Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy, has long had a website that he's run himself, offerring various books and merchandise featuring his most famous character. The site has been in its current form for around twenty years at this point, and Griffith has been offerring for most of that time the ability to buy an original 5" x 7" pen and ink drawing of Zippy with a word balloon that you can ask to be filled with whatever 'Zippyism' you'd like. Either by selecting one of a dozen Griffith-written phrases or writing your own.

I don't recall when I first saw that exactly, but it likely was in the two-decades-ago ballpark and I thought a fun, original phrase that would be completely personal and still sound very much like Zippy would be, "Kleefeld is just dlefeelk spelled backwards!" I can't recall if it was a cash flow issue or some kind of problem with the site, but I never pulled the trigger on that.

Until last week.

I was actually looking at getting a copy of Griffith's new Photographic Memory book and I saw that he still had that commission option available. Still using the circa 2004 preview image. Still charging $100. And so, twenty-ish years after having the idea, I received in the mail yesterday...

For as much as my copy looks almost exactly the same as the preview, it is an original piece of art. The pencil sketch is visible underneath the ink, and there are indeed a couple ink marks that have been corrected with white paint.

Griffith is in his 80s now, and his artwork isn't showing any signs of faltering. And that he's only charging $100 for a piece like this in 2025 strikes me a steal. It's a fun bit of original art, and Griffith apparently has done so many of these that he can do them in his sleep. I put in my order on Friday, and he had it in the mail the very next day! I recognize that things are fiscally tight for a lot of people right now, but I'd recommend taking advantage of the opportunity if you're able.

If you've heard virtually anything about US politics over the past two years, you've probably heard something about the infamous "Epstein files." But on the off chance you haven't, here's a short summary. Between 2008 and 2019, Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused dozens of young girls. He travelled in high profile circles and forced underage girls into sexual relations with a number of celebrities. He was eventually arrested in 2019 for sex trafficking and died in his jail cell a month after being incarcerated. Officially, it was ruled a suicide but there are more than a few reasons to believe he was murdered.

Because of the seriousness of his crimes and the length of time he was being investigated, the US Department of Justice has an extensive set of files on him, including material confiscated from Epstein's home as evidence. This is noteworthy for two reasons. First, Epstein had extensive surveillance capabilities on his properties, specifically in order to capture unflattering material of his guests that he could use as a form of blackmail. Second, these people who he had video and audio recordings of included the likes of Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.

So the so-called "Epstein files" are not only things like datebooks and ledgers, but actual recordings of wealthy indvidiuals who -- given the great lengths they're going to in order to keep those files secret -- likely engaged in blatantly illegal and morally bankrupt behaviors. Given that Trump himself has already been criminally proven to be a rapist, has publicly shown himself to a weirdly sexual attraction to his own daughter going back to when she was a child, and seems to have fetish for watching women urinate, I can't imagine what levels of his depravity must be on those tapes that he refuses to have them released. (I wouldn't be surprised at what he's done -- I've been saying for years that there is no bottom with him -- just that he got recorded doing it.)

OK, so why the Epstein backstory here on a blog about comics? Because the whole sordid mess directly ties in with the comic book industry.

One of the women who Epstein abused when she was a child is Ashley Rubright. She's recently been speaking more openly about her experiences, notably in a CNN interview back in September. But this pertains to comics because -- as Rich Johnston just pointed out -- Rubright is a comic book dealer, selling comics alongside her husband Gary Attaway at BrokeAssComics.com.

I don't really have anything new to add. I'm pointing this out for much the same reason that Johnston did: that even if you don't follow this type of news very closely -- or at all -- because it's about immorally rich people who are so far removed from the reality of the rest of the world that they're even more two-dimensional that the bad guy on the worst Saturday morning cartoon you've ever seen, it still has a touches actual, real people. The victims these wealthy assholes screw over aren't just names on a page. They're real people who've been emotionally, if not physically and financially, traumatized. People who have interests and hobbies just like you. People who thought nothing of being interviewed on the BBC with shelves of long boxes in the background, and stacks of Amazing Spider-Man and Punisher comics within arms' reach.

 

That is why this stuff is relevant. Because it affects real people. This isn't "abstract background noise that sounds nominally awful but hey it's just about rich, white dudes I'll never meet." These are the people you run into at conventions. The ones you chat with on social media. The ones who are just as excited about seeing Robert Downey, Jr. as Doctor Doom as you are. To assholes like Epstein and Trump, they might be namelessly disposable, but they absolutely are not.

I grew up in an area of the country where a sugary carbonated beverage was called "pop." I can't imagine not having heard "soda" before college, but it was around that time that I consciously decided that "pop" was an ugly word, and "soda" was rolled off the tongue much more easily. I suspect the change had something to do with drinking more soda in college than I had previously, and possibly being in a more diverse environment where I heard different slang from other parts of the country, but it was a deliberate choice on my part. I made active choice to change my internal dictionary to reflect my thoughts.

Several ago, my (at the time) brother-in-law came out of his kitchen with something he called an I.C.D -- improvised chocolate desert. It was my birthday, and he knew my penchant for chocolate so he put together this combination of chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips, chocolate syrup and a Kit Kat bar. He handed it to me, wishing me a happy birthday, and I responded "Cheers!" It's not a word used much in the "hey, thanks" sense here in the United States. In fact, I think, prior to that utterance, I had only heard it on British TV shows and movies. But I had watched enough of them over the years that it slipped into my personal vocabulary. That was the first time I'd actively noticed that my own word selection had been surreptitiously affected by media consumption.

