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by Bill Griffith
Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead is a pop culture icon. Born in
underground comix, the surrealist character is now one of the most recognizable
characters on the newspaper pages, and is currently in production as an animated
series to debut on the Showtime Network in 2002. Syndicated since 1986 by King
Features, ZIPPY is read in over 200
newspapers seven days a week. Zippy's trademark non-sequitur, "Are we
having fun yet?" has become so often-repeated that it is now in Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations. His likeness was graphittied on the former Berlin Wall,
while Dan Akroyd is rumored to have created his Saturday Night Live characters,
the Coneheads, after seeing Zippy for the first time. With Zippy Annual 2001
(a.k.a. "Z2K1"), all of Griffith's hilarious strips from 2000 and 2001 are
collected into one place to guide us into the 21st Century. Millennium fever
never seemed so, well, absurd. Frivolity is a stern taskmaster, and these
brilliant
black-and-white dailies and color Sundays (Griffith is a master of color
and the printing process of the newspaper page) spotlight Griffith's inimitably
existential and surreal sense of humor. "Bill Griffith's nationally syndicated
Zippy continually stretches the intellectual bounds of the daily newspaper
strip," writes the San Francisco Examiner.
Plus, it's damn funny.
SC, 160pg, PC
