Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead is the popular comic strip with its own bizarre answers to this already bizarre world. Zippy is inspired by the legendary circus sideshow attraction, “Zip the What Is It?”
The strip has created a reality all on its own with a unique cast of characters including Griffy, Zippy’s foil; Zerbina, Zippy’s wife and their children, Fuelrod and Meltdown.
Griffith began the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip in 1970, selling it to different underground magazines. In 1985, when William Randolph Hearst III took over the San Francisco Examiner, he offered Griffith a job doing Zippy as a feature for the paper.
A year later, in 1986, King Features Syndicate offered Griffith national syndication withZippy the Pinhead. Today, Zippy appears in more than 100 newspapers. In addition, Griffith continues to self-syndicate to several college papers and weeklies.
Awards and Distinctions:
Zippy’s catchphrase, ldquoAre we having fun yet?rdquo is included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, attributed to Bill Griffith.
Zippy’s image appeared on the Berlin Wall, subsequently torn down and auctioned off for $10,000 (USD).
Two stage productions: “Zippy the Pinhead: the Musical” performed in Baltimore, Md. and The Zippy Play: “Fun: The Concept” performed in San Francisco.
“The first time I read a Zippy comic book, I was blown away. I had never seen a comic book character that just seemed to leap off the page like that. It struck some kind of chord in me. It would be great to be Zippy for a day– give your mind a vacation from rational thought, sit next to a pool saying things like, ‘I’m pretending to pull in a trout. Am I doing it correctly?’ Just enjoy it!”- Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill