Tag Archives: Bill Griffith

Paul Buhle on Comics: Three Rocks and a Guy from the Bronx

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy. By Bill Griffith. New York: Abrams, 2023. 265pp, $24.99.

Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 274pp, $110.

The “three rocks” of the title might be metaphorically translated as the three giant artists of Underground Comix still above the ground. More and more of the major players have passed in recent years, including Griffith’s own wife Diane Noomin,  Aline Kominsky Crumb and Justin Green.  Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith: these six words thus conjure up a vanished world, with Crumb the pop culture super nova and the latter two editing ARCADE (1975-80), the  premier anthology of the genre before each went on to fame in separate ways.

Only one artist coming up from the Underground managed what almost every comic artist wanted, at least until the 1970s: a steady gig in the daily newspapers. Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” emerged as the daily press was drifting into a long last hurrah. The comic strip was picked up for worldwide daily distribution by King Features Syndicate in 1986, and many thousands of readers looked eagerly each day for the latest.  These days, Zippy is mostly online.

But Griffith has also produced graphic novels, beginning with Invisible Ink, with a semi-fictional but definitely real biographical story of his mother and the gag artist (but also the savant or Henry Higgins) of her grand adulterous adventure. The next, Nobody’s Fool, offered the reader an adventure through the life of a real-life sideshow mirocephalic actor or non-actor (and a definite non-victim), the source of Zippy. Up ahead, Griffith will produce a comic version of the story of his great-grandfather, the famous photographer of the West, William Henry Jackson.

Not every reader or even lover of comic strips is likely to know that “Nancy” has become the subject of considerable scholarship. The enigmatic nature of the characters (mainly herself and a suspiciously unrelated but also suspiciously erotic Aunt Fritzi, along with Nancy’s street companion, the ruffian Sluggo), how each four panel strip builds a gag toward a climax, has always fascinated would-be cultural commentators and obviously continues to do so.

An entire volume, How To Read Nancy by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, pondered the apparent thinness of the narrative, the flatness of the visual presentation, and the incredible popularity of the strip. What was really going on and why did readers, generation after generation, crave the strip so?

Griffith saves the more or less decisive conclusions to the end of his book, and for good reasons. Nancy is, after all, the projection of artist, whose life we find laid out as only another artist, comic artist, could possibly manage properly.

Ernie Bushmiller was an Irish, second-generation immigrant growing up in the blue collar Bronx of the early decades of the twentieth century. Showing talent from an early age, taking a flunky job at the premier New York World, he landed a strip (as a replacement artist) at 19, an incredible feat. One could suggest that Bushmiller, taking in comic-ness at its peak (even the appearance of network radio in the 1920s would lessen the appeal of the comic page, a bit), did not need to think about anything beyond the examples offered by other humorous strips of the day.

That conclusion would probably be wrong, but how wrong? Even  the crucial Aunt Fritzi was borrowed from another daily strip about a would-be film actress. Seen sometimes in her slip or in a two-piece bathing suit, Fritzi could no more avoid being sexy than the rascally Nancy could avoid being a rule-breaking annoyance. By the time we reach p.74 and a comic-character Griffith is lecturing an audience of young people in the non-existent “Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art,”  Nancy is not (unlike Peanuts) about childhood but about comic-hood, comic form, with sight-gags predominant.

This conclusion had already been reached in How to Read Nancy, but Griffith elucidates the implications in a dozen ways, while telling the otherwise mundane story of the artist’s life. Other hugely popular artists like Bushmiller’s friend Milt Gross lived in public from their fame, sometimes appearing on the radio, making themselves visible in nightclubs, and inevitably womanizing. By contrast, Bushmiller had an insular life (and wife), chained to his desk, evidently happy to spend his life thinking up gags.

Griffith invents wildly here, bringing Bushmiler’s characters literally to life, placing himself in the story, teasing out why Nancy might attract a cult-like following in the 1970s, as Bushmiller himself shuffled off life’s stage. Could Dagmar, one of those minor characters introduced well along in the history of the strip, really have had affairs with Sluggo and others including the forgotten Irma? Why not?

