".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002. ISBN 1-56097-505-9
- Zippy Annual 2003. ("Vol. 4", "October 2002 - October 2003".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. ISBN 1-56097-563-6
- Zippy: From Here to Absurdity. ("Vol. 5", "November 2003 - November 2004".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004. ISBN 1-56097-618-7
- Type Z Personality. ("Vol. 6", "December 2004 - December 2005".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005, ISBN 1-56097-698-5
- Connect the Polka Dots. ("Vol. 7", December 2005 - August 2006".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006. ISBN 978-1-56097-777-3
- Walk a Mile in My Muu-Muu. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2007. ISBN 978-1-56097-877-0
- Welcome to Dingburg. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2008. ISBN 978-1-56097-963-0
- Ding Dong Daddy from Dingburg. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60699-389-7
External links
- Official site
- Understanding the Zippy comic strip
- Toonopedia
- The Real Zip the Pinhead from Liberty Corner, New Jersey
- Still asking "Are we having fun yet?" by Bill Griffith, transcript of Griffith's talk at the 2003 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels
- Photos of the opening night of the stage play Fun: The Concept
- The Heideggarian Disruptions of Zippy the Pinhead by Ellen Grabiner, Philosophy Now (June 2011)
- 2003 TV interview with Bill Griffith in his Connecticut studio. The "Zippy Theme Song" is heard on the soundtrack.
- "Waymarking" website tracks down and photographs real world locations in Zippy strips. It also links the photos to the Zippy strip in which the location appeared.
- BBC/Current Affairs interview with Griffith by Phil Jupitus, 2008.