Customer Reviews

King Pin

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Are we having fun yet? Yes, yes we are., September 22, 2007


What struck me most about rereading this collection of Zippy strips from 1986-87 is how non-dated they were. This could be the bohemian/existentialist underground at any time. Plus, you have strips mentioning global warming and cell phones from over 20 years ago. It is timeless. And like all truly great comic strips, when you read a solid block of them you begin to slip into a certain unique atmosphere or mind-set (Krazy Kat comes to mind.)

It is nice to see that Zippy has endured. I always considered it ironic (when you are in your 20's and 30's things are always striking you to be ironic) that so many people attacked the strip for being "meaningless." It was the times that were meaningless- the strip was just pointing that out in a Zen-like fashion. That was the point of all the non-sequiturs and absurdities dealing with daily life, especially the daily life of outsiders. Everything was becoming meaningless noise. The constant bombardment from the media was making everything equally worthless- distracting us from what really was important.

Yet when you have comments on Republicans making war to take the people's minds off a miserable economy you get a real sense of deja vu. You realize that things are ten times worse than they were in the 80's- and the same sort of b*st*rds are in charge. That isn't strictly funny, but then Zippy, like the Yellow Kid a century before him, was always a muckraker.
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