Archive for the ‘Identities’ Category

The existential question

October 11, 2019

In today’s Zippy strip, Zerbina and Zippy contemplate their existence — ever an issue for self-aware cartoon characters:

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How do we know we exist? And if this perilous sort of existence, created in the mind and (literally) at the hands of an artist, fails to be validated by those in the outer, non-cartoon, world, are we nothing but a dream (sweetheart)?

Perhaps a concern for all of us, but especially pointed for cartoon characters. Who will speak for them, especially now that Mad Magazine is gone?

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Posted in Comic conventions, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry | 2 Comments »

Will the real Zippy please stand up?

April 20, 2019

Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to Littleton (NH, not the more famous CO — or, for that matter, IL, IA, KY, ME, MA, NC, or WV), where our Pinhead falls into an identity crisis:

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Everybody, including the counterman, is Zippy, or at least a Zippy. And the strip begins with a stretch that is both two panels, each with a Zippy in it, and one full-diner-view panel, with two Zippys in it. We’re in the nightmare world of clones — who am I?

Then there’s the observation in the last panel: No one brings small problems into a diner. Certainly, an interpretation of what happened in the strip before this, though as that it’s crucially ambiguous. But maybe also a moral that we should take away from those events, a piece of advice about what we should or should not do.

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Posted in Diners, Identities, Movies and tv, Music, Pragmatics, Semantics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

The return of Lazlo?

June 30, 2015

Today’s Zippy finds Lazlo and Connie holed up, unhappily, in a motel near Duluth:

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The Pinhead life begins to look attractive, even congenial.

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The Crannich chronicles

June 29, 2015

A missing part of the saga of character actor Lazlo Crannich in Zippy. Earlier postings led up to a discussion of identities and performances, and then Lazlo agonized unhappily about his job portraying Zippy, through a series of strips, until he simply fled the scene and escaped to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

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Auditioning to be Zippy

June 28, 2015

When we last heard from Lazlo and Connie, the actors who perform Zippy and Zerbina, they had fled to Copper Harbor MI (where they were staying at the King Copper Motel). The story then shifted (on June 24th) to Griffy and the task of finding replacements for the actors. The first strip in this story line:

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