Author: DOuG pRATt

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead is no longer included in the comics section of the Washington Post phone app, although it continues to be listed on the Post’s Website.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/zippy-the-pinhead/

Zippy appears in the daily, but not the Sunday, edition of The Boston Globe. As explained a year ago, I stopped subscribing to the Globe, preferring to read the print edition at the local public library.

Buh-Bye, Boston Globe

For a long time, Bill Griffith has been working on a graphical biography of Nancy cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller. It’s scheduled to be published in August. Griffith wrote and drew two previous biographies. One of them tells the strange tale of Schlitzie, the inspiration for Zippy. Schlitzie was a circus and carnival sideshow performer who was born with microcephaly.

The other book is both biographical and autobiographical. It’s the story of his mother’s long affair with a writer and not very good cartoonist named Lawrence Lariar. A charitable way of describing Lariar’s drawing style is to say that it was “old school.”

There is much more about Bill Griffith and his work over at Gil Roth’s Virtual Memory Show.

https://chimeraobscura.com/vm/tag/lawrence-lariar

In one of the Roth’s interviews with Griffith I was both relieved and reassured to hear what he said about Roy Lichtenstein.

Compare that comment to something Griffith says in the documentary, WHAMM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation.

While going through some old books, I realized that I happen to have one that was edited by Lariar while he was involved with Griffith’s mother. It’s a collection of cartoons from 1966. Here are the opening pages.