Griffith, Bill – Are We Having Fun Yet?

Website

Are We Having Fun Yet?

I’ve never been able to articulate my thoughts about Zippy, which probably explains why I’m just now putting this stuff up on the page when I’ve had it since I started. Here goes: I like the stuff, really I do. It’s just… it’s the kind of thing that I like a lot more in theory than I do in practice. Kind of like that horrible new movie with Sean Penn playing the retarded guy. I want to believe that all he needs is love to raise his daughter, but I know that he’s retarded and all the heart-wrenching music in the world won’t change the fact that he’s incapable of it. Maybe that’s a bad analogy… Anyway, this is still one of the best daily strips running, if you can find it anywhere. It is, for reasons unknown, something that I don’t pick up when I see it sitting there in a comic store, and I don’t order it when I see it on the preorder page. The couple of things I have were purchased on incredibly cheap deals, otherwise I wouldn’t have any at all. What this says to me is that, no matter how much I protest to the contrary, I just don’t like it all that much. I liked his old Griffith Observatory stuff a lot, and there are a lot of genuinely funny things in here, don’t get me wrong. It’s just always left me kind of cold. I know I’m in the extreme minority on this one, so go on without me. Here’s his webpage, where you can find all kinds of samples and various other Zippy-related things. This book has Zippy turn into a beatnik, carve Jack Palance into Mount Rushmore, and talk to Ernie Bushmiller (the guy who started Nancy). You know, I wonder if I would have had the same opinion about this guy if Fox had approached him years ago instead of Matt Groening. I don’t know why I say bad things about this guy. Reading his stuff has obviously set my brain in a different direction that it usually goes…