Zippy the Pinhead

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Zippy the Pinhead is the main character in the comic strip of the same name, created by Bill Griffith.

Contents

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Publication history

Zippy made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix #1 in March 1971. The comic strip began in The Berkeley Barb in 1976 and was syndicated nationally soon after, originally as a weekly strip; it has been a daily feature since 1985.

The Zippy comic strip has a cult following of devoted readers; however, many people find nothing humorous in Zippy and cannot comprehend the strip. This antagonism and confusion is so common that the official Zippy website contains a tutorial on understanding the comic strip [1]. When the original home of the Zippy daily strip, the San Francisco Chronicle, cancelled it briefly in 2002, the Chronicle received thousands of letters of protest, including one from Robert Crumb, 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 other papers, but often ranks at or near the bottom of reader polls[2].

The strip is unique among syndicated multi-panel dailies for its near-absence of either straightforward gags or continuous narrative, and for its unusually intricate artwork, which is only slightly simplified from the style of Griffith's 1970s underground comics.

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Characters and content

Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by several microcephalics, including Schlitzie, from the film Freaks (which was enjoying something of a cult revival at the time), and P.T. Barnum's sideshow performer, Zip the Pinhead (who was not a microcephalic, but was nevertheless billed as one)[3]. (Coincidentally, Zip the Pinhead's real name was William Henry Johnson; Griffith's full name is William Henry Jackson Griffith, after his great-grandfather, the noted photographer.) However, he is distinctive not so much for his skull shape, or for any identifiable form of brain damage, but for his enthusiasm for philosophical non sequiturs, verbal free association, and the pursuit of pop culture ephemera. His wholehearted devotion to random artifacts satirizes the excesses of consumerism. Zippy's unpredictable behavior sometimes causes severe difficulty for others, but never for himself.


Zippy always wears a yellow muumuu with large red spots, and clown shoes.

He is married to a nearly identical pinhead named Zerbina, and has two children, Fuel-Rod and Meltdown. He has two close friends: Claude Funston, a hapless working man, and Griffy, a stand-in for Bill Griffith who often appears in the strip to complain about various aspects of modern life. A humanoid toad, Mr. Toad (less commonly Mr. the Toad), appears occasionally, embodying blind greed and selfishness.

In his daily-strip incarnation, Zippy spends much of his time traveling and commenting on interesting places; recent strips focus on his fascination with roadside icons featuring giant beings; Zippy also frequently participates in his long-running conversation with the giant fiberglass doggie mascot of San Francisco's "Doggie Diner" chain (later, the Carousel diner near the San Francisco Zoo). The website encourages people to send photos of interesting places for Zippy to visit in the strip.

His most famous quote is "Are we having fun yet?" It became a catch phrase, and appears in Bartlett's Familiar 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, 5 or 6 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 [Comics] #2 in 1979. ...[T]hat'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.
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Zippy in other media

In 2004, Zippy made his stage debut in San Francisco in Fun: The Concept. Griffith approved of the adaptation, though he did not work on the project.

Rumors of a Zippy movie project have circulated for decades, and Griffith has 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 Noomin, was in negotiations from 1996 to 2001, but was abandoned due to lack of financing.

Live action footage of an actor portraying Zippy and singing a song about the character was included in the 1988 documentary, Comic Book Confidential. Stand-up comic Jim "The Bob" Wyand's work has been greatly influenced by Zippy's outlook.

A collection of about 1,000 Zippy quotes is packaged and distributed with the Emacs text editor [4]. 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" (on PC keyboards that's Alt-X, then y-o-w, then Enter) and most Linux or BSD users can get a random quote by typing "fortune zippy" in a shell.

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Books

  • 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
  • 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
  • From Here to Absurdity: Zippy November 2003 – November 2004. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004. ISBN 1-56097-618-7
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External links

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