In fact, the sexiness of Aunt Fritzi inspired fantasies in the minds of generations of readers, who were also perplexed, if they thought about it at all, by the uncertainty of the setting. Mad Magazine ran several satires suggesting what Griffith points out: Nancy is not some cute little kid at all but just the comic strip character that she inhabits. Nor is Nancy “surrealist” in ways that some critics have suggested, except that the strip frequently bent the borders of the comic panel, the form’s own “fourth wall,” and sometimes offered sight gags that surrealist devotees could call their own. No evidence exists, not even in the personal bookshelf that Griffith discovers in Bushmiller’s home, of anything resembling conscious sophistication.

The Epilogue appropriately features Nancy reading How To Read Nancy, and on the following page, p.239, Nancy reading The Best of Nancy, collected by Brian Walker. What non-conclusion could be more appropriate?

And then again, it could easily be said that the emerging scholars of comic art have provided their own curious non-conclusion. Belgian scholar Benoit Crucifix’s Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel (2023) argues that the top notch of comic art today, perhaps some lower notches as well, has become a history machine at large.

The case for comic masters as simultaneous comic historians aka archivists of the apparently obscure pulp past, is a strong one. Art Spiegelman taught comic history at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan almost out of instinct, the process of recovery being part of the process of ongoing creation (or re-creation), actually recuperation of a low-rated art form. Thus “classics” like Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, from the early twentieth century, come to life again, and can even be reworked by later artists tinkering with the pulp past.

Art history proper, the recognition of masters and icons for the sake of the art buyer as well as the art appreciator, makes almost no sense here. Except that Robert Crumb originals on napkins in Southern France may sell for thousands of dollars. But even this, or the current placement of comic strips in museum exhibitions, is not the main issue. Griffith himself signals or seeks to signal that point in Three Rocks. Comics, comic art, exist in a space that “art” has never been, up to now at least. For it to be present demands a fresh look at the mundane, a closer look at daily life.

Perhaps we are too late in the day of a collapsing civilization? It’s a good question. Artists who look beyond their own personal interests have always looked for redemption in one way or another. Comic art and the reuse of comic art, would seem to be the least likely place to find a redemption but who can tell?

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THREE ROCKS by Bill Griffith graphic novel review

Nancy, the very definition of a comic strip.

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy. Bill Griffith. Abrams. New York. 272 pp. $24.99

Nancy and Sluggo are such recognizable characters that the two instantly represent the concept of “comics” throughout the world. As the author of this graphic novel has said, “Peanuts tells you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” However, as Bill Griffith (creator of Zippy the Pinhead) makes clear, Nancy’s evolution as a comic strip was every bit as bumpy and uncertain as any other comic strip. One of the joys of this graphic novel is following Griffith’s “fly on the wall” method of keeping the reader right on the pulse of the process. You see it all here, from the unlikely start of one aspiring cartoonist to the unlikely start of yet another comic strip; and you see both, Ernie Bushmiller (1905 – 1982) and Nancy, evolve to a transcendent level.

Griffy lectures on comics.

There’s a lot of fun things going on in this book and you definitely don’t need to know a thing about comics or have any strong feelings regarding the subject. That’s because this is as much an American success story as it is a quirky look at how some things work or an exploration of how we humans process information. Take your pick, there’s something for everyone. And that is how it should be when discussing this most iconic of pop culture phenomena. Who hasn’t heard of Nancy and Sluggo, right? Even the youngest and most detached will likely pick up the signal. Nancy has origins going back to 1922 when it began as a whole other comic strip, Fritzi Ritz, the madcap adventures of a flapper young woman, by Larry Whittington. In 1925, 19-year-old Ernie Bushmiller took over the strip and, along the way, introduced mischievous 8-year-old Nancy, who also took over. By 1938, the comic strip was known simply as, Nancy, and it pursued a process of comics perfection up to Bushmiller’s death in 1982. Griffith’s graphic novel goes about chronicling, dissecting, and analyzing Nancy and Bushmiller with glorious results.

Nancy in its prime, early 1960s.

Already a longtime fan of the strip, it didn’t take any more convincing of its greatness for Griffith when, a few years ago, he stumbled upon a home-made scrapbook of Nancy comic strips, circa 1960-63, during an eBay shopping spree. This purchase proved to be a big revelation. As Griffith explains: “Reading through them, I came to a surprising conclusion: These were the strip’s best years. Bushmiller’s diagrammatic drawing style has been honed to perfection, the punchlines work as gags and as a mini-theatre of the absurd, and he allows the world outside of Nancy and Sluggo’s neighborhood to creep in more often. Television, rock ‘n’ roll, and the Cold War are all fodder for satirical gags. But once the outside world enters Nancy’s familiar reality, it becomes Nancy’s. It may be 1962 on the calendar, but–in Bushmillerland, time stands still.” What a gift of insight for Griffith, a master at blending the surreal with everyday reality.

