"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, 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. He ventured to San Francisco
in 1970 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.He 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. 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. Today Zippy appears in over 200 newspapers worldwide.
There have been over a dozen paperback collections of Griffith's
work and numerous comic book and magazine appearances, both
here and abroad. He became an irregular contributor to The New
Yorker in 1994. Griffith's inspiration for Zippy came 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).
"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
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. 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. Today Zippy appears in over 200 newspapers worldwide.
There have been over a dozen paperback collections of Griffith's
work and numerous comic book and magazine appearances, both
here and abroad. He became an irregular contributor to The New
Yorker in 1994. Griffith's inspiration for Zippy came 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).
