Speaking about Zippy
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Email your comments: griffy@zippythepinhead.com (snail mail: Pinhead Productions / PO Box 88 / Hadlyme CT 06439) This "reader feedback" page is a place where visitors can see what Zippy's many fans (and detractors) are saying about their favorite pinhead. Send all emotional outpourings to the e-address above. Most letters will be answered. Some will be posted here. LAST UPDATED: 10/10/11 (most recent mail at bottom of page)
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4/21/10
No questions. Just thanks in abundance. Thanks for the 40 rules of cartooning, that found me via a tweet of a tweet of a retweet. It has spurred me on to continue with the development of crazy idea of a comic strip. Which I intend to eventually self-publish on the web. I'll be honest, and admit I've never heard of you or Zippy before. But wish I had. I'm enjoying the task of Reading through your comprehensive archive. Your knowledge is honest and invaluable. You've lived the cartoonist dream, or is it a nightmare?
Many thanks,
Darren
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5/3/10
Hi Bill! I have been a fan of yours since I was fifteen and my Uncle gave me a trade paperback of Zippy cartoons for my birthday. It changed my whole life! I had no idea comics could be about more than superheroes or Little Lulu comics! I am a cartoonist now because of YOU! I have had many influences but your artwork has had the biggest impact on me and my style.
-Lance Ward
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5/10/10
Griffy:
Thanks for the speedy reply!
I read the Zipster daily in the Boston Globe. DIngburg has saved the day- the giant advertising icons were running out of gas. Dingburg is effing Brilliant!
Larry M.
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5/19/10
Wow. Excellent. You have just condensed all the works of the philosophers from Des Cartes to present in today's strip. I think I will take some books down to the used book shop and stop at the 7-11 on the way.
Good strip
John Thames
Tucson, Arizona
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7/15/10
And when I am stumped, I read Zippy the Pinhead and everything falls into place.
Zippy. He's good for what ails you!!
- Jeffrey Diehl
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7/20/10
Dear Griffy,
I have to let you know how thrilled we are down here with the uke references.
More power to your pen.
Love to Zippy & Zerbina,
Andrew Bunney
Adelaide Ukulele Appreciation Society
Australia
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8/3/10
I believe the Ukulele and Kayak cartoon backdrop was from the Steel Bridge north of Hartford down to the Capitol City? And the arches underneath the Charter Oak Bridge? I work downtown Hartford and walk it every morning and at lunch walk the old Train Bridge. I love your cartoons and remember back in '78 reading it at ZooMass Amherst. Zippy's abstract realism and inquistive ponderings was then as it is now most enjoyable. Thanks for the ukelele pluckings and kayak paddle. Surreally, I do both. Aloha.
-Rex Joffray
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8/31/10
Dear Mr. Griffith,
I just thought I would send you a gushing fan letter. You are, by far, the greatest current daily strip practitioner. You break my heart. Zippy saved me in high school and, for better or worse, shaped my personality a little, I think, and, in a way, my attempts at comics. Anyway, thanks for making a newspaper comic strip that is actually readable. At a CCS class, James Sturm once showed one of your originals (the White River Junction strip; the one with baseball gags) and your mark-making shocked me. It's been said a million times but I can't believe you and Cathy are on the same page! Beautiful things do happen, I guess. I have a distinct memory of reading a Zippy comic strip in a complimentary newspaper at a Big Boy restaurant in New Jersey and feeling special/gross.
This is starting to sound like one of the letters to Big Boy in those menu comic books, actually. I should stop before it gets even more embarrassing.
Thanks,
Dane Martin
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9/28/10
Dear Mr. Griffith
Last weekend I recieved "Ding Dong Daddy From Dingburg" AND a free gift: "Griffith Observatory". Thank you so much, it was a great surprise! I've started reading the book and I like it very much. I would love to visit Dingburg. In general, I appreciate the development in the comic strip. And though it's sometimes hard to get all the references (I'm Norwegian), I really think I now and then get "Zippysized". So thanks!
-Magne Taraldsen
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9/30/10
"Hi, I've been following your work since I was in college in the late 70s - early 80s(!). Used to follow Zippy in the Good Times Santa Cruz newspaper way back when.Now I read Zippy online.
Thanks for the laffs and incisive commentary over many decades....".
-William de Lay
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11/9/10
I am hoping that you will soon go back to simpler dialogue to make a point with rapier wit as in days past. Dingburg is getting really tedius as are strips like today with tons of dialogue. Best and thanks for continued emails. (signed) Peggy: Long time SF Chronicle reader
- Peggy Collett
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12/13/10
Dear mr Griffith,
I live in a rather small country but I am very familiar with your work and reputation, you are a living monument; my request for the letter was not made to question this all !
