Zippy: Connecting the Polka Dots

Description

by Bill Griffith
Zippy the Pinhead is a pop culture icon. The surrealist-leaning character is one of the most recognizable figures on the newspaper pages, seen by tens of millions of people a day. Syndicated by King Features since 1986, Zippy is read in hundreds of daily newspapers across the country, while the Pinhead's trademark non-sequitur, "Are we having fun yet?," has become so often repeated it's in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. His likeness has been graffitied on the Berlin Wall and aped for Saturday Night Live's classic "Conehead" sketches. In this new, almost square-shaped Zippy collection, Zippy visits his doppelganger atop the Leaning Tower of Pizza, talks Republicanism with several symbolic elephants, imagines he's in a Deputy Dawg cartoon and deconstructs King Kong - and that's just between breakfast and lunch. He also meets Arnold Stang (the voice of "Top Cat"), stars in a 1940s Film Noir, hitch-hikes to Los Angeles to break into the television industry (with his mini-series adaptation of Allen Ginsburg's "Howl") and worships at the World's Largest Laundromat just outside Chicago.