Is He Having Fun Yet?

Bill Griffith: Yes. Schlitzy, among other places, performed here in San Francisco at Play land. I was told this by a Circus sideshow historian 15 or 20 years ago. Schlitzy is the Pinhead in freaks. There at three pinheads in freaks and Schlitzy is the one that partly inspired Zippy.

GM: Is Zippy an amalgam of all these different pinheads?

BG: Zippy's changed a lot over the years but the original Zippy was inspired by the movie Freaks and the way they spoke in that movie and also a Pinhead (Pinhead of course is the sideshow term for microcephalic) named "Zip The What-Is-It?" He was exhibited in the Barnum & Bailey Sideshow from the 1860's to the 1920's. He was billed as various things; like the "Wild Man From Borneo" (he'd wear a hairy costume).

GM: What was it that attracted you to pinheads?

BG: Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days. The kind of fractured, short term information overload that we're all exposed to every day. And when I heard the Pinheads speak in that broken non-sequitur fashion I thought it was a combination of a weird kind of poetry and a metaphor for information overload.

Before I started doing Zippy I had an early encounter with a Pinhead in 1969. A friend of mine was a cab driver in Connecticut and one of his pick-ups was a pinhead named Dooley. I went on a couple of drives with Dooley in the back seat. When I first got in the cab with him he looked at me very intently and said: "Are you still an alcoholic?" That was one of the several moments when Zippy was starting to bubble up in my head.

GM: What kind of background do you come out of?

BG: I grew up in Long Island, I came to live in California in 1967 to visit and came back a few years later to live. I started doing Mr. Toad in 1968 in New York working for a few underground comics, Screw and the East Village Other. I didn't do Zippy until a few months after I moved to California.

GM: Were your parents artistic or more conventional?

BG: I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer. In the 50's when I was growing up she was writing mostly science fiction. She didn't make a living at it and was frustrated, but she still published various things from fiction to articles. My father grew up in the army. He volunteered Pearl Harbor day and stayed in almost his whole life. He got as high as Captain. He was a completely frustrated, miserable, human being.

GM: Did your mother encourage your writing from an early age?

BG: She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

GM: Did you start to think about being a cartoonist early?

BG: I began to think about it early as seven or eight, and thought about it on and off until I discovered fine art when I was twelve or thirteen. Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr. I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other. I thought this was cool I think I'll try one. And as soon as I did I came right back to comics. I've been making money from it since 1970.

GM: What were your early comic book influences as a child?

BG: My favorite was the "Uncle Scrooge" stories, when Donald, Huey, Duey, and Luey would go on these long adventures. That was my earliest, and I also liked "Little Lulu" and "Plastic Man." Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character. The writing for that was really good; the art was minimal but that's all right.

GM: I've gotten the impression that you have a particular hatred for Nancy and Sluggo, or is it that fine line between love and hate?

BG: I love Nancy and Sluggo. Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level. There are some collections of Nancy and Sluggo released recently, and if you read a whole lot of them you can conclude that its overly simple punch-line humor. Yet "The Best of Nancy and Sluggo" is the best case for its being a work of genius. Ernie Bushmiller was a primitive artist, a kind of naive genius, who had a lot more depth then even he or his audience understood.

GM: What do you think is the worst comic strip of all time?

BG: There's such a huge list to choose from. From what's around now I'd have to say Cathy, for every reason from drawing to pseudo-reverse feminism. There's nothing feminist about it at all. It's just about a woman who's obsessed with dieting and the way she looks. I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips. Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece. It doesn't make any sense to me. It has no charm. It's the most popular strip in America and right away I hate it.

GM: Do you have the same problem with The Simpsons?