I am a forensic artist for the belgian federal police, my first contact with your work and that of your friends was in 2006, when I spent 3 weeks at FBI HQ in Quantico on their invitation for a facial imaging course (bookstores in Washington DC); your style of drawing is quite special, as an artist you walk through life whisteling and with your hands in your pocket (literally translated from our flemish, meaning with utmost confidence and ease), I bet that you can draw anything you want with that same confidence, extreme fluidity and ease; this is why I relate to your work as a student to a master, I stand in awe but it is too far above my head for me to be drawn in emotionally; Rory is a crippled artist, a sucker, he struggled, like you once described he was a folk artist, so his work strikes a different nerve, more in tune with the daily misery of raped women and beaten up people I deal with;
this portrait is maybe not his best work and rather one-sided technically speaking, but nevertheless it divulges a little bit of the madness I think, I am interested in your opinion of course;
In any case, It is a great honour for me to be in contact with you;
Sincerely
Filip Van Achter
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12/21/10
Dear Mr. Griffith, I learned of your work just yesterday on WSHU, and am compelled to write. Congrats on the interview, your strip is smartly written and funny! I am totally with you on the wise fool. My adult sister Val has Down Syndrome and she, like Zippy, happily pokes holes in my three piece suit world on a regular basis. But this is 2010, do you not find the word "pinhead" to be at all vulgar? To me, it perpetuates a negative stereotype at a time when our society is taking great steps toward embracing the other, which of course takes many forms. Zippy the Tinhead has a certain ring, does it not? Thanks for listening.
- Ellen Litwinovich
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1/14/11
I have to take this opportunity to thank you for what you do for your readers. I get the daily dose in email, and no matter what I'm doing, I always drop everything to read the daily strip. All urgent matters just have to wait when it's time to read the latest Zippy. It never fails to make me laugh, even on my most difficult days.
I suppose you'll want to retire one day, but I hope it won't be soon. Since I can't get Zippy in a daily paper anymore (well, I can't even get a decent local daily anymore) I can't make my tiny contribution to your royalties as I used to. So I'll try to get over to the website soon to shop around. I probably need a new coffee mug, anyway.
Thanks again for the wonderful work you do.
-Scott Spoolman
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5/23/11
Todays strip was a Gem. Your depiction of
god always tickles me. Being brought up a "good Catholic" I only hope your home is lightining proof
-Nick Grippo
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6/23/11
Hi Bill-
Today's strip about the snoballs was brilliant. It took 5 minutes for me to quit laughing.
Thanks very much. I have been a loyal reader for over 30 years.
Kris Henke
Port Angeles, WA
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7/7/11
This hardly matters, but a 1950 receiver had a round tube, and the rectangular viewing area would not be nearly so large. those sets were probably more interesting than you realize, for technical reasons. the real reason for writing is to admit that like probably many of your readers, references to contemporary cdelebrities and such have always gone gone completely over my head. I could guess from context, but perhaps most people who enjoy your strip do not keep up with such thing (and would be horrified if they had to). I mention this because a favourite pundit of mine lauched a vitrioulic and doubtless justified attack on someone named Nancy Gracy this morning, in his blog, and I have no idea who she is and certainly don't want to know.Did you know that Proust was greatly affected by his philosophy teacher in his final year in school, the teacher had a passion for "science" and Proust developed one too, so that there are a fair umber of reference to optics
in A la Rechereche?
-David Potter
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7/23/11
Just wanted to say, much belatedly (for I have read "Zippy" for 30 years) that you and your strip and Zippy himself are pure genius!
-David Coddon
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7/23/11
"Heartburn" (7/23/11) is a masterpiece! I read it again and again and it just got better and better. I may hafta put you on the top o' my list of folks who ain't brain dead...
-Morris
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7/24/11
'Ive kept a folder labeled "icebox favorites" (I'm too old to call it a "fridge") for years. I have many, many other Zippy home runs in that folder, but your Gladys and Babs self-parody/lampoon always knocks me for a loop every time I see it.
As one who dabbles in the arts a little meself (I draw political stuff for a small fortnightly alternative rag up here in NH), I'd just like to go on record to say that I am blown away at your uncanny ability to draw such imaginative and varied work on a daily basis, and so often with such detailed drawings. And I am not alone. Together with a couple of other Zippy addicts we marvel and parse the strip every day. At least in the collective estimation of this gang of fruitcakes, Zippy is by far and wide the most remarkable and outstanding strip going. We don't know how the hell you do it, but thanks for doing it.
Mike
P.S. Did you come from another planet or this one? Just curious.
-Mike Dater
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8/16/11
Hi BG. Enjoying your strips immensely, as always. Just a few hours ago, while dozing off in my car (not while driving!), I dreamed that I was sitting behind a man who was standing, and this man was facing and apparently speaking with a human-sized toad! This toad had a toad body, but was as tall as the man or perhaps a bit taller while sitting on the ground. I made brief eye contact with the toad, partly to share a common sense of irritation about a very loud, annoying background noise that was filling the air. On awakening, I immediately downloaded an "annoying sounds" app into my smartphone!
Just sharing...lol...thanks again! MONONGAHELA!!!!!!!! (I like to say it too!)
Scott
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10/10/11
Every so often I have a Zippy dreamThis weekend I had two consecutive ones.In the first [and both were in comic strip form] Zippy had an important list of words he was showing evryone he met.In the second,an actor protrayed Zippy as president of the United States.The thing was the actor looked nothing like Zippy.all down to the influence of the moon.LOVE ZIPPY...thanks for you time.
- Don Mccardell
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