In Zippy’s latest collection of daily and color strips (with additional pages!), the tour of “Dingburg” continues; we drop in on dozens of Dingburgers and observe them in their natural habitat. The city “inhabited entirely by pinheads” can be seen as a metaphor for the world we live in today — or not.
In any event, we watch as Zippy and his fellow Dingburg residents hunt and bag “Speedy Alka Seltzer,” hear voices in their refrigerators, become addicted to Riboflavin, enjoy fondling newsprint, believe that “wahoo bark” attracts the opposite sex, and worship Joan Rivers. There’s also the extended series in which Zippy has a long (and donut-based) conversation with God and another in which we meet a pinhead poet who bears a striking resemblance to Charles Bukowski. Are we having fun yet?
“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 irresistible: 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
“No other strip challenges the reader in such a smart way.” —Time
Bill Griffith is the artist behind the legendary weekly comic Zippy. Griffith's prolific output has been included in such publications as the Village Voice, National Lampoon, and the New Yorker. Along with Art Spiegelman, Griffith co-founded the influential anthology Arcade and is credited for coining the popular phrase, "Are we Having Fun Yet?" He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife, the cartoonist Diane Noomin.
204 page paperback
Fantagraphics, 2010
