Walk a Mile in My Muu-Muu
A Zippy the Pinhead collection. By Bill Griffith (Fantagraphics Books, $18.95)
Yow! Every fall, East Haddam-based cartoon dadaist Bill Griffith compiles a book of the past year of his Zippy the Pinhead strips. The non-sequitur-spouting Zippy debuted in West Coast underground comic books in 1970, soon earned his own weekly syndicated strip in alternative papers like the Advocate, and in the mid-'80s started appearing six times a week in mainstream dailies, including The Hartford Courant and The Boston Globe.
The beauty of the annual anthologies is the fine print. Bill Griffith annotates the strips, explaining Zippy's oft-obscure pop culture references. Most importantly, the detail-oriented cartoonist reveals the locations of his strip's foremost real-world obsessions: old-fashioned diners and gigantic representations of people and animals — like the rollicking elephant and fence-bound Popeye figure at Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, or the lower half of a Muffler Man in Cheshire.
Since he lives and works in Middlesex County, eateries and statuary from throughout Connecticut have made it into Zippy, alongside icons from as far away as France (home of this collection's greatest oversize image, a giant thumb at la Defense in Paris). A shopping plaza in Bristol inspired an entire August strip, asking "The crucial question — Is it Zippy who's deranged? Or is it the world that's become unhinged?," while the polka-dot muu-muued hero strolls by a succession of real-world businesses: Crazy Bruce's Liquors, Insane Irving's and Dollar Mania. While the pinhead's expostulations are abstract and stream-of-conscious, Griffith's drawings are sharp and realistic, giving class and substance to a lower-class home in Niantic and Marjorie Strider's sculpture "Fish" in Cornwall Bridge (which, in an October strip, told Zippy "You taste like old socks.").
Asked via e-mail to comment on the Zippyness of Connecticut, Griffith responds: "Moving to Connecticut after 28 years in San Francisco really opened my eyes to my surroundings. Sure, San Francisco is as beautiful a city as they come, but I'd started to tune it out, take it for granted. When I arrived in East Haddam and started to drive around, everything stood out in high relief. The giant bowling pin and Muffler Man in nearby Norwich, followed quickly by all the vintage diners; Rosie's in Groton, O'Rourke's in Middletown, the Aero in North Windham. I was back in "Brand X" America. And Zippy was having fun again."
A recent series of Sunday Zippy strips were set in the tranquil yet absurdist village of Dingberg, "a town inhabited entirely by pinheads." But Connecticut comics lovers know where our microcephalic friend is really grounded.
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