| Bill Griffith | |
|---|---|
 Griffith in 2012 | |
| Born | William Henry Jackson Griffith (1944-01-20)January 20, 1944 (age 81) |
| Area | Cartoonist |
| Pseudonym | Griffy |
Notable works | Young Lust Arcade Zippy the Pinhead Invisible Ink Nobody's Fool |
| Awards | Inkpot Award (1992)[1]Reuben Award (2023)[2] |
| Spouse | |
| Signature | |
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William Henry Jackson Griffith (born January 20, 1944) is an Americancartoonist who signs his workBill Griffith andGriffy. He is best known for hissurrealdaily comic stripZippy.[3] Thecatchphrase "Are we having fun yet?" is credited to Griffith.[4]
Over his career, which started in theunderground comix era, Griffith has worked with the industry's leading underground/alternative publishers, includingPrint Mint,Last Gasp,Rip Off Press,Kitchen Sink, andFantagraphics Books. He co-edited the notablecomics anthologiesArcade andYoung Lust, and has contributed comics and illustrations to a variety of publications, includingNational Lampoon,High Times,The New Yorker,The Village Voice andThe New York Times.
Born inBrooklyn,New York City,New York, Griffith grew up inLevittown onLong Island. He is the great-grandson and namesake of the photographer and artistWilliam Henry Jackson[5][6] (Jackson died at age 99 just two years before Griffith was born).
One of Griffith's neighbors wasscience fiction illustratorEd Emshwiller, whom Griffith credits with pointing him toward the world of art.[7] Griffith, his father and his mother all served as models for Emshwiller at one time or another; a very young Griffith appears (along with his father) on the cover of the September 1957 issue ofScience Fiction Stories.[8]
For over a decade, starting in 1957, Griffith's mother Barbara had an affair with cartoonistLawrence Lariar; this formed the basis of a 2015 graphic novel by Griffith.[6]
While attending Brooklyn'sPratt Institute in 1963, Griffith saw a screening of the 1932Tod Browning filmFreaks. As he said in a later interview, "I was fascinated by thepinheads in the introductory scene and asked the projectionist (who I knew) if he could slow down the film so I could hear what they were saying better. He did and I loved the poetic, random dialog. Little did I know thatZippy was being planted in my fevered brain."[9]
Griffith graduated with anAssociate of Applied Science Degree inGraphic Design from Pratt in 1964.[10][11]
For a short period in the late 1960s, Griffith joined a team of artists that includedKim Deitch,Drew Friedman,Jay Lynch,Norman Saunders,Art Spiegelman,Bhob Stewart andTom Sutton,[12] who designedWacky Packagestrading cards for theTopps Company. Later, Griffith drew new "Wacky Packages Old School Sketch Cards" for Topps.[citation needed]
In 1969, Griffith began makingunderground comix,[3] first inNew York City.[13] His firstcomic strips, which appeared in theEast Village Other andScrew magazine, featured an angry amphibian named Mr. The Toad,[3] who showed up later in a solo comics series and then as a recurring character inZippy.
Griffith ventured toSan Francisco,California in 1970[3] to join its burgeoning underground comix movement.[13] He quickly gained a reputation for his willingness to collaborate and organize: one of his first acts upon arriving in San Francisco was to help form the United Cartoon Workers of America,[14] along withRobert Crumb,Justin Green,Art Spiegelman,Spain Rodriguez,Roger Brand,Michele Brand, and Griffith's sister Nancy.[15] (The U.C.W. of A. brand appeared on a number of comix from that era.)
Young Lust, an "X-rated parody of girl'sromance comics"[16] that Griffith co-founded and edited with cartoonistJay Kinney, was a huge hit upon its 1970 debut,[17] with the first issue enjoying multiple printings.[18] The title eventually published eight issues, with the last one appearing in 1993 (with a ten-year gap between issues #6 and #7).
In 1973, Griffith was one of the founding members ofCartoonists' Co-op Press, along withKim Deitch, Jerry Lane,Jay Lynch,Willy Murphy,Diane Noomin, and Spiegelman.[19] The press was a short-livedself-publishing cooperative that operated out of Griffith's apartment.[20] It was founded as an alternative to the existing underground presses, which were perceived as not being honest with their accounting practices.[21] (For example, Griffith's popularanthology,Young Lust, ran through three publishers —Company & Sons,Print Mint, andLast Gasp — in its first three issues.)
Griffith's solo title,Tales of Toad, had a three-issue run from 1970 to 1973, published first by thePrint Mint and then Cartoonists' Co-op Press. The main character, Mr. Toad, is a humanoidtoad who embodies blind greed and selfishness.[22]
Griffith's weeklycomic stripGriffith Observatory (a play on thetourist attraction of the same name) was distributed by theRip Off Press Syndicate in the late 1970s.[23] Material from the strip was published inRip Off Comix (Rip Off Press) andArcade, and then collected, first byRip Off Press in 1979,[24] and then in an expanded edition byFantagraphics in 1993.
In 1975, after many years of gestation,[25] Griffith and Spiegelman debuted the magazine-sized anthologyArcade, the Comics Revue, published by thePrint Mint. Arriving late in the underground era,Arcade stood out from similar publications by having an ambitious editorial plan, in which Spiegelman and Griffith attempted to show how comics connected to the broader realms of artistic and literary culture.[26][27]Arcade also introduced comic strips from ages past, as well as contemporary literary pieces by writers such asWilliam S. Burroughs andCharles Bukowski,[28] and illustrated nonfiction pieces by writers likePaul Krassner andJ. Hoberman.
