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Home
Authors
Bill Griffith
American
Cartoonist
About the author
Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Attention
#Reality
#Metaphor
I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Art
#Years
#First
#School
Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Culture
#Movies
#America
#Jazz
Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Character
#Time
#Thought
Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Years
#Friends
#Artist
My first character was Mr. Toad.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Character
#First
A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Style
The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Being
#Culture
#Light
#Americans
Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#People
#Language
Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Art
#Being
#Vision
#Romantic
Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Community
#Conformity
#Imitation
Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Being
When drugs came around I sampled them just like anybody else but I never became dependent creatively on drugs; like various cartoonists in the underground never did anything if they weren't stoned, That was the prerequisite for sitting down and drawing.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Drugs
Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Order
#Chaos
She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Problems
#Father
#Sister
I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Career
#Man
#Writer
#Mother
#Father
#Army
Are we having fun yet?
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Fun
All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Life
#Republicans
I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Nothing
#Body
Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Life
I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Beauty
#Artist
But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Character
#Now
#Life
#Style
#Technology
#Computer
I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Parents
I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Hate
#Formula
When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Art
#Artist
#Smoking
I just became one with my browser software.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Software
Zippy is living in the moment.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Living
Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
I always thought of Levittown as a joke.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#Thought
What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.
Bill Griffith,
American
Cartoonist
#People
#Work
#Wrong