Archive for the ‘Surrealism’ Category

Chips on the west, Chip’s on the east

May 17, 2021

Yesterday’s (5/16) Zippy strip shows a Zippy-like Pinhead actor playing the Zippy role in the comics; Zippy strips often advance the unsettling view that characters in the comics are, or at least can be, just roles that are played by actors, who have lives of their own, outside the strips their characters appear in. But then (as here) these Zippy strips sometimes feature such actors as characters in the strips, hence as roles that can themselves be played by actors. And so on down the surrealistic rabbit-hole.

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So much for the content of the strip. My attention was immediately caught by the diner, Chips, that the Zippy-actor is studying his script in, and its arresting architecture, which cries out “L.A.!” So it is.

But a search for “Chips diner” pulls up as its first hit a set of 5 east-coast eating establishments, the Chip’s Family Restaurants located throughout Connecticut — equally offering old-fashioned diner fare, but architecturally crying out “New England!”

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Wigs and smog in Nevada

December 26, 2020

Today’s (Boxing Day) Zippy cartoon takes us to commercial strips in Nevada and to a Woody Allen (comic) homage to German Expressionist film:

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(Remember that Zippy is a notably surrealistic cartoon.)

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Plastic Fantastic Pinhead

March 8, 2016

Today’s Zippy, taking us back into the world of Doggie Diner heads and Muffler Men, roadside fiberglass icons that Zippy engages in conversation with every so often. Today they give him astonishing news about his origins:

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Comic conventions

February 26, 2015

Two cartoons today touching on conventions of the comics: A Calvin and Hobbes on conventional characters in the comics and a Zippy on the conventions of surrealistic cartooning:

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The portal

December 14, 2014

(Not much linguistic in this, but it tickled my fancy.)

Today’s Zippy:

An exercise in Zippyesque surrealism.

Note that the two panels have “the same” characters in them, doing the same things, but with everyone transformed by the portal in the second panel: the woman with a wrap on her arm becomes a Pinhead with a folded muu-muu on her arm, and so on.

And there’s no going back.