BG: No, I like The Simpsons, although when I first saw it I was repulsed by the artwork. In any comics, any animation, the artwork should be as important as anything else. It should be compelling and have a style that impresses you in some way. The Simpsons was in the forefront of this anti-artwork tradition in comics that's arisen now. Matt Groening and Mike Judge who does Beavis & Butthead are both highly developed satirists who have a great feeling for character (and in Groening's case for story) who didn't have the talent, the skill, or the technique -- but it didn't stop them because they both have such a tremendous gift for satire, parody, and storytelling. What ultimately happened to them is somebody else did the artwork. It's an example of the creative force that doesn't recognize any limitations and just goes right ahead and does it.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist. I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork. If you're a good artist, great. If you produce struggling looking artwork it could get in the way of your message. If its simple artwork like the Simpsons then it just becomes a functional element.

GM: In the 60's did the use of drugs, especially acid, influence your work or the work of the people around you?

BG: Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head. When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist. It was just what you did. Nobody drank in those days, they just smoked pot. When drugs came around I sampled them just like anybody else but I never became dependent creatively on drugs; like various cartoonists in the underground never did anything if they weren't stoned, That was the prerequisite for sitting down and drawing. I never could do that, I always had to be straight to draw.

GM: How do you feel about R. Crumb after the movie?

BG: I've known Crumb for twenty-five years and no movie could affect my opinion of him. My take of the movie was like Crumb's take: it was upsetting in the sense that it is an honest depiction of aspects of his character, life, and childhood and things like that but it's not a very good depiction of his work. That movie was nine years in the making, and at various time Terry Zwigoff would show me rough footage, and my major advice to him was to try to get across something that is difficult to do on film: try to get the work across more than the person. Then I realized what people want in this Oprah Winfrey tabloid culture, is the person. They don't really care about the work. They want to see a freak show.

Crumb was visiting a few months ago and I asked him what he thought of the movie and he said he had a sound bite: "It's Oprah Winfrey for the NPR (National Public Radio) crowd." That says a lot about the irresistible urge to make it that way for the director. Terry Zwigoff is one of Crumb's very best friends, and the movie made it difficult for them for awhile but they're still friends. Terry doesn't know the whole Crumb, if anybody could. He knows parts of Crumb very well but he succumbed to take some of the more sensational and grittier material and feature that more than a well-rounded biography should. The reviews said this was the story of a tragic American Family. None of them said this was the story of a great American cartoonist.

GM: You sometimes hint at a movie that's going to be made about Zippy. Is that just a joke or is that really going to happen sometime?

BG: At this point it's kind of a faded, tattered dream, but over the years there was some serious effort and a lot of serious money spent to make a movie. I went through nine drafts of a screenplay; it had a whole plot, not just vignettes. Right now I'm getting a lot of feelers from animation companies. When the Zippy movie first started being talked about very rarely would people actually say animation to me, because I would never consider it. It was pre-computer and to get good animation would be too expensive and out of the question. I always thought of him as a real human being anyway. Animation was something I couldn't physically do. What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.

I have been approached by MTV but I turned them down twice. They wanted to own the character. MTV won't do anything unless they own it 100% so that didn't tempt me at all because I would never give away the character. There's another company approaching me now that have told me some interesting things. I won't reveal who they are at the moment but I am talking to them very seriously about a Zippy TV animated series.

GM: You had that epic series on Cuba and it seemed obvious you were really taken with the country and the people. I was wondering if there was any censorship with people trying to change your subject?

GM: No, my strip is syndicated by King Features which is the oldest comic strip company in America, and you would think they would be the most conservative, and maybe if you asked them their politics they are. But they came to me in 1986 and I told them I wasn't going to change what I did. I said "He is what he is and that's what I'll keep on doing; and explore any areas I want aside from using four letter words." I was lucky and they said that was fine. I started doing Zippy for the Examiner in 1985 a year before it was syndicated and that was because Will Hearst took over in '85 and the first thing he did was hire me and Hunter Thompson. He even got Crumb to do a strip for 20 days but it never got published.

GM: Were you involved in some sort of foreign aid? You were smitten with Cuba.

