New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium – November 17, 2015

Bill Griffith on his new book, Invisible Ink.
Invisible Ink is about my mother’s secret 16 year affair with a famous cartoonist and how it affected me and my family.
There will be a slide talk on the book’s evolution and why it took me so long to do my first graphic novel.
Digressions into Zippy and Ernie Bushmillerland may occur.

“Are we having fun yet?” This non sequitur utterance by the clown-suited 
philosopher/media star Zippy the Pinhead has become so oft-quoted that 
it is now in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Zippy has in fact become an 
international icon, even appearing on the (former) Berlin Wall. Zippy’s
 creator, Bill Griffith, began his comics career in New York City in 1969.
His first strips were published in the East Village Other and Screw
 Magazine and featured an angry amphibian named Mr. The Toad.
He ventured to San Francisco in 1970 to join the burgeoning underground
 comics movement and made his home there until 1998. His first major 
comic book titles included Tales of Toad and Young Lust, a best-selling 
series parodying romance comics of the time.He was co-editor of Arcade, 
The Comics Revue for its seven issue run in the mid-70s and worked with 
the important underground publishers throughout the seventies and up to 
the present: Print Mint, Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink and 
Fantagraphics Books. The first Zippy strip appeared in Real Pulp #1 
(Print Mint) in 1970. The strip went weekly in 1976, first in the Berkeley Barb 
and then syndicated nationally through Rip Off Press.
In 1980 weekly syndication was taken over by Zipsynd (later Pinhead Productions), owned and operated by the artist. Zippy also appeared in the pages of the National Lampoon and High Times from 1977 to 1984. In 1985 the San Francisco Examiner
asked Griffith to do six days a week, and in 1986 he was approached by 
King Features Syndicate to take the daily strip to a national audience. Sunday 
color strips began running in 1990. Today Zippy appears in over 200 newspapers
 worldwide. There have been over a dozen paperback collections of Griffith’s work
and numerous comic book and magazine appearances, both here and abroad.
He became an irregular contributor to The New Yorker in 1994. Griffith’s inspiration
 forZippy came from several sources, among them the sideshow “pinheads” in
 Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. The name “Zippy” springs from “Zip the What-Is-It?”
a “freak” exhibited by P.T. Barnum from 1864 to 1926. Zip’s real name was
 William Henry Jackson (below), born in 1842. Coincidentally, Griffith (as he discovered in
1975, five years after creating Zippy) bears the same name. He was born
 William Henry Jackson Griffith (in 1944), named after his great-grandfather,
 well-known photographer of the Old West William H. Jackson (1842-1941).
Griffith presently lives and works in East Haddam, Connecticut with his wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin.