In response to my Zippy posting earlier today in which I looked for the source of the strip’s title, “Peachy Keen”, Drew Smith suggested that the peach part came from the strip Miss Peach rather than (my suggestion) the game character Princess Peach. At issue was the model or models for a grotesquely big-headed character in the Zippy. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but now I see that Miss Peach seems not to have come up on this blog, so it would be worth discussing.
From Wikipedia:
Miss Peach was a syndicated comic strip [set in an elementary school] created by American cartoonist Mell Lazarus. It ran for 45 years, from February 4, 1957 to September 8, 2002.
… The daily strips often contained only a single panel. The format was “gag-a-day”. The drawing was stylized: the children had tiny bodies and large heads with flounder faces (both eyes on the same side of the nose).
The heads are large, but the bodies are really tiny. True, the heads are larger than adults’ heads, but only by a bit. And the Zippy character is viewed from the front, not the side.
Two samples, with linguistic humor in them:
(#1)
(#2)
#1 turns on two different specialized uses of the verb form whooping — in the formulaic whooping crane and whooping cough. #2 turns on an ambiguity of the verb name ‘give the conventional name for’ vs. ‘assign a name to’.
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