illusionofjoy | Zippy the Pinhead

Amoung other things canceled last week (more on that some other time), I opened my copy of the Post-Gazette on Monday to find that Zippy The Pinhead had been canceled, only to be replaced by Get Fuzzy. Although it probably shouldn't have, this pretty much put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day.

Over the past year, I had grown quite fond of Zippy. Most mainstream comic strips bore me these days, but Zippy was something unlike most of the other strips. It was quirky and sometimes challenging. It was more like a little piece of art on the comics page than a mere strip. By contrast, Get Fuzzy is a lame rip off of Garfield, retread for Generation X. It's a banal gag-a-day that tries too hard to be funny but ends up merely being derivative. I hated it from the moment I saw it.

This evening I was visiting the Zippy website, catching up on strips I'd missed, when I noticed in the newsbox on the main page an announcement that the strip had been cancelled in the Post-Gazette, along with an email address to which I could send complaints about said cancellation. I had been rolling it around in my head all week that I should write to the newspaper, airing my consternation at the cancellation of one of my favourite strips an that little newsbox gave me the mental push to say, "what the hell..."

What follows is the result:

To: magazine@post-gazette.com
Subject: Zippy the Pinhead

I am aware of the machinations of marketing. If something doesn't sell, it is replaced by something that does. This is simple economics. However, common sense dictates that something must be ranked the lowest, just as something must be ranked the highest. Also, there are times when one must consider art over economics.

"Zippy" was your lowest-ranked comic strip; such was the claim in the article published in your newspaper about it's glaringly inferior replacement, "Get Fuzzy." While "Zippy" may have ranked on the bottom rung of the popularity bracket on the comics page, I sincerely doubt that no one was reading it. I, for one, quite enjoyed the strip. In fact, on a comics page that was so often full of banal gag-a-day strips which retread the same tired clichés, I found "Zippy" to be a quirky breath of fresh air (to drag yet another cliché screaming from the vaults). I'm sure there were others who felt as I did.

"Get Fuzzy" is not funny nor is it amusing or interesting in any way. After a week of Darby Conley's blatant rip-off of "Garfield" (also not interesting), retread for Generation X, the desire to see "Zippy" back on the printed page became even stronger than when I had initially read of it's cancellation. Couple that with the fact that it is a slap in the face to the city of Pittsburgh to even allow "Get Fuzzy" into the pages of the Post-Gazette, given that most denizens of this city first became aware of it due to a joke wherein the punch line implied that Pittsburgh "smelled." Please forgive me if I begin to believe that the best way to get press time in the Post-Gazette is to insult the city in which it is published.

In any case, the primary reason for this letter is to express my opinion that your editorial board made an error in dropping "Zippy" from the comics page. Furthermore, I am of the viewpoint that an even greater error was made in replacing it with "Get Fuzzy," a strip that tends to blend in with the scenery. It is my hope that your editorial board would reconsider your decision and bring "Zippy" back to the Post-Gazette, however, as I am in the minority, I will not hold my breath. At this point, I can only hope that no other quality strips are cancelled from your publication. At last count, only two notables remained: "The Boondocks" and "Non-Sequitor."

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Seth Warren
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Pittsburgh (Mt. Lebanon) PA, 15216
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Email - seth_warren @ hotmail.com
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