Zippy The Pinhead
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, distributed by King Features.
The Zippy comic strip has a cult following of devoted readers; however, there are those who find the strip incomprehensible. This antagonism and confusion is so common that the official Zippy website contains a tutorial on understanding the comic strip .
The original home of the strip was the San Francisco Examiner, where it was first published daily in 1985. When the San Francisco Chronicle canceled Zippy 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 many other papers, but often ranks at or near the bottom of reader polls.
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 reminiscent of the style of Griffith's 1970s underground comics.
Characters and content
Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by the microcephalic 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). (Coincidentally, Zip the What-Is-It's 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, 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 sequiturs, verbal free association, and the pursuit of pop culture ephemera.
Zippy's unpredictable behavior sometimes causes severe difficulty for others, but never for himself.
Zippy almost always wears a yellow muumuu with large red polka dots, and puffy, white clown shoes.
He is married to a nearly identical pinhead named Zerbina, and has two children, Fuel-Rod and Meltdown. He has three 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, and Shelf-Life, a fast-talking schemer always looking for "the next big thing".
the Toad) who embodies blind greed and selfishness, appears occasionally, as does Zippy's angst-ridden brother, Lippy. The Toadettes, a group of mindless and interchangeable amphibians, also pop up here and there.
The actual sign for the San Francisco Doggie Diner, commonly portrayed in the comic strip as one of Zippy's conversational foils
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?," which has become a catch phrase. 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 #2 in 1979.
...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.
Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!"
Zippy in other media
Mikl Em as Griffy and Bryce Byerley as Zippy in a publicity photo from Fun: The Concept
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.
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. Meyers with Jim Fourniadis.
Following a criticism of Scott Adams' simple art style within Zippy the Pinhead, a series of Dilbert comic strips saw Dogbert parodying Zippy by name and character by creating a comic strip he intended to syndicate named "Pippy the Ziphead" (the strip was about a character identical to Zippy) which was a comic strip that disguised its total lack of any jokes by filling each panel with bizarre amounts of artwork.
Dogbert revealed that it had a single joke, which Dilbert correctly deduced to be on the reader.
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.
A collection of about 1,000 Zippy quotes was formerly packaged and distributed with the Emacs 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 did 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, these quotes have been erased for GNU Emacs 22.
Books
Zippy Stories.
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. ISBN 0-86719-348-4 Zippy strips, 1985-1986.
King Pin: New Zippy Strips.
ISBN 0-525-48468-X Zippy strips, 1987-8.
From A to Zippy: Getting There Is All the Fun.