Bill Griffith

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.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

Zippy is living in the moment.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

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.

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

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.

Well, I’ve done a lot of strips since I’ve been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

Mike Judge, who I’ve become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

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.

I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.

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.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

I just became one with my browser software.

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.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.

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.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

Are we having fun yet?

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I’m not Zippy.