More recently, I was trying to explain a technical problem to a group of non-technical people at work. Technical jargon obviously won't work in this instance, so I believe I said something to the effect of, "If the two computers have trouble talking to each other, the data gets all wonky." Someone stopped me immediately. "Did you just say 'wonky'?" The word has since cropped up in a number of other meetings.

My individual word choices are based on a combination of conscious and subconscious decisions. If I hear a word or phrase that I like, I might decide to adopt it. If I hear a word or phrase that I don't necessarily like, but hear repeatedly over an extended period, I might adopt that as well.

What I'm wondering, in light of that, is what kind of impact visuals have on our language. Does seeing drawings of Spider-Man swinging by a web with his arms and legs going every which way influence how we think about... something? I don't know what that something might be, but it seems like there ought to be some effect based on the repetition of seeing that same type of image over and over. I'm sure it would influence how other artists draw Spidey, but what about people who don't draw?

Not just Spidey, of course. How do all of the repeated images of our favorite characters impact how we see? I'm not just talking about how being able to read comics impacts our thought process, but how do specific images -- or types of images, like the Superman akimbo pose or the brooding, wrapped in his cape Batman pose -- impact how we express ourselves?

In 1986, Gerhard Hahn's Deutsche Zeichentrick Erste Produktions GmbH & Co. KG. produced an animated feature called Don Martin Does It Again. Directed by Gaëtan Brizzi, Paul Brizzi, and Andrew Knight, it was based off many of Martin's old comic strips. Although I think it has some additional material written by Knight and Donna Bartolini, from what I've seen the bits are pretty faithful executions of Martin's original material. Sounds like a brilliant idea! Somehow, though, the pacing and onomatopoeia make the originals funnier to me. See for youself... Norma Martin, Don's widow, described it as "a half hour version of one of Don's long stories that can be found in his wholly owned pocketbooks." She added, "Don worked on this project extensively and the film won an award—there were problems of the usual kind between the parties. It was shown on TV in Europe — but never released in the US."

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Reflecting on the Web vs Print Debate
https://ift.tt/eUsAzwY

Kleefeld on Comics: Woodstalks
https://ift.tt/8IWmYg0

Kleefeld on Comics: End of an Era
https://ift.tt/692ur5L

Kleefeld on Comics: Mr. Civil Defense Tells About Natural Disasters
https://ift.tt/NZBrDaE

Kleefeld on Comics: A Curmudgeon's Take on Halloween
https://ift.tt/qHKUEa3

I don't really care much for Halloween. I'm not a hater or anything; it's just not my thing.

Halloween when I was a kid was kind of cool. You got an excuse to pretend you were Batman or Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones or whomever, and you got a bucket full of candy. Hard not to love that as a kid.

But somewhere when I got to be around 8 or 9, I started to realize that I really wasn't very good at it. The costuming part of it, I mean. There was always a matter of not wanting to spend a lot of money on a costume you'd wear once, maybe twice. And then there was the matter of being comfortable; the more elaborate the costume, the more uncomfortable it tended to be. The last time I even attempted a costume was 1991, when I was in college and my housemates all wanted to have a big Halloween party. I wore a pair of suede, knee-high boots I already had and a loincloth made of faux fur, carried around a cheap toy sword, and called myself "Shandor From The Village In The North!!!" That was probably my most successful costume, but mostly from the standpoint that it was me walking around almost naked. (Fortunately, it was quite warm that year.)

I understand the attraction of pretending to be someone else when you're a kid. You're still trying to figure out who you are and you can use Halloween as a sanctioned way to try on other roles. But I had a pretty good handle on who I was early on, and didn't feel any need to change identities. That sense of self has strengthened over the years and I have zero desire to pretend to be anyone else. In fact, I was a mildly irked when I first signed on to Second Life and couldn't use my real name as my screen name. I actually really like me, and don't have any interest in being anyone else. Even for one night.

(Semi-related: I have even less interest in trying my hand at cosplay.)

"OK, fine," you might say. "So you don' go to Halloween parties and dress up. You can still hang out at home and pass out candy to the neighbor kids."

My ex-wife insisted that we participate each year and hand out treats to the kids. Primarily out of fear that our house would get egged. I was never keen on getting up to answer the doorbell every few minutes, but I made it a little more tolerable for myself by handing out comics as well. While I did get one or two really good reactions each year ("WOW! Hey, guys! He's passing out comic books!") I didn't get much out of it. Because the youngest kids didn't even know what was going on, the older kids didn't care at all and just wanted free candy, and the ones in the middle didn't seem all that into it either.

Besides, it's not exactly cheap to buy a bunch of candy and/or comics mostly for people you don't know!

When I moved to the Chicago area, the town I moved to started trick or treating at 3:00. Working from downtown Chicago, that would mean I'd need to leave work at around noon in order to get home in time to hand out anything. So it wasn't exactly a high priority. In fact, prior to COVID, I often even made it a point to not even be home during the whole thing and I'd wind up rolling into the driveway around the time trick or treating was formally over.

Tonight, I'll have the lights off, the curtains drawn, and I'll probably be sitting in my library working my way through a way-too-large TO BE READ stack of comic books. But that's just me -- don't let me dissuade you from doing Halloween however suits you. Happy Halloween!

In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, I thought I might run this 1956 government printed pamphlet touting how you could be a good citizen during a natural disaster. The Li'l Abner artwork on the cover is signed by Al Capp, but the interior artwork doesn't look like his. I haven't been able to track down any solid creator information on whose art it actually is.