BG: I was actually sent down there by the New Yorker but they never published the piece. They've published seven or eight things of mine in the past couple of years. I had done pieces on Aspen and Las Vegas, and I proposed to them I would do something different than the kitchy aspects of America. I first proposed a piece on the post-Russian Cuba, with an angle on tourism. Because Cuba is desperately trying to attract tourism dollars. I knew I had to pitch a light-hearted angle because I knew they wouldn't want anything probing or heavy. But as I was about to leave the whole immigration crisis started with people leaving Cuba on rafts. So I called up the New Yorker and said obviously it can't just be on tourism now because I should report on the political happenings. They said "absolutely, that's what you should do" but when I brought it back it wasn't what they were expecting. I never understood why they didn't publish it.

GM: How do you come up with your non-sequiturs?

BG: Well, I get some of them in the mail. Zippy's non-sequiturs aren't really non-sequiturs. It seems like he's stringing together non-related thoughts but that's not really what's happening. You can decode almost all of it if you give it a little effort.

GM: Were you always fascinated with puns because you've got extremely brilliant puns that tie everything together as the titles.

BG: I got that from my mother. When I was growing up in Levittown, I saw in the inside bathroom door she had beautifully lettered (she was somewhat of an artist) puns. Two and three line word play humor. I remember one was "Eskimo Christians Italian No lies." She would get it from Bennet Cerf, the all time punster.

BG: It came more out of a desire to analyze my own strips than to parody anyone else. In making my strips the inspiration is really only the germ of something, they say it's 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. You get a flash of an idea, a visitation almost, a bolt comes out of the sky, a muse appears .... but its really only the beginning of something. The trick is not to censure yourself and let that happen, just be ready for it every day or night, always have a notebook. It comes via the unconscious usually and then it goes right back if you don't capture it quickly.

But when I sit down to actually work then I have to call on everything I've learned about how to do narrative comics over the past twenty-five years. Though I had formal training, unlike most cartoonists, so I have all these conventions, that I either use, play with, twist, or whatever. If you're going to be a cartoonist you have to master the language, and what keeps you going is playing with the language of comics.

GM: There seems to be a radical subtext in your cartoons that have to do with what's happening to society in general, and you seem pretty unhappy with the way it's going. Do you think Collectivism still has any hopes, or where are we going to turn to now that Communism is gone?

BG: I still have this idealistic hope for some version of a Socialist arrangement of power. In my opinion Cuba took a tragic, at least wrong-headed move into a dogmatic Communism, which most revolutionaries have in recent years. Dogmatism has place in the revolution, but then other people have to take over once its finished. But what happened in Cuba, Russia, China and other places is that the people who created the revolution became the bureaucracy, and that's where the problem started. Also there were the Cults Of Personality and in Cuba there was much more of an opportunity to do something than in Russia. So Cuba to me is more tragic (though in a way more hopeful) because the Russian model never worked and they finally realized that. If you look now there are a lot of positive things going on in Cuba and even though it's a failure in any terms of using it as model for anybody else it has shown tremendous accomplishments. When I was there I had mixed emotions of tragedy and hope. Because there's almost two generations of people in Cuba who have grown up under this system and they're not like you or me.

GM: Do you think hardship is necessary for a people's soul to become deep?

BG: Not really hardship, but a democracy of hardship, like in Cuba where everybody (except for a ruling elite that always existed like in Russia and everywhere else), a doctor, a ball player, a Sugar King, all earn the same salary. So they all benefit and suffer equally from the system, and as a result they feel part of it. They don't feel alienated by it. The average person feels that they can control their destinies and their future and it's very hopeful. If it could happen there it could happen anywhere else.

GM: Will 'Are We Having Fun Yet?' be on Zippy's tombstone or will he just ride an ox away into the misty mountains?

BG: It'll be on my tombstone. Eveybody gets a soundbite. Einstein's in E=MC2, mine is 'Are We Having Fun Yet?'

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