Zippy: Type "Z" Personality (Zippy (Graphic Novels)) [Paperback]

Bill Griffith (Author)

Book Description

Series: Zippy (Graphic Novels) | Publication Date: March 8, 2006

America's last great newspaper strip, presented the way it should be read!

Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead is a pop culture icon. The surrealist-leaning character is one of the most recognizable figures on the newspaper pages, seen by tens of millions of people a day. Syndicated by King Features since 1986, Zippy is read in hundreds of daily newspapers across the country, while the Pinhead's trademark non sequitur, "Are we having fun yet?," has become so often repeated it's in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. His likeness has been graffitied on the Berlin Wall and aped for Saturday Night Live's classic "Conehead" sketches.

This new Zippy collection features approximately a year's worth of strips, from November 2004 through November 2005, including full-color Sundays. Unlike most newspaper pages, the book sports top-notch reproduction worthy of Griffith's master draftsmanship. Part satire, part philosophy, and part surrealism, Zippy is one having fun pinhead and the perfect antidote to the real world.

In Type "Z" Personality, Zippy's new collection of daily and Sunday strips, Zippy dabbles in haiku, visits the malls of Australia, talks to Albert Einstein, lampoons "Manga" and goes into a deep trance while bowling. And if all that wasn't enough, Zippy insults Dick Cheney while imagining he's the hood ornament on a 1931 Studebaker.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Subscribers to newspapers that run Zippy the Pinhead should be grateful for just how wonderful their world is. Every day they can open up the funnies and among formulaic strips read about a freak (of the Tod Browning variety) in a muu-muu who helps us comprehend our pop culture—soaked world in a most postmodern way. It's rare to find something so smart that's so accessible. To help newcomers get a handle on the strip, this collection opens with the six-part series Understand Zippy. Zippy and Griffith's cartoon alter—ego, Griffy, explain the philosophy of the strip, declaring that the boundary between high and low art shall not be observed and the absurd in life will be appreciated to the fullest. The rest of the book lives up to its promises with most of the strips revolving around Zippy speaking to roadside attractions—when he isn't speaking to works of cubism, that is. Griffith draws his characters in a stylized manner, but the real-life attractions (catalogued in the "Pindex" found in the back of the book) are drawn photorealistically. They blend together so well because of the compatible meeting of the bizarre. This is a strip that thrives on the mix between the real and the unreal. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

There aren't any really big sequences in this year's Zippy the Pinhead collection, such as the one in which Zippy and Zerbina were caught in a romance-comics continuum, or the one in which Griffy, Griffith's stand-in in the strip and Zippy's best friend, tried to get Zippy to relinquish the worship of giant roadside publicity sculpture. But the smaller series and the recurring situations here are absolute gold. In one, each member of the regular cast--Zippy, Zerbina, their kids Fuelrod and Meltdown, Griffy, voice of red-state consciousness Claude, irascible Mr. Toad, wheeler-dealer Shelf-Life, even the giant dog's head from the old Bay Area Doggie Diner drive-ins--is shown to have a secret life. Well, Doggie had one, a Vegas act with "all clean material." But as he tells Zippy, "Every dog has his day." "Life is a tough room," the pinhead sums up. Griffith's ongoing satire of commercialism and the ways it warps our minds is as sharp as ever. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; First Edition edition (March 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560976985
• ISBN-13: 978-0615189406
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,016,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)