Artist Bio - BILL GRIFFITH

"ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?"
This non sequitur utterance by the clown-suited philosopher/media star ZIPPY THE PINHEAD has become so oft-quoted that it is now in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Zippy has in fact become an international icon, even appearing on the Berlin Wall.
Zippy's creator, BILL GRIFFITH, found inspiration for Zippy from several sources, among them the sideshow "pinheads" in Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks. The name "Zippy" springs from "Zip the What-Is-It?" a "freak" exhibited by P.T. Barnum from 1864 to 1926. Zip's real name was William Henry Jackson, born in 1842.

Coincidentally, Griffith (as he discovered in 1975, five years after creating Zippy) bears the same name. He was born William Henry Jackson Griffith (in 1944), named after his great-grandfather, well-known photographer of the
Old West William H. Jackson (1842-1941).

Griffith began his comics career in New York City in 1969. His first strips were published in the East Village Other and Screw Magazine and featured an angry amphibian named MR. THE TOAD. In 1970 he ventured to San Francisco to join the burgeoning underground comics movement and made his home there until 1998.

His first major comic book titles included "Tales of Toad" and "Young Lust", a best-selling series parodying romance comics of the time.

Griffith was co-editor of "Arcade, The Comics Revue" for its seven issue run in the mid-70s and worked with the important underground publishers throughout the seventies and up to the present: Print Mint, Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink and Fantagraphics Books. The first Zippy strip appeared in Real Pulp #1 (Print Mint) in 1970. The strip went weekly in 1976, first in the Berkeley Barb and then syndicated nationally through Rip Off Press.

In 1980 weekly syndication was taken over by Zipsynd (later Pinhead Productions), owned and operated by the artist. Zippy also appeared in the pages of the National Lampoon and High Times from 1977 to 1984. He became an irregular contributor to The New Yorker in 1994.

In 1985 the San Francisco Examiner asked Griffith to do Zippy six days a week, and in 1986 he was approached by King Features Syndicate to take the daily strip to a national audience.Sunday color strips began running in 1990.

Mr. Griffith still creates his daily Zippy Strip for King Features, which can be seen on his website here: https://www.zippythepinhead.com/

www.zippythepinhead.com

"In two decades, Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead has been transformed from a one-shot gag into the idiot savant of our whirling consumer culture. Griffy's tirades against advertising, truckers' caps, and Bruce Springsteen are hilarious, but he'd be just another elitist snotball without Zippy's cut-and-paste giddiness. Together they're irrisistible: the good cop/bad cop of surrealist social criticism. Zippy's not the biggest fool this country has - we elect those - but he is our best."

- Entertainment Weekly

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