top of page
Bill Griffith is an American cartoonist known for creating the comic strip "Zippy the Pinhead." His work is characterized by its surreal humor and satirical commentary on contemporary culture. Griffith's unique style and inventive storytelling have made "Zippy the Pinhead" a notable and influential comic strip in the world of cartooning.
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
1
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"When drugs came around I sampled them just like anybody else but I never became dependent creatively on drugs; like various cartoonists in the underground never did anything if they weren't stoned, That was the prerequisite for sitting down and drawing."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I just became one with my browser software."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I always thought of Levittown as a joke."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Are we having fun yet?"

Fun,
Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"A full, rich drawing style is a drawback."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"My first character was Mr. Toad."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Zippy is living in the moment."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
GettyImages-1390397976_b_edited.jpg
Quote_1.png

"All life is a blur of Republicans and meat."

Share on Facebook_Black.png
Share on X_edited.png
Painting Icon
bottom of page