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.
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