Zippy: Nation of Pinheads

by Bill Griffith

A collection of Zippy the Pinhead strips from the early '80s. An excellent introduction Bill Griffith's popular comic strip. From his first appearance in Tales of the Toad, Zippy has lived a true American Success Story.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Humor

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1987

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zippy: Nation of Pinheads is a collection of Zippy strips from 1981 and 1982 starring Zippy the Pinhead.

I was aware of Zippy the Pinhead for years but never read any until I found this for 6 bucks.

Zippy is a microcephalic in a polka dotted muumuu that Bill Griffith uses to make sport of 1980s culture using observations and non-sequiturs. That's pretty much all I can say. It's a bizarre strip.

Bill Griffith is a talented draftsman. He uses a lot of cross hatching and black to give his strips depth. What I'm trying to say is the strip is surprisingly detailed and isn't a Garfield strip that takes an hour or two to knock out a day's page. Griffith's sense of humor shows through using Zippy as his mouthpiece, poking fun at pop culture in almost every strip.

I'm sure this strip wasn't meant to be read in a book like this and I'm equally sure it hit differently forty years ago when it was new. Four decades later, the references in almost every strip are dated. I think if you were born after 1990, most of the references will go right over your head. I'm pushing 44 and I had trouble with some of them.

Zippy: Nation of Pinheads is a fun collection of strips featuring everyone's favorite pinhead. I'm not sure I'll read another one, though. Three out of five stars.

[David Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. Zippy is kind of a one-note type deal. This collection is just one gag strip after another where the joke is non-sequiturs about stuff that was topical in 1981. It's amusing enough at first but it gets stale fast. Zippy feels like the kind of thing that works better read as a daily comic and not one after another in this kind of collection.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes they’re hilarious, sometimes they’re weirdly funny, and sometimes they’re just weird. But they're always entertaining. The 80s would have been a lot less fun without Bill Griffith.

[Frank McGirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more you read, the more you need...

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

he was a pinhead, happier than you or me!