Soon after the magazine's debut, however, co-editor Spiegelman moved back to his original home of New York City,[29] which put most of the editorial work forArcade on the shoulders of Griffith and his new partner (later wife),Diane Noomin. This, combined with distribution problems, retailer indifference, and a general failure to find a devoted audience,[27] led to the magazine's 1976 demise after seven issues. Nonetheless, many observers creditArcade with paving the way for the Spiegelman-edited anthologyRaw, the flagship publication of the 1980salternative comics movement.[27]
The firstZippy story appeared in the underground comicReal Pulp #1 (Print Mint) in 1971.[30] As Griffith said of that story, "I was asked to contribute a few pages toReal Pulp Comics #1, edited byRoger Brand. His only guideline was to say 'Maybe do some kind of love story, but with really weird people.' I never imagined I'd still be putting words into Zippy's fast-moving mouth some 38 years later."[9]
Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by themicrocephalicSchlitzie, from the filmFreaks, which was enjoying something of a cult revival at the time; as well as theP. T. Barnum sideshow performerZip the Pinhead, who may not have been a microcephalic but was nevertheless billed as one.[31]
TheZippy strip went weekly in 1976, first in theunderground newspaper theBerkeley Barb and then syndicated nationally through theRip Off Press Syndicate.[32][3] At this point, Zippy strips began appearing regularly inHigh Times magazine .
In 1979, Griffith added hisalter ego character, Griffy,[16] to the strip. He describes Griffy as "neurotic, self-righteous and opinionated, someone with whom Zippy would certainly contrast. I brought the two characters together around 1979, perhaps symbolically bringing together the two halves of my personality. It worked. Their relationship seemed to make Zippy's random nuttiness more directed and Griffy's cranky, critical persona had his foil, someone to bounce happily off of his constant analysis of everything and everyone around him."[33]
In 1979–1980,Last Gasp published a three-issue Zippy comics series, with much of the material made up of strips that had appeared inHigh Times. At first titledYow[34] (which is Zippy's exclamation when he is surprised), the title was changed toZippy for the final issue.[35]
The first full-length Zippy collection,Zippy Stories, was published in 1981 byAnd/Or Press. The collection was brought back to print by Last Gasp in 1984, and had multiple printings (up through 1995).[36]
In 1986, the "Zippy Theme Song" was composed and performed, with lyrics byThe B-52s'Fred Schneider and vocals byThe Manhattan Transfer'sJanis Siegel.[37] Also on the cut are singersPhoebe Snow andJon Hendricks.[38]
The dailyZippy strip (syndicated byKing Features Syndicate to over 200[3] newspapers worldwide) started in 1986. Griffith compares the creation of the strip tojazz: "When I'm doing aZippy strip, I'm aware that I'm weaving elements together, almost improvising, as if I were all the instruments in a little jazz combo, then stepping back constantly to edit and fine-tune. Playing with language is what delights Zippy the most."[39]
In October 1994 Griffith touredCuba for two weeks, during a period of mass exodus, as thousands of Cubans took advantage of PresidentFidel Castro's decision to permit emigration for a limited time. In early 1995, Griffith published a six-week series of "comics journalism" stories about Cuban culture and politics inZippy. The Cuba series included transcripts of conversations Griffith had conducted with various Cubans, including artists, government officials, and a Yoruba priestess.[40]
Years ago, as continuity comic strips gave way to humor strips, typeset episode subtitles vanished from strips. Griffith keeps the tradition alive by always centering ahand-lettered subtitle above eachZippy strip.[citation needed]
In 2007, Griffith began to focus his daily strip on Zippy's "birthplace," Dingburg.[16]
In 2008, Griffith presented a talk on Zippy at theUniversity of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In it, he laid out his "Top 40 List on Comics and their Creation,” which has been reposted on numerous comics blog posts.[citation needed]
Griffith's younger sister, Nancy,[6] was also involved in the underground comix community.[41]
His wife was cartoonistDiane Noomin, whom he began dating in 1973 and married in 1980.[42] They lived together inSan Francisco from 1972 to 1998, first in an apartment on Fair Oaks Street, and then in their own house on 25th Street inDiamond Heights.[43] They moved toHadlyme,Connecticut, in 1998.[13][40] Noomin died of uterine cancer in 2022.[42]
In January 2012, Fantagraphics publishedBill Griffith: Lost and Found, Comics 1969-2003, a 392-page collection of Griffith's early work in underground comics from theEast Village Other to his pages forThe New Yorker and theNational Lampoon in the 1980s and 1990s.
Griffith's mother's affair with cartoonistLawrence Lariar formed the basis of Griffith's 2015 graphic novel memoir,Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist, published byFantagraphics.[6]Invisible Ink depicts various other details and incidents involving Griffith's family, including his father'sphysical andpsychological abuse of his family members.[44]
In 2019, Griffith's graphic biography ofSchlitzie,Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead, was published byAbrams ComicArts.
Griffith revealed in the August 19, 2020,Zippy strip that he was writing and drawing a graphic biography ofNancy cartoonistErnie Bushmiller. The book,Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy, was published byHarry N. Abrams August 2023.
In 2023, Griffith produced a comic book memoir of Diane Noomin and their marriage together, titledThe Buildings Are Barking.[45]
Zippy comics and books are now published byFantagraphics Books.
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