Today’s Zippy:
An illeistic meta-cartoon.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Self-referential cartooning
August 2, 2017News for penises: the Haring commemorative bathroom
June 16, 2017(Sexually explicit images, but they’re certifiably Art, so they should be displayable here. If this is not the sort of thing you want to see, then pass on.)
More Pride Month news. From the Artsy site on the 13th, “Keith Haring’s Most Risqué Mural Is Hidden in a Public Bathroom” by Alexxa Gotthardt:
Masterpieces don’t often end up in public bathrooms.
But boundary-defying street artist Keith Haring didn’t care for the distinctions about where art could and should be made; his canvases were Manhattan’s buildings, streets, and subways. On them, he scrawled ecstatic, aroused bodies that radiated with bursts of energy.
Many of Haring’s public paintings have disappeared since they emerged from his prolific brush in the 1970s and ’80s. The city government treated them as acts of vandalism, or they were rubbed away by the wear and tear of time. Luckily, though, one of his most audacious, masterful murals still stands—and you can find it in a bathroom that’s open to the public every day of the week.
An early “is is”? Probably not.
March 27, 2017Jon Lighter on ADS-L yesterday, offering “An early “is is”:
1964 Jere Peacock To Drill and Die (N.Y.: Bantam) 257:
[(1)] “The thing of it is,” Waldron said … “is that this order was set up for you personally.”
The earliest example of Isis on record up to this point is from Dwight Bolinger in 1971 (details in a 2007 handout of mine, “Extris, extris”); 1964 would be an antedating, but not a remarkable one. Still, I’m dubious that (1) is a report of Waldron saying:
(2) The thing of it is is that this order was set up for you personally.
More likely it’s a report of:
(3) The thing of it is, …is that this order was set up for you personally.
Sticks and stones
January 13, 2017Two Calvin and Hobbes strips from a series in recent re-runs. Background: Calvin has called Susie names, deriding and insulting her. Susie tries to take solace in a proverbial rhyme, sadly without success:
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And Calvin totally muffs an apology:
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Two poignant cartoons
October 27, 2016A mildly poignant Zippy, in which things have come to the point where Griffy almost misses Richard Nixon. And another deeply poignant episode in the Doonesbury account of Lacey and Jeremy’s adventures in senior dating.
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Comicat
July 26, 2016Today’s Zippy takes us back in comics history:
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Felix the Cat. And Felix Chevrolet, 3330 S Figueroa St in L.A.
Zippy on a cross-comic run
July 16, 2016In the “Ask the Archivist” column on the Comics Kingdom Blog (from King Features) on the 14th:
It’s been thirty years since Bill Griffith’s underground comix star Zippy The Pinhead went above ground and joined King Features Syndicate. Zippy had been around since 1971, so he’s in the midst of a forty-fifth anniversary, too.
Zippy, as you might know, was inspired by Griffith’s real-life interaction with a Pinhead, as well as Pinheads in popular culture, like the co-stars of the infamous film, “FREAKS” (MGM 1932).
But Griffith has always been more interested in the way culture has impressed him, especially that which addressed kids many years ago. At any time, incomprehensibly, long-dead actors or forgotten corporate mascots might appear, and interact with Zippy or Griffith’s cartoon alter ego. It’s like a surreal dream, often punctuated with misty bits of philosophy and out-of-date advertising catchphrases.
Today I’ve picked some of the Zipster’s various encounters with comic characters
Someone old, someone new
July 8, 2016Two cartoons from the latest (July 11/18) New Yorker, by veteran artist Danny Shanahan (in the magazine since 1988) and newcomer Edward Steed (first appeared there in 2013):
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The Shanahan (which is, in a sense, “about” animal communication) exemplifies the cartoon meme of the animal in a bar (most often a dog, but many other animals have engaged in bar conversations); in this case, the animal in a bar is combined with a comic trope in which a bartender covers for a patron by telling a caller to the bar (clasically, the patron’s wife) that the patron isn’t there. The Steed is a bizarre bulletin in the news for penises.
Another offer (X-rated)
June 18, 2016Those of you who have visited Kirjasto Zwicky (my “library condo”) on Staunton Ct. in Palo Alto will probably remember the “X-rated bathroom” (the front bathroom upstairs), which was enlivened by mounted X-rated gay collages hanging on its walls; there were more mounted collages (not quite so racy) in the adjoining study/office. All of this is now being converted into a bedroom, which requires more divestment / divestiture. So another offer, this time of the mounted collages.
Anatol Kovarsky
June 17, 2016In the New York Times on the 14th, an obituary by William Grimes, “Anatol Kovarsky, New Yorker Cartoonist for Decades, Dies at 97”:
Anatol Kovarsky, an artist and illustrator whose sense of whimsy and the absurd made him a fixture at The New Yorker from the late 1940s through the 1960s as both a cartoonist and a cover artist, died on June 1 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.
Mr. Kovarsky, a master of the wordless visual gag, produced nearly 300 cartoons for The New Yorker. His first, published on March 1, 1947, showed two museum visitors peering at each other in surprise as they looked through the hole in a large Henry Moore-like nude.
