I vaguely remember when I first encountered the “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip. I am sure I was in my teens, when I was reading some underground stuff, though my interest was largely mainstream. Zippy was in the middle: started by Bill Griffith as a character and then a heavy focus of his underground/alternative work, the strip was picked up by his local San Francisco paper and then, not long after, put into syndication by King Features nearly 40 years ago. It blew my mind: something this surreal and not-at-all-square (except the panels) in a regular newspapers?! I became a lifelong fan.
In preparing to launch How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, I knew that Bill would be a key “get” as an interview subject and for his permission to reproduce material. He had worked in production, starting as early as the late 1960s, and collaborated on publications, performed all his own graphics production work for Zippy, and had—as I recalled and then confirmed by reading old collections of the strip—several times referenced printing, scanning, and other aspects of reproduction in his work.
I went to the Small Press Expo in Maryland in September 2023 and managed to chat with him briefly and hand over a card explaining my book while I was getting him to sign a copy of Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy, his great graphical biography that came out last year. He was intrigued, and we spent nearly two hours on a Zoom call a few weeks later. You can read excerpts from that interview in the first installment in November of my (free) comics-history newsletter.
When I was thinking about something special to create as a higher-tier and somewhat unique reward for the Kickstarter project, I kept coming back to flong. I thought of how I might work with Jessica Spring, a letterpress printer, artist, and educator in Tacoma (about 45 minutes away by car), who I’ve known for over a decade. We had a fortuitous and accidental crossing of paths in June 2023 in London, when we had both arranged to research at the St Bride Printing Library, which is open only on Wednesdays. I introduced her around—I had been there before and wrote a book that encompassed St Bride and kept in touch—and that was a hoot.
Last fall, I got in touch and went to visit her studio, and we talked about the possibility of re-creating flong: using a debossing plate and a thick paper to create something that looked and felt like a mold used for comics syndication (along with distribution of ads, clip art, and other stuff) from about the 1910s to 1980s. I don’t think flong (also known as a “mat” for “matrix”) has been made in any quantity since the 1980s. But what art to reproduce?
Yes, you can still get all sorts of plates made for use in engraving, pressing down (debossing), and up (embossing), printing, and much more. We used Owosso Graphic Arts.
We created a test run-through using a public-domain Krazy Kat (George Herriman) strip and liked the results. Creating the “fake” flong involves using a thick paper (in our case, a handmade one from Porridge Papers) that Jessica dampens to make more pliable. She then puts the debossing plate with padding in contact with the paper in a nipping press, a hand-cranked device used in binding to compress pages while glue dries and for other reasons. She then lets the sheet dry. The letterpress print is made from the same plate, raised to the necessary height to receive ink and make a clean, solid impression on one of Jessica’s historic presses.
For the actual strip, Jessica was a big underground comic fan and, I found, loved Bill’s work. I thought, what the heck. I emailed Bill with photos and details, and—in part, because it didn’t require him to create new art—he agreed. You can see a proof of the flong and a letterpress print made from the same plate below.
The actual print that backers of the campaign at the “Are We Having Flong Yet?” tier will get will be a single larger sheet with both the mold and print on it, as well as metal typeset text that explains the print and identifies the installment of Zippy referenced.
I picked a Zippy strip that was the first in a series of five that Bill explained came about when he went to his local copy shop where he’d been photocopying Zippy for years to send to his syndicate. I asked him about this series from 1991 and he said:
That was my cry of pain. I would go to the copy center nearby in San Francisco and suddenly the resulting image—it wasn't what I put onto the plate. Yeah, what's going on here? This is slightly fuzzy. What's going on? And they said, “Oh, that's a laser scanner. That's the new copy we have.” I said, “Where's the old copy machine?” They said, “We’re not using that anymore.” So I saw this as a disintegration of the process, not an improvement, and that’s why I did that strip. And I actually brought the first strip in that series to the guy in the copy center and said, “Make this progressively so that it's just breaking up into pixels.”
The strip is identical across all five days, but gradually breaks down, with the final day dissolving into something almost abstract. I thought it was a great commentary on technological change, and a particularly head-jarring strip to re-create using the previous methods, which had become obsolete years before Bill drew this series in 1991! I’ve included a low-res preview below.
If you’re interested in getting this flong/print combo, the Kickstarter tier is $500, reflecting the cost of materials, fees to Jessica and Bill, a copy of the book, and a special bookplate that I’ll be revealing later in the year. Backing the campaign at this tier helps with the high overhead in producing the book, too: every bit of each reward above expenses gets me closer to having the right funds in place to proceed.