Bill “Zippy” Griffith has appreciated comics since he was a kid. He began his career in comic illustration in 1969 as an art student in New York. After art school, he moved to San Francisco to join the underground comics movement, where he befriended cult-comics icon Robert Crumb. These days, Bill Griffith lives in East Haddam and can often be found eating a breakfast special in a booth at O’Rourke’s diner on Main Street while working on material for his next comic.
Visualize: A stubble-faced pinhead in a polka-dotted muumuu sits at a booth in O’Rourke’s Diner.
“I’ll have th’ leek and garlic goat cheese cake, served with a smoked cheddar omelet topped with horseradish sauce and grilled babka and a veal sun dried tomato sausage patty,” he says.
His pointy-nosed compatriot, donning a vest and tie, reprimands him: “Zippy, this is a diner! They don’t do haute cuisine!”
This is the first panel of Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip that ran in June of this year in over a hundred newspapers nationwide. Griffith has been a patron of O’Rourke’s for nearly six years and finds inspiration in his frequent trips to the Main Street diner. Griffith’s comic strips illustrate his fondness for the diner aesthetic and the whimsy of pop, kitsch and Americana.
“The place has got the world’s largest breakfast menu,” Griffith said of O’Rourke’s. “There has to be like forty-seven pages in that thing. It’s an unusual example of an old diner with great food. Usually, you go to a diner [arguably] for the ambience […] but you don’t expect much aside from the basics.”
Brian O’Rourke, owner and head chef at O’Rourke’s, has an appreciation for “Zippy the Pinhead” that parallels Griffith’s affection for the diner. He lets Griffith eat for free whenever he comes in. O’Rourke also sees beauty in the diner as a mythic force
“Diners are very special places,” O’Rourke said. “They’re real. People are treated as they are.”
“Bill Griffith is a legend,” O’Rourke said as he unwrapped a huge stick of butter and dropped it into a bowl filled with dried apricots. “He’s at the top of his game. I have his original artwork on my kitchen wall at home.”
Griffith is attracted to this sense of authenticity and originality. Zippy wanders the strange landscape of America exploring its nooks with a sense of honest curiosity.
“Zippy is the perfect consumer,” Griffith said, “He buys according to the shiny package, not what’s inside. He loves Hohos, Dingdongs, Wingdings, Yoohoo…”
Griffith says he gets numerous letters from bewildered, sometimes even angry readers who tell them they don’t “get it.” Griffith himself admits that Zippy may seem obscure to many people, but he says that that is not his intention.
“Well it’s not Garfield….With the exception of ‘Little Lulu’ and ‘Nancy and Sluggo,’ I always recoil from the horror of cuteness,” he said. “The way I look at it, I’m basically doing my strip with myself as my audience. I’m not looking to please a specific audience or to tell a joke like other comics. I’m asking the reader to meet me half way.”
Recently, Griffith’s agent has been trying to pitch a “Zippy the Pinhead” animated series to the Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” programming block, a late night lineup of cartoons for mature audiences, but Griffith is skeptical. Zippy has been optioned for film and television numerous times, and Griffith and his wife, Diane Noomin, completed several drafts of a screenplay. At one point there were even commercials advertising the series on Showtime, but for various reasons, plans for a televised show always fell through.
Despite the wavering interest from television shows, Griffith remains dedicated to his comic, giving his caricature new life every time he sits down at a table at O’Rourke’s with his pen and an omelet with smoked salmon prepared by Brian O’Rourke himself.
“If it isn’t your reason to get up in the morning then it doesn’t get made,” Griffith said. “And my reason to get up in the morning is doing my strip, making Zippy every day.”
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