A waterproof ballpoint pen takes the stage.

Time and again, Griffith plucks gem after gem of Nancy insights and Easter eggs. He lets the comic strip speak for itself with numerous examples and, in so many ways, lets his own graphic novel take on a life of its own. Griffith’s numerous re-enactments are so magically loopy that you might remember some later as if you’d daydreamed them yourself. If you enjoy sojourns into now long-gone retro New York, you’ll find plenty of that here. One such example is the depiction of a publicity stunt for a new waterproof ballpoint pen. It takes place at the now defunct Lambs Club on West 44th Street, circa 1950. Bushmiller has been enlisted, along with some of his cartoonist cronies, to take part in an event that showcases a number of swimsuit models posing as the cartoonists draw directly on their bodies to demonstrate the quality of the featured product. The scene is taken in stride by Bushmiller. The photos taken of the event were slotted for a feature in Life magazine but, in the end, the editor pulled the plug on that. It was just another gig for Bushmiller.

Nancy and Sluggo in their later years.

Bushmiller seemed to pay little to no attention to all the accolades to Nancy. Perhaps, in some ways, he was not fully aware of what he had unleashed. It certainly wasn’t because he lacked sophistication. In some respects, Bushmiller simply did it his way. There were some happy accidents along the way that gave Nancy its surreal kick, notably the dynamic of Nancy, an 8-year-old, in the care of Fritzi, a young aspiring actress from a completely different comic strip that the Nancy comic strip had inherited. In interview after interview, Bushmiller downplays any artful qualities to his comic strip. He said he learned long go that most people chewed gum than ate caviar and he sided with the masses. And yet it takes one to know one and it’s easy to imagine that Bushmiller would have approved wholeheartedly of fellow cartoonist Griffith’s tribute to him. He might have shaken his head with an aw-shucks attitude while including a knowing nod. And sure, some things in the book, Bushmiller might have shrugged off as the concerns of a younger generation, like Griffith’s wonderfully loopy epilogue that revisits Nancy and Sluggo in their later years. Nancy, and the study of Nancy, involves the deep recesses of the mind. The ideal guide is someone keenly familiar with the cartoonist’s lot, complete with the repetitive tasks and the never-ending pursuit of perfection. Ernie Bushmiller, the pioneer trailblazer, is an ideal model of the true artist-cartoonist. Bill Griffith, a master himself, proves to be the ideal guide.

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BUILDINGS ARE BARKING: Diane Noomin Remembered in Comics Tribute by Bill Griffith

The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin, in Memoriam. By Bill Griffith.

Seattle: F.U. Press, Fantagraphics,  2023. 23pp, $7.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

We are nearly a year now since the passing of Diane Newman, who took on the comics moniker “Diane Noomin” as she began to publish her work in the Bay Area-centered world of Underground Comix in the 1970s. This is, then, a tribute booklet, but singular, in the way no one except her husband Bill Griffith could conceive and draw. As far as I can recall, no homage from a comics spouse has ever achieved this conceptual depth or intensity. It is a remarkable miniature, with a surprising depth that will please but fail to surprise the regular readers of Griffith, a master of the self-reflection that is also mass-culture-reflection.

The Buildings Are Barking might be compared, if comparisons are possible, to the many pages of Robert Crumb’s Biblical-adaptation Genesis in which Aline Kominsky Crumb’s physical self appears and reappears as the women of ancient Hebrew lore. Real-life Aline had a couple of decades ahead.

Within the last year or so, the artists of Underground Comix lore have been disappearing in haste: Justin Green, Jay Lynch, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, to name only the most widely known. Spain Rodriguez and Harvey Pekar (not artist but writer/editor and self-publisher) passed a decade earlier, signalling how easily even the memories of a unique and vital development in comic art might slip away.

