Zippy The Pinhead - Characters and Story

Characters and Story

Zippy's original appearance was partly inspired by the microcephalic Schlitzie, from the film Freaks (which was enjoying something of a cult revival at the time) and P. T. Barnum's sideshow performer, Zip the Pinhead (who may not have been a microcephalic, but was nevertheless billed as one). (Coincidentally, Zip the What-Is-Its real name was William Henry Jackson or Johnson (according to various sources); Griffith's full name is William Henry Jackson Griffith, after his great-grandfather, the noted photographer.) However, Zippy is distinctive not so much for his skull shape, or for any identifiable form of brain damage, but for his enthusiasm for philosophical non sequiturs ("All life is a blur of Republicans and meat!"), verbal free association, and the pursuit of popular culture ephemera. His wholehearted devotion to random artifacts satirizes the excesses of consumerism. Zippy's unpredictable behavior sometimes causes severe difficulty for others, but never for himself.

Zippy almost always wears a yellow muumuu/clown suit with large red polka dots, and puffy, white clown shoes.

He is married to a nearly identical pinhead named Zerbina, has two children, Fuelrod (a boy) and Meltdown (a girl), both apparently in their early teens, and owns a cat named Dingy. He has four close friends: Claude Funston, a hapless working man; Griffy, a stand-in for Bill Griffith, who often appears in the strip to complain about various aspects of modern life; Shelf-Life, a fast-talking schemer always looking for "the next big thing"; and Vizeen Nurney, a 20-something lounge singer who, despite her rebellious image, has an optimistic and sympathetic nature. A humanoid toad, Mr. Toad (less commonly Mr. the Toad) who embodies blind greed and selfishness, appears occasionally, as do The Toadettes, a group of mindless and interchangeable amphibians, who pop up here and there.

Zippy's angst-ridden twin brother Lippy also frequently appears. He is portrayed as Zippy's total opposite, often dressed in a conservative suit, thinking sequentially and avoiding his brother's penchant for non-sequiturs. In a daily strip dated 8 March 2005, he is depicted as being deeply moved by the poetry of Leonard Cohen, the landscape paintings of Maxfield Parrish and the music of John Tesh.

Zippy's favorite foods are taco sauce and Ding Dongs.

In his daily-strip incarnation, Zippy spends much of his time traveling and commenting on interesting places; recent strips focus on his fascination with roadside icons featuring giant beings; Zippy also frequently participates in his long-running conversation with the giant fiberglass doggie mascot of San Francisco's Doggie Diner chain (later, the Carousel diner near the San Francisco Zoo). The website encourages people to send photos of interesting places for Zippy to visit in the strip.

In 2007, Griffith began to focus his daily strip on Zippy's "birthplace", Dingburg. Griffith said, "Over the years, I began to expand Zippy's circle of friends beyond my usual cast of characters to a wider world of people like Zippy--other pinheads. I kept this up for a few months, happily adding more and more muu-muu-clad men and women until one day the whole thing just reached critical mass. The thought then occurred, 'Where do all these friends of Zippy live? Do they live in the real world which Zippy has been seen escaping for years—or do they live apart, in a pinhead world of their own?' Thus Dingburg, 'The City Inhabited Entirely by Pinheads' was born. It even had a motto: 'Going too far is half the pleasure of not getting anywhere'. The logical next step was to imagine Dingburg streets and neighborhoods—to create a place where Zippy's wacky rules would be the norm and everyone would play 24-hour Skeeball and worship at the feet of the giant Muffler Man. Zippy had, at last, found his home town."

His most famous quotation, "Are we having fun yet?", appears in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and became a catchphrase. At the 2003 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, Griffith recalled the phone call from Bartlett's:

When Bartlett's approached me in—I forget what year, five or six years ago—I got a call from the editor. And he was going to give me credit for the "Are we having fun yet" saying, but he wanted to know exactly where Zippy had first said it. I did some research (I had no idea), and I eventually found... the strip "Back to Pinhead, the Punks and the Monks" from Yow #2 in 1979... That's the first time he said, "Are we having fun yet?" Certainly not intended by me to be anything more than another non sequitur coming out of Zippy's mind.

Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!"