A New Newsletter with an Excerpt of a Bill Griffith Interview
The long and short: subscribe to my new newsletter about how newspaper comics were made or read the inaugural issue.
If you’re anything like me, I would be surprised. (I stole that joke in part from the late, great Mitch Hedberg. “If you’d like to see me after the show…I would be surprised.”) But, if you’re of the same era, you may remember the glorious surrealism of Zippy the Pinhead. Somehow, in our universe, this comic strip was syndicated by King Features and ran daily in hundreds of papers. Even more bizarrely, nearly 40 years later, it still does!
I loved Zippy and used to pore over old collections of it. Thus it was a huge pleasure to meet Bill Griffith briefly at the Small Press Expo (SPX), an indie comics event, back in early September, and intrigue him enough about my upcoming book, How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, to set up an interview. I knew Bill had a passionate interest in reproduction: he wasn’t that into printing, but rather wanted his work (and that of cartoonists in publications he edited long ago) to appear as good as possible in print. We had a long, far-ranging conversation, parts of which will inform and wind up in the book, along with production material he’s offering from his personal collection, and appropriate Zippy strips.
To capture some of my working process and share interviews, I started a newsletter also called How Comics Were Made that you can subscribe to. I’ll be producing issues regularly as I move towards the February 2024 target of a Kickstarter campaign for the book. Subscribe here, or just click this link to read the first issue, which includes excerpts from my interview with Bill.
