ZIPPY's trademark non-sequitur, "Are we having fun yet?" has become so often-repeated that it is now in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. His likeness was graphittied on the former Berlin Wall. Dan Akroyd is rumored to have created his Saturday Night Live characters,the Coneheads, after seeing Zippy for the first time.

With ZIPPY ANNUAL (a.k.a. "Z2K"), all of Griffith's hilarious strips from 1998 and 1999 are collected into one place to guide us into the 21st Century. Millenium fever never seemed so, well, absurd. Frivolity is a stern taskmasker, and these brilliant black-and-white dailies and color Sundays (Griffith is a master of color and the printing process of the newspaper page) race toward Y2K with Griffith's inimitably existential and surreal sense of humor. "Bill Griffith's nationally syndicated Zippy continually stretches the intellectual bounds of the daily newspaper strip," writes the San Francisco Examiner. Plus, it's damn funny.

Bill Griffith began his career in underground comix in the late-'60s with the East Village Other and Al Goldstein's Screw magazine. He co-edited the seminal Arcade anthology in the '70s with Art Spiegelman and created Zippy in 1970. Rumors of a Zippy movie or television show have abounded for almost 20 years. They still aren't true. He recently relocated from San Francisco to Connecticut with his wife, the cartoonist Diane Noomin.