Bill Griffith's Bukowski ... (1 Viewer)

I can't work out if Bill Griffith doesn't like Bukowski, doesn't like Bukowski 'fans' or maybe both? Funny drawings tho'. And I like the frame about the smell of books :D
 
Griffith is weird. Zippy (or Zippy-fied Bukowski) is only one aspect of his weirdness. I remember buying a comic in the late 70s/early 80s called Griffith's Observatory that was pretty cool. At least I thought it was cool when I was 19.

Not sure what to make of him using Bukowski so much. I don't think he would do it as criticism, but who knows.
 
I don't think they're all that funny, but maybe they'll get funnier along the way.
 
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Zippy always reminded me of Pinhead from those freak shows years ago, and then I realized that they actually referred to Pinhead as Zip, thus the inspiration of Zippy from the comic books. Needless to say, these strips portraying Bukowski are not my favorite.
 
Griffith on Zippy two ....

Hmn, Griffith seems always to evoke a mixed response. He is a big fan of Buk ... it's exactly what Buk portrays that Griffy is trying to capture. All comics aren't, well, funny.

That may seem counter-intuitive but then again all poems ain't roses and caramels. The strip is all about the human condition, that which Buk captures so well. That's were the connect between them is, that's what Griffith is after.

Two more Buk related comics have been posted over the last two days ... one (click image to enlarge b & w strip) and then click previous for the second.

Throw away the words and look closely at the face ...

w/respect,
Don
 
Yes in the others from your blog you can see that the images are closely based on well known (around here at least) photos of Bukowski. No problem there.

They just seem a bit sneering to me. Is it pastiche? Is it satire? Caricature? I don't know.
 
Maybe it isn't any of those things. Or maybe it's all of them. ;)

Remembering the old Griffith's stuff, it seems to have a lot in common with much of Bukowski's later poetry, actually. In as much as both were retelling little everyday episodes they witnessed. I'm thinking of bits from Griffith's Observatory. But you know, that's a memory through 30 years of fog and Cheetos.

But in these strips he's "doing" Bukowski in Zippy form, so you really have to look at them in that context. And if you haven't seen Zippy before or don't like it, then these are probably going to fall flat.

But in the Zippy non sequitur world, I think the Slouch Gavitsky strips are funny. "When I go out to Denny's I always buy a Wall Street Journal to hide behind." That's spot-on satire of Bukowski tucked inside a Zippy-style random non sequitur.

Or something.

Hammer it down!
 
Maybe nothing to do with Bukowski, but I liked the one that mentions Sara Palin. You click his link and click on the black & white cartoon then hit next.

The cartoon is titled "Pronounced Difficulty" April 2010.

I see how most of the images are using poses of famous photos- I like that too.
 
Yeah, I also discovered Zippy in the mid-to-late 70's and embraced the strip just for the sake of weirdness, if nothing else. It ran in an underground free music paper called "The Prairie Sun" that was available in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri (and maybe Minnesota mjp ?)

The character was - imo - a cultural satire of anything and everything all at once. Zippy was the clueless but lovable schlub trying to fit in and saying whatever it took to accomplish that. He was naive and desperate to look cool, but too much his own person to succeed at fitting in. Sometimes the joke was on him, sometimes it was on society.

If that makes sense.

And I can't believe that 30-plus years after discovering him, I am contributing to a conversation about him to people I have never met in person.

Hey....ARE WE HAVING FUN YET ?
 
It ran in an underground free music paper called "The Prairie Sun" that was available in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri (and maybe Minnesota mjp ?)
No Zippy in the weeklies in Minneapolis or St. Paul. I bought the comics at Schinders, a great old magazine shop that used to have their downtown St. Paul branch in the building I lived in. Schinders had all the underground comics (I mean, comix) and was conveniently located next to Candyland, Musicland and between two bars. One bar per block may be enough where you live, but we're talking about St. Paul. People are thirsty there. God damn, downtown St. Paul was a lot of fun in those days. Like London after the Blitz.

I see now that they closed a few years ago after a 91 year run.

In related news, someone dumped hundreds of filleted Walleye carcasses, and the perpetrators remain at large.
 
There's a new Zippy-Bukowski strip up ("Poetry Emotion",April,16).
 
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It ran in an underground free music paper called "The Prairie Sun" that was available in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri (and maybe Minnesota mjp ?)

Maybe Michigan? Somehow this sounds familiar. I can't remember where I first ran into zippy. I used to read alot of the "underground" stuff so it may have been some other place too. I must admit though, I do remember it being funnier then. But maybe life was just funnier then....
 
Zippy comix kind of frightened me when I first read them; there was something unpredictably insane about him, the glance of his eyes, the stare, the clown costume, the grin... creepy. I was young and he was too weird for me.
I didn't have that with Bukowski.
 
Zippy is actually a pretty traditional-type strip, with a punchline and everything...but in a traditional joke, the punchline imposes order on the absurdity of the setup - and in Zippy, it's always the reverse: the punchline's invariably more absurd than the setup.



That's sort of the charm of Zippy, though...that bit of absurdity can be like a ray of sunshine when you're really bored.
 
Have a boxful of the comix catalog - everything from Crumb to Wilson and the problem with the Zippy stuff is it just really isn't all that funny. It isn't really all that anything. If sticking a donut on your pointy head is good humor then good laughs to you.
 

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