Griffith has seized the moment,  rather taken his time to seize the moment, perhaps as a yohrtseit (symbolic Jewish commemoration on an anniversary) to Diane and her ambiguously and also unambiguously Jewish identity. Urged on by Ko-Ko the Clown—Max Fleischer’s magical animated creation of the 1920s—Griffith gets around within a few pages to telling us about Diane Newman’s alter-ego, Didi Glitz, the soul of her comix or comics work. A teenage inhabitant of Canarsie of the 1950s, Didi had all the appealing/repellent qualities of adolescence seizing onto popular culture as a means of identity. Bouffant hairdos, garish clothes, garish crushes on boys (sometimes goys), clique-obsessions among girlfriends, above all a need for expression, no matter how embarrassing to the objective viewer.

Griffith (let’s call him Griffy here, as Diane did) enjoys his rumination on life in San Francisco of the 1970s-80s, perhaps not really the “idyllic city…before the Dotcom boom,” but idyllic for them and for many artists. Always badly overpriced, losing its architectural beauty decade by decade, their San Francisco was still arguably (with New Orleans) the most beautiful of American urbanscapes. Here, at any rate, Griffith and Newman moved past earlier long-term relationships to grasp each other, marrying in 1980. From there on, and no doubt connected to their mutual grasp of the varied icons of popular culture seen as “history” (her poodle pin collection, his vintage diner photos), they sunk or rose into each other.

Bill Griffith has famously been producing the near-daily strip Zippy the Pinhead since the middle of those San Francisco days, while Diane became part of a subset of women comics artists who ruthlessly delved into their lives and psyches. She aspired to draw a comic about her parents’ secret (and very Jewish) connections with the Communist Party in the McCarthy Era, but she didn’t live long enough. Griffith has found his own way to produce real history-based comic works as Zippy stumbles through time and space. In other words, and laughs aside, they were both serious artists.

The Buildings Are Barking is deeply personal in ways that this reviewer cannot describe adequately, and to which the reader is advised to proceed intuitively, that is, following Griffith’s own shifting moods of consciousness. At the end, we are with  Ko-Ko the Clown again. Ko-Ko always expressed a grimness behind the jaunty exterior: there is a bit of a Grim Reaper about him.

What any serious artist (or writer) leaves behind is the effort at expression, brilliant or less than brilliant but a striving with purpose. Griffith has captured Diane Noomin aka Newman, and thereby captured himself as well.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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Review: ‘Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead’ by Bill Griffith

Friendly Freaks are Family.

Every art form has its dark, morose, and melancholic aspect. Comics, despite the ingrained comedy in its very name, is a truly dark art much of the time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. What can you say when you’re feelin’ glum, chum? See ya in the funny papers! One of the best examples of the tragicomic in comics can be found in the work of legendary cartoonist Bill Griffith. Considering a lot of the surreal and loopy stuff that Griffith has depicted over the years, he always manages to not lay it on too thick, finding just the right balance. He is certainly just the right artist to tackle the life and times of one of the strangest and most celebrated of weary souls, Schlitzie the Pinhead. In Nobody’s Fool, published by Abrams, Mr. Griffith has achieved a crowning achievement in the comics medium.

Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead

There’s a unique experience that creators have, particularly writers of one form or another, that provides the loopy sensation of having your creation come to life. Yes, there’s is definitely something behind the idea of having your characters take on lives of their own. This notion comes to mind when contemplating Mr. Griffith’s journey with the inspiration for his legendary comic strip, the cool and sardonic Zippy The Pinhead. Where Zippy, the weirdo in a mumu, will forever be the epitome of deadpan irony, the actual source for Zippy is quite a different story. Schlitzie the Pinhead was quite literally a circus freak. In 1963, Griffith, a young struggling artist, caught a screening of the 1932 cult classic, Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, in which Schlitzie played a modest but memorable role. After viewing Schlitzie on screen, the imagery stuck in Griffith’s mind and quickly morphed into a comics avatar. All these years later, Griffith is able to reconcile the original Zippy with his own work and pay tribute to Schlitzie.

 

Zippy The Pinhead by Bill Griffith

 

The Many Names of Schlitzie The Pinhead

This is one of those remarkable graphic novels that truly takes your breathe away. It shares a space with the best that the comics medium has to offer. It’s a utterly original and distinctive work of art inextricably linked to one legendary talent. The detail and dedication involved to make this happen is comparable, say, to your favorite movie up for an Academy Award. Yes, it’s that big of a deal. The amounts of hours put in, all the little details, are staggering to think about. Griffith dug deep, doing his research and going back to interview as many individuals as he could find associated with the celebrated circus freak. And what did he find? Well, part of the charm of a book like this is simply the journey itself. Griffith is careful to modulate how much of himself he directly places into the narrative. But, in the end, he’s as much a key player as anyone else in the book. We find him connecting the dots along the way and, ultimately, we have a key sequence with him viewing and processing that infamous and misunderstood film, Freaks.

