Zippy the Pinhead is a fictional character who is the protagonist of Zippy, an American comic strip created by Bill Griffith. Zippy's most famous quotation, "Are we having fun yet?", appears in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and became a catchphrase. He almost always wears a yellow muumuu/clown suit[1] with large red polka dots, and puffy, white clown shoes.[2] (Other forms of attire may be seen when appropriate to the context, e.g. a toga.) Although in name and appearance, Zippy is a microcephalic, 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 ("All life is a blur of Republicans and meat!"), verbal free association, and pursuit of popular culture ephemera. His wholehearted devotion to random artifacts satirizes the excesses of consumerism.
The character of Zippy the Pinhead initially appeared in underground publications during the 1970s.[3] The Zippy comic is distributed by King Features Syndicate to more than 100 newspapers, and Griffith self-syndicates strips to college newspapers and alternative weeklies. The strip is unique among syndicated multi-panel dailies for its characteristics of literary nonsense, 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 comix.
Origin
Zippy made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comics #1 in March 1971, published by Print Mint.[4]
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 Institute 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.[5]
The strip began in the Berkeley Barb in 1976 and was syndicated nationally soon after (by Rip Off Press),[6] originally as a weekly strip. When William Randolph Hearst III 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 by King Features Syndicate in 1986, appearing in 60 daily papers by 1988.[6] The Sunday Zippy 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, who called Zippy "by far the very best daily comic strip that exists in America."[citation needed] The Chronicle quickly restored the strip but dropped it again in 2004, leading to more protests as well as grateful letters from non-fans.[citation needed]
The strip has developed a cult following[7] and continues to be syndicated in many newspapers.
Characters and story
Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by the microcephalicSchlitzie, 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 may not have been a microcephalic but was nevertheless billed as one.[8]
Griffith has never committed himself to a set origin story for Zippy; no fewer than five have appeared:
a strange visitor from another planet
a pinhead who wandered away from the circus
an android whose inventor didn't live to see its imperfections
the secret identity of a jaded heir to a fortune who decided to apply Zen to everyday life
a college student who inexplicably turned into a pinhead
Griffith also never committed himself to any set time period or home location for Zippy.
Griffith compares the creation of the strip to jazz: "When I'm doing a Zippy strip, I'm aware that I'm weaving elements together, almost improvising, as if I were all the instruments in a little jazz combo, then stepping back constantly to edit and fine-tune. Playing with language is what delights Zippy the most."[9]
Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!" Zippy's unpredictable behavior sometimes causes severe difficulty for others, but never for himself. (For example, drug dealers tried to use him as a drug mule, but lost their stash or were jailed.)
He is married to a nearly identical pinhead named Zerbina, has two children, Fuelrod (a boy) and Meltdown (a girl), both apparently in their early teens, and owns a cat named Dingy. His parents, Ebb and Flo, originally from Kansas, live in Florida. 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, the landscape paintings of Maxfield Parrish, and the music of John Tesh.[11]
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"
Vizeen Nurney, a 20-something lounge singer who, despite her rebellious image, has an optimistic and sympathetic nature
A humanoid toad, Mr. Toad (less commonly "Mr. the Toad") who embodies blind greed and selfishness, appears occasionally (along with his wife, Mrs. Toad, and their children, Mustang and Blazer), as do The Toadettes, a group of mindless and interchangeable amphibians, who pop up here and there; and the Stupidity Patrol, described by Bill Griffith as "cruising the streets of L.A., correcting the behavior of insensitive louts".[12] (Mr. Toad first appeared in underground strips done by Griffith in 1969.)[13]
The actual sign for the San Francisco Doggie Diner, commonly portrayed in the comic strip as one of Zippy's conversational foils
Another occasionally occurring character is God, appearing either as a disembodied head or a head superimposed on various peoples' bodies. He is depicted as either conversing with Zippy on various philosophical topics, or commenting on humanity in general.[14]
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). For a while the Zippy website encouraged people to send photos of interesting places for Zippy to visit in the strip.
In 2007, Griffith began to focus his daily strip on the fictional city of Dingburg, Maryland, Zippy's "birthplace" which, according to the cartoonist, is located "17 mileswest of Baltimore."[15] 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 muumuu-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 hometown."
In regard to Zippy's famous catchphrase, 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 ... 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[a] 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."[16]
Appearances elsewhere
Following rumors of a Zippy movie project that was never consummated, 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 Noomin, was in negotiations from 1996 to 2001.
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.[17]
A collection of about 1,000 Zippy quotes was formerly packaged and distributed with the Emacs text editor. Some 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. However, as a result of a decision by Richard Stallman prompted by FSF lawyer Eben Moglen, motivated by copyright concerns,[18] these quotes were erased in GNU Emacs 22.[19] Zippy under emacs now will only say "Yow! Legally-imposed CULTURE-reduction is CABBAGE-BRAINED!".[20] Zippy can be restored by replacing the yow file with one from an older Emacs.
After Griffith criticized Scott Adams' comic Dilbert for being "a kind of childish, depleted shell of a once-vibrant medium,"[21] Adams responded a year and half later on May 18, 1998, with a comic strip called Pippy the Ziphead, "cramming as much artwork in as possible so no one will notice there's only one joke... [and] it's on the reader."[22]Dilbert notes that the strip is "nothing but a clown with a small head who says random things" and Dogbert responds that he is "maintaining his artistic integrity by creating a comic that no one will enjoy."[23]
Zippy also makes an appearance in the 1995 round-robin work The Narrative Corpse where he takes the stick figure protagonist to Croatia for "peace and quiet". Another appearance can be found in the Ramones' comic book-themed 2005 compilation Weird Tales of the Ramones, consisting of Zippy asking to play "air glockenspiel" for the band.
Nation of Pinheads. Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1982. ISBN0-915904-71-3. Reprinted, San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1987. ISBN0-86719-365-4. Zippy strips, 1979–1982.
Pointed Behavior. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1984. ISBN0-86719-315-8. 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. ISBN0-525-48184-2. Reprinted, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1994. ISBN1-56097-149-5.
Pindemonium. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1986. ISBN0-86719-348-4. Zippy strips, 1985–1986.
King Pin: New Zippy Strips. New York: Dutton, 1987. ISBN0-525-48330-6. Zippy strips, 1986–7.
Pinhead's Progress: More Zippy Strips. New York: Dutton, 1989. ISBN0-525-48468-X. Zippy strips, 1987–8.
From A to Zippy: Getting There Is All the Fun. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. ISBN0-14-014988-0. Zippy strips, 1988–90.
Zippy's House of Fun: 54 Months of Sundays. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1995. ISBN1-56097-162-2. (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 Quarterly (eighteen collections, published from January, 1993 until March, 1998)—no ISBN identification for these publications.
Zippy Annual: A Millennial Melange of Microcephalic Malapropisms and Metaphysical Muzak. ("Vol. 1", "Impressions Based on Random Data".) Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000. ISBN1-56097-351-X.
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.
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