Word: griffith
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When a crowd armed with donuts and taco sauce gathered at the San Francisco Chronicle's office last Thursday, they were prepared for spicy, sugary violence over the loss of their favorite daily comic strip. A reader poll had shown Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead" to be unpopular despite having first appeared as a daily in San Francisco over fifteen years ago. Had the city changed so much that it could no longer tolerate the strip's non-conformist structure and idiosyncratic ramblings? Most of America doesn't understand "Zippy," the best daily comic strip printed today. Here...
...Sync. His barbed commentary on actual trends, such as jet skis or the infantilization of men's fashion, will come as a shock to readers more used to the toothless "humor" of placating, status quo strips like "Beetle Bailey." What a relief to find no punch line. Griffith has actually made room for essays and meditations on the "funnies" page...
...Zippy Annual" has a large section dedicated to a series of strips about Zippy interacting with roadside novelty sculpture and diner architecture. Each one features a different giant-sized muffler man or androgynous ice-cream cone creature found at real places around the country. Essentially, Griffith uses the strip as an excuse to draw things he loves three time over - once per panel. A comparison to Warhol, who also loved repetition, commercial art and pop culture, feels natural. This way "Zippy" single-handedly appropriates Pop Art into the comics page the way the comics page got appropriated into...
...must have been rich to support his disciples." May Jakes put his emphasis on the plain preaching of the Gospel of Christ rather than on "ornate call-and-response cues and dramatic eruptions." Have we not had enough disappointments from those wealthy televangelist preachers of the 1980s? L. HOYT GRIFFITH Wirtz...
More meaningful to me are the repetitious mumblings of Zippy the Pinhead in the like-titled strip by Bill Griffith. "Zippy Annual" (Fantagraphics Books, October) collects the last year's-worth of this razor-sharp cultural critique and nonsense strip...