Bill Griffith is a famous US cartoonist who produces a daily comic strip titled Zippy that appears in the Taipei Times six days a week -- in addition to over 200 other newspapers worldwide, including Britain and Japan.
In a recent e-mail interview, Griffith, who lives in rural Connecticut, explained a few things about his popular strip and its genesis over the years.
While Griffith has never visited Taiwan, his comic creations, Zippy and Griffy did appear in a Taiwan-related panel. A reader in Taipei had sent in photos of some strange lawn sculpture in Pingtung City in southern Taiwan and Griffith used the imagery for his artwork on that strip.
Griffith said he is currently doing some online research about the roadside imagery of Taiwan's famous "betel nut beauties" and might use them in one of his upcoming strips.
The humor in Zippy is very surrealistic, as regular readers know, with lots of wordplay and word games. When asked how about the genesis of this kind of cartoon humor, Griffith said, "If you think Zippy is surreal now, you should have read him when he started out in the early 1970s in Underground Comix in San Francisco.
"In the early Zippy stories and strips, Zippy's tendency to speak in random non sequiturs was in full force. He rarely gave an answer or made a statement that related in any but the most oblique way to what other characters around him were saying."
"But I do not consider Zippy to be particularly surreal in his current incarnation that Taiwan readers can see in the Taipei Times. Off-center, maybe -- unexpected, indirect, poetic -- but not really surreal, if by surreal you mean nonsensical or random.
"Actually, Zippy is almost always trying to respond sensibly to any question posed to him -- he just sees the world through a very personal distorted-lens. My intent with much of Zippy's statements is to be satirical, and even political, but not surreal."
Griffith has placed Zippy and Griffy in a few strips that took place in Japan, with lots of funny English terms and phrases that the Japanese use on T-shirts,product names and store signs. When asked if Zippy might visit Taiwan again for future strips, Griffith said, "It's true, the Japanese interest in the English language is very Zippyesque. Strangely poetic."
"Zippy did go to Taiwan recently -- it was in the strip from Feb. 18, 2004, titled "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free," and the animal statues in the four panels were inspired by photographs from Taiwan that an expat there named Aaron Spinak sent to me.
"The photos were from a lawn sculpture store in Pingtung. I'd love to see photographs of more possible Taiwan locations for Zippy to visit. Sure, tell readers there to send me photos of anything Zippyesque in Taiwan. Zippy will be happy to discuss world affairs with a betel nut beauty, sure!"
Griffith, who is 51, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the US when there was enormous experimentation in culture, art and lifestyles. When asked how this period influenced his own imagination and if that period still has a big impact on his work, Griffith said, "Zippy would not exist if it were not for the counter culture of the late 1960's and early 1970's.
"The underground comics and newspapers of that time were very open to free-wheeling, unconventional comics. The mainstream press would never have had any interest in publishing my early stuff -- it was way too weird!
"Too many taboos were being broken, too much satire was aimed at the establishment of the day. I'm very grateful to the alternative press of that time -- without it, I may have become an autoseat-cover salesman living on Long Island."
For some people the strip might be a bit confusing at times because of the US wordplay and cultural issues. But Griffith says, that while he draws and writes the strip mostly for a North American audience, he is also open to corresponding with readers overseas who have questions about the strange and wild antics of Zippy and company.
"I am always happy to respond by e-mail to confused readers," Griffith says. "My explanations are always sincere, but I always warn people that to explain humor is to kill humor."
Griffith, who was born in Long Island near New York City, and then lived in San Francisco for a long period before moving back to the East Coast, noted that for new Zippy readers there's a kind of learning curve involved.
"For the first six months, the strip seems like incomprehensible jabber. Then, if you keep reading, one day, suddenly, it all makes sense," Griffith said. "You've achieved what I call `Zippyconsciousness' and you're finally on Zippy's wavelength. Seriously though, I consider the Zippy strip to make fairly conventional punchlines in at least half of my syndicated strips. They're just not always in the final panel."
As readers know, America's "diner culture" is a big feature of Griffith's humor. Griffith said that for him, diners are the "anti-McDonald's" of America. he noted that diners are "non-corporate, individually-owned gathering places for people to eat slow food and relate to each other in a user-friendly environment. ... Plus, the cheeseburgers are much, much better."
When asked if Zippy ever deals with such thorny international political issues such as cross-strait ties between Taiwan and China, or famine in Africa or terrorism and the war in Iraq, Griffith said that he once visited Cuba for a magazine assignment and put much of what he learned into his drawings.
"Zippy (and I) visited one of the last remaining Communist dictatorships in the world a few years ago -- Cuba. I was there on an assignment for a magazine. My characters, Zippy and Griffy, had a lot to say about what they saw, much of it critical of the Fidel Castro regime."
"Zippy asks the reader to meet him halfway, unlike many other daily comic strips, which demand much less of their readers," Griffith said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located