Bill Griffith

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William Henry Griffith (born January 20, 1944) is an American cartoonist who works under the name Bill Griffith and Griffy.

He is best known for his surreal daily comic strip Zippy.

The catchphrase "Are we having fun yet?"

Early life, family and education

Griffith, a Brooklyn, New York City, grew up on Long Island, New York. Ed Emshwiller, a science fiction illustrator, who cites his contribution to the field of art, was one of his neighbors. Griffith, his father, and his mother all appeared on Emshwiller at one time or another; a young Griffith appears (along with his father) on the front of the September, 1957 issue of Science Fiction Stories. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cartooning from Pratt Institute in 1964 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cartooning from the School of Visual Arts.

Griffith began his comics career in 1969 in New York City. Mr. Byron's first comic strip in the East Village Other and Screw included an angry amphibian named Mr. The Toad.

Personal life

Griffith's mother Barbara had an affair with cartoonist Lawrence Lariar beginning in 1957; this became the basis for Bill Griffith's 2015 graphic novel Invisible Ink: My Mother's Private Love Affair With a Famous Cartoonist. Invisible Ink depicts various other facts and incidents concerning Griffith's family, including the fact that Griffith himself is the great-grandson of photographer and artist William Jackson and was named for him.

Nancy, Griffith's first wife, was also involved in the underground comix group.

Diane Noomin, a cartoonist who died in 2022) was his second wife. Griffith and Noomin moved from San Francisco to Connecticut in 1998. His studio is located in East Haddam, Connecticut.

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Career

Griffith began making underground comix in 1969. In 1970, he came to San Francisco, California, where he stepped into the underground comix movement and rose to prominence, first with the introduction of "an X-rated parody of girl's romance comics." Jay Kinney, a cartoonist, co-created the series. Tales of Toad was among the first big comic book titles to be published. He co-founded Arcade, the Comics Revue, with Art Spiegelman, and co-edited for its seven-issue run in the mid-1970s. Griffith has worked with some of the best underground publishers in the United States and beyond: Print Mint, Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink, and Fantagraphics Books have all been published throughout the decade and up to the present. He contributed comics and illustrations to a number of publications, including National Lampoon, High Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and The New York Times.

In 1971, the first Zippy strip appeared in the underground Real Pulp #1 (Print Mint) magazine. The strip appeared in the Berkeley barber first and then syndicated nationally through Rip Off Press. In 1976, the one-row strip debuted in the Berkeley Barbarian and is still available in weekly newspapers.

Griffy, his alter ego, was introduced to the strip in 1979. Griffy is described by him as "neuotic, self-righteous, and opinionated," someone with whom Zippy would unquestionably compare. Around 1979, I brought the two characters together, perhaps symbolically bringing together the two halves of my personality. It worked. Zippy's random nuttiness was more directed, and Griffy's cynical, critical persona had his aide, someone to bounce happily away from his constant study of everything and everyone around him."

The "Zippy Theme Song" was composed and performed in 1986, with lyrics by Fred Schneider of The B-52s and vocals by Manhattan Transfer's Janis Siegel. Phoebe Snow and Jon Hendricks, two singers, are also on the cut.

The daily Zippy strip (syndicated by King Features to more than 200 newspapers around the world) began in 1986. Griffith compares the strip's creation to jazz: "I'm conscious that I'm weaving pieces together, almost improvising, as if I were all the pieces in a little jazz combo, then stepping back to edit and fine tune often." Zippy is the most delights when he plays with words.

Thousands of Cubans took advantage of President Fidel Castro's decision to allow emigration for a limited period of time in October 1994. Griffith toured Cuba for two weeks during a period of mass exodus. In early 1995, Griffith published a six-week series of "comics journalism" articles about Cuban history and politics in Zippy. The Cuba series featured transcripts of Griffith's talks with many Cubans, including writers, government officials, and a Yoruba priestess.

As continuity strips gave way to humor strips, typeset episode subtitles took over striptyrefaction. Griffith maintains the tradition by prominenting a hand-lettered subtitle above each Zippy strip, despite being nodding toward the classic daily strips of yesteryear.

Griffith began to concentrate on Zippy's "birthplace," Dingburg, in 2007. "I began to expand Zippy's circle of friends beyond my usual cast of characters to a wider audience of people like Zippy," Griffith said. I followed this blog for a few months, slowly adding more muu-clad men and women until the entire thing reached a critical mass. Then came the question, "Where do all these Zippy friends live?" Do they live in the real world in which Zippy has been seen for years — or do they live separately in a pinhead world of their own?' Thus, Dingburg, 'The City Inhabited Entirely by Pinheads' was born. It had even had a tagline: 'Going too far is half the pleasure of not getting anywhere.' The next step was to imagine Dingburg streets and neighborhoods to make a place where Zippy's wildest dreams would be the rule and everyone would play 24-hour Skeeball and worship at the feet of the giant Muffler Man. Zippy had, at last, found his home town."

Griffith gave a talk on Zippy at Ann Arbor's University of Michigan in 2008. He outlined his "Top 40 List on Comics and Their Creation" in it, which has been reposted on numerous comics blog posts and is now available in four illustrated sections: part 1, part 2, and part 4.

Griffith worked with Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, Jay Lynch, Norman Saunders, Art Spiegelman, Bhob Stewart, and Tom Sutton, who designed the Topps Company's Wacky Packages trading cards for the Topps Company, for a brief period in the 1960s. Griffith recently unveiled Wacky Packs Old School Sketch Cards for Topps.

Griffith's memoir In 2015, Fantagraphics published Ink: My Mother's Ink: My Mother's Unconscious Love Affair, Affair Featuring Terry Ink, and in 2019 his graphic biography of Schlitzie the Pinhead appeared in Harry N. Abrams' book "The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead."

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