Zippy: the Dingburg Diaries – June 2010-January 2013 (Zippy Annual volume 11)


By Bill Griffiths (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-641-6

Starting life as a subversive and broadly comedic underground cartoon in 1971, Bill Griffith’s absurdist commentary on American society has since grown into such a prodigious and pervasive counter-culture landmark that it’s almost a bastion of the civilisation it constantly scrutinises and castigates.

Almost: there’s still a lot of Americans who don’t like and certainly don’t get Zippy the Pinhead…

Legendarily based on the microcephalic Schlitzie from Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 film “Freaks” and P.T. Barnum’s carnival attraction Zip the Pinhead, Griffith’s Muu-Muu clad genial simpleton first appeared in Real Pulp Comix #1 (March 1971) and other scurrilous home-made counter-culture pamphlet publications before winning a regular slot in the prominent youth culture newspaper The Berkley Barb in 1976.

Soon picking up syndication across America and the world, Zippy “dropped in” during the ultra-conservative Reagan years when, in 1985, King Features began syndicating the strip, launching it in the San Francisco Examiner.

Zippy’s ruminations and Dadaist anti-exploits have expanded over the years to include his own nuclear family and cat, and a peculiar cast of iconic regulars such as embodiment of rampant callous Capitalism Mr. The Toad, the star’s antithetical brother Lippy (conceptual and ideological opposite in the grand tradition of Happy Hooligan‘s sibling Gloomy Gus, and thus the epitome of the average mainstream US citizen), tired, ink-fingered Griffy – analogue of the cartoonist and even God the creator him/her/them/itself…

The strip follows few conventions although it is staggeringly well-rendered in a bewildering variety of styles. Plot-lines and narratives, even day-to-day traditional gags are usually eschewed in favour of declamatory statements of bizarre, quasi-philosophical and often surreal concept-strings that resemble word (and occasionally picture) association or automatic writing, all highlighting the ongoing tsunami of globalisation as experienced by every acme of our modern culture.

Be it the latest fad in consumer electronics or celebrity fashion and “newsfotainment” the brightly caparisoned denizens of Dingburg USA – an entire town of quaint, genteel, broadly identical like-minded complacent pinheads and happily American consumers – simply lap it all up …

The strip is the home of the damning non-sequitur and has added to the global lexicon such phrases as “Yow!” and “Are we having fun yet?” as the Dingburgers go about their appointed courses, following fads, consuming junk food and drinking Valvoline (kids – do not try this at home or anywhere else!)

Being free of logical constraint and internal consistency, Zippy’s Daily and Sunday forays against The Norm can encompass everything from time travel, talking objects, shopping lists, radical philosophy, caricature, majorly dead minor celebrities, packaging ingredients, political, social and metaphysical ponderings, toy crazes, vintage TV show memories and even purely visual or calligraphic episodes. It is weird and wonderful and not everybody gets it – even those of us who been friends of Zippy’s for years…

This latest volume – featuring material published between June 2010 and January 2013 – is broken into chaptered segments beginning with Dingburg: a free-associating batch of stand-alone instalments acting as travelogue and extended tour of the odd old home town and reintroducing the everyday folk who live there through such appealing situations as ‘Dingamajig’, ‘Dancing with the Czars’, ‘Totally Zygomatic’ or ‘Kitty, Kitty Bang-Bang’…

This is followed by a selection of skits and sketches dealing with the community’s Big Issues such as Beatniks, Bowling, Laundry & Food. Here ‘Like, The End’, ‘Bongos!!’, ‘Come Loaf with Me…’ and ‘Crossing the Fowl Line’ inevitably lead to ‘Percolating’, ‘Downers’ and ‘Cracking the Zip Code’ for ‘Persons of Pinterest’ after which follows a number of vignettes delineating the low character of that Bachtrian Bounder Mr. The Toad via such revelatory episodes as ‘Oversaxed’, ‘A Jab at Rehab’, ‘And He Really Memes It’, ‘Banana Oil Well’ and ‘Living the Toad Code’.

As you might suspect, Sunday Color highlights the bigger, bolder, un-monochromed escapades and focuses far more on Zippy and his immediate family. Nonetheless even you won’t be expecting such intriguing experiences as ‘Let a Smile be your Umbrella’, ‘Zippy Receives a Fraudulent Email’ or ‘Zippy’s Three States of Grace…’ Mister, Miss or Mrs. Smartypants…!

More astute readers might gain a smidgen of insight into our dullard star in Zippy Solowith more brief but illuminating strips such as ‘Hook, Line and Thinker’, ‘High Wired’, ‘Goretex Happens’, ‘Backpacking in Bushmillerland’ or ‘Up Stares, Down Stares’ and glean the making of the man from tales of the pinhead as a boy in the pastiche-frenzied Little Zippy with ‘Does Cute Commute?’, ‘Learn, Zippy, Learn’, ‘No Adult Supervision’, ‘Pre-Pubescent Pugilist’ and ‘Science Infliction’…

Art, Music & Comics concentrates on the finer things of Dingburg life with glimpses into and instruction on ‘Schnozznostication’, ‘Paleosputnik’, ‘Artache’, ‘Zippy Tone’, ‘Cartoona Obscura’ and playing ‘Peace Accordion’ ‘With a Song in my Brain’ as well a revealing the results of the Annual Best Currently Unpublished Daily Comic Strip of the Past Award…

Zerbina & Other Relationships explores the private life of that very public woman who is Zippy’s good lady wife via ‘No Semolina’, ‘A Whiter Shade of Newsprint’, ‘Crossing the Borderline Personality’ and ‘Love in the Time of Flatulence’ amongst other kiss-and-tell moments.

Roadside devotes time and space to the eponymous protagonist’s peregrinations the length and breadth and especially width of America, fixating briefly upon ‘Square Root Beer’, ‘Breakfast with Mr. Johnson’ and ‘Love in the Outback’…

God is always there and this section recounts some of His revelatory interactions with Dingburg regulars ‘Per Diem’. ‘His Favorite Band? Genesis’. He likes ‘Playing Canasta with the Universe’, debating ‘Religious Thimbleism’ and performing tricks like ‘Abracadingburg’.

This massive manic missive from the edge ends with some longer, continued Stories such as an octet of awesomeness entitled ‘The Eightest Stories Ever Told’ before tracing the history of Dingburg from 1840 (‘The Pedantic Era’) to 1958 (‘Before Youtube’), learning Zippy’s automotives tastes in ‘Car Toon’ 1 through 5 and closing with the gritty saga of the Dingburg Normalium “where misfits and difficult citizens are kept”…

Existential ripostes, spiritual revelations, social gaffes and cultural belly-flops are a daily occurrence in Zippy town where the collected musings of America’s most engaging Idiot-Savant are incontrovertibly the perfect cult-strip for jaded smart folks. This latest volume finds cretin and creator on absolute top form and if you like this sort of stuff you’ll adore another heaping helping of it.

Aren’t you having Fun Yet?
© 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Bill Griffith. All rights reserved.