All it took was some red hots.

Griffith spares no expense, as it were, in fully depicting the life and times of Schlitzie the Pinhead. For a cartoonist who gave us, Zippy, an icon of irony, the irony must not be lost on Griffith for devoting so much time and effort to Schlitzie, a prime example of an utterly simple soul. When you dig deep into the life of Schlitzie, it breaks one’s heart to find such an overwhelming nothingness. Schlitize enjoyed, or tolerated, performing for big crowds. But, truth be told, he mostly enjoyed washing dishes and eating fried chicken. Ah, but in the hands of a masterful cartoonist, profound beauty can be found in the darkest of places.

Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead is a 256-page hardcover published by Abrams ComicArts, to be released March 19, 2019. For more details, visit Abrams right here.

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Review: ‘Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist’ by Bill Griffith

Searching through the past: the true story of Barbara Griffith emerges

Searching through the past: the true story of Barbara Griffith emerges

As if drawn with invisible ink, there are mountains of comics from yesteryear that, even if popular in their day, will never be read again. But once upon a time, cartoonists were bona fide celebrities. Today, of course, everything has splintered off. But we still have some of the good stuff that harkens back to a golden age. We have Bill Griffith’s legendary comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead. Mr. Griffith is an expert on comics many times over and a masterful storyteller. He takes all that and gives us his first long-form graphic story, “Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist.”

Cartoonist Bill Griffith channels Cartoonist Lawrence Lariar

Cartoonist Bill Griffith channels Cartoonist Lawrence Lariar

Griffith navigates us through the often murky world of pop culture’s past and puts it into unique context. The past easily holds onto its secrets all too often because no one bothers to ever try to pry them open. This is a book about prying open the past and revealing the most intriguing secrets, family secrets. Much in the spirit of Griffith’s surreal Zippy the Pinhead, the mundane here collides with the supposedly more colorful world of mass media. Add to that, a decidedly offbeat look at the world. I swear, I found Zippy creeping up when you least expected it. For instance, there’s a scene in a diner between Bill and his uncle, Al, and Al says, “You know what’s coming back?” Bill asks, “Salisbury steak?” “No,” Al says, “morse code!”

The K & W Cafeteria in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

The K & W Cafeteria in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Check out the page above that I just made reference to with the morse code comment. Ah, such a thing of beauty! A perfect example of the Bill Griffith sensibility and I’m sort of just picking a page at random. It speaks to the very best spirit of underground comix which Bill Griffith came from. It articulates a worldview of someone finely tuned in to his feelings and observations. It is a very relatable view since we all feel we’re tuned in to the world around us. The idea is to create an expression of what one sees that touches on all the details of the moment and evokes a stream-of-consciousness. We see Griffith reacting to a quaint world of yesteryear still alive in the here and now. It’s a world where you can expect to order three different kinds of macaroni & cheese. Of course, the actual K&W Cafeteria doesn’t think of itself as out-of-date. It offers free Wi-Fi, after all. But, from Griffith’s perspective, it is a strange world to marvel over and that’s what we’re looking for!

Invisible-Ink-Bill-Griffith

You can imagine that Bill Griffith’s mother might have pretended she was writing with invisible ink in order to be as revealing as she was in her journals and related work. Whatever the case, we hear her loud in clear in this exploration of her inner life. Griffith synthesizes various artifacts to find a greater truth. When you go hunting for answers like this, you’re liable to get lost in your own issues with your parents. Griffith is no different in this regard. He is just like any of us trying to deal with the past and that is an excellent hook for readers. What makes this story extraordinary is that Bill Griffith has definitely met his match with his mother who gives his storytelling skills a run for their money. If truth is stranger than fiction, then this must be one hell of an example of that. It boggled the mind of Bill Griffith, one of the great mind-bogglers in comics.

“Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist” is a 208-page black & white hardcover published by Fantagraphics Books. For more details, and to order, visit our friends at Fantagraphics Books right here.

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