After sporadically reading Zippy the Pinheadover the years, I have been reading the strip regularly over the past few months, and noticed the cartoonist Bill Griffith plays a major character (‘Griffy’) in many strips, mostly as a straight man to Zippy’s inanity. The character is clearly meant to be Bill Griffith (in a recent strip the ‘Griffy’ character mentions an interview he did w/ Jerry Lewis for the New Yorker in 1995, which did in fact happen in real life), albiet the character looks more like Bill in his mid-30s (matches an older picture in his Zippy website biography) than today.
Question the 1 - Did Bill always draw himself into the Zippy strip (as ‘Griffy’), or is this a recent trend.
Question the 2 - Stephan Pastis routinely draws himself as an intergral character in ‘Pearls Before Swine’ (although unlike Zippy, in their universe they are aware that they are in a comic strip). Are there other PRINT comics (sorry, had to qualify that to differentiate from web-only comics) in which the cartoonist intergrates his/herself as a recurring character, as opposed to one-off promo images and the like?
Overboard occasionally refers to the writer of the strip and shows the characters talking to him while he’s at his desk. It’s not as often as the others, but it does happen regularly.
I don’t have anything to contribute to the OP, but am I the only one who thinks the entire Zippy strip is bizarre and disturbing? It really freaks me out, and not in a good way. Is there some level to it that I’m completely missing?
Hamster King, if you saw the Griffy character in the 1980s, then that’s a good long time he’s been doing it.
Well, it’s mostly absurd. Zippy strips sometime just consist of Zippy repeating some out-of-context phrase (‘No Load Mutual Fund’), and the Cartoonist certainly realizes this (in a later strip, Zippy repeats ‘Quion’, and the Griffy character basically asks Zippy what he’s fixated on now).
To me, it’s hit or miss, mostly miss, and I suppose it’s been that way for decades, but sometimes the wordplay and meta-discussion is almost as good as Dinosaur Comics…
Back in the 70s, there was a newspaper strip called “Inside Woody Allen.” It was credited to Allen as the writer, although I gather he did little but license his name to it. Anyway, he was in it every day.
Berke Breathed drew himself into his strips on a couple of occasions.
Frank Cho put himself by name into his strip, Liberty Meadows, but as a chimp. His “Frank” character has his glasses and haircut, but otherwise does not much resemble him.
Bill Keane and Cathy Guisewite are the main characters in their respective strips.
In underground/alternative comic books, there is a long tradition of “confessional” strips too numerous to cover here, but I limit myself to newspaper strips.
Well, the Griffy question is well and truely settled - I guess the cartoonist being a major character in his own strip is simply par for Zippy. Thanks y’all.
Man, The Piranha Club - another strip that I had forgotten all about - disappeared years ago from our local papers - so I’ll take cjepson’s word for it that Bud Grace appears.
As for Cathy, I never thought of her as being Cathy Guisewite herself, but perhaps representing some facet - or maybe not - same w/ Garfield’s Jon Arbuckle (original presented as a cartoonist in the strip) vs. Jim Davis.
Bill Keane and family circus - I haven’t paid any attention for the past 2 decades, do they still do the ‘Daddy took the day off so Billy/Jeffery drew the strip’ deals anymore? Never liked those as a kid, and I hope Billy has learned to finally draw after all those decades…
Zippy is such a joycean character? The stream of coscious dialogue between Zip and Griffy gives you a lot of insights.
Or maybe I’m wrong-maybe Bill Griffith took too much LSD!