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Bill Griffith is best known as the creator of the Zippy daily comic strip, currently running in over 300 newspapers nationwide, but Zippy was conceived as an underground comix character before he became embraced in the main- stream, and Griffith himself was a seminal figure in the underground comix movement, during which he was a cartoonist, an editor, and an entrepreneur.

Bill Griffith: Lost & Found collects hundreds of Griffith’s early underground comics, most of them long out of print and unavailable. Much of the work will be unfamiliar and a real revelation to those readers who only know Griffith from his long-running Zippy strip.

Beginning in 1969, Griffith contributed stories to a long list of legendary undergrounds. Lost and Found is not only a collection of these underground comix — hand-picked by the artist himself — but a mini-memoir of the artist’s comix career during the early days of the San Francisco Underground and his nearly twenty year on-again, off-again involvement with Hollywood and TV. Griffith’s running recollections and commentary serve as a wry and often hilarious counterpoint and context to the stories themselves. Lost and Found follows Griffith’s career from New York to San Francisco in stories taken from The East Village Other, Screw, Arcade, Young Lust and Griffith's solo comic Griffith Observatory, featuring the first Zippy appearances and a cast of characters including Claude Funston, Mr. The Toad, Shelf-Life, The Toadettes, and Alfred Jarry.

While the vast majority of the book is non-Zippy comics, it also features the earliest appearances of Zippy, not seen in any other collection. Zippy fans will be happy to see the very first Zippy stories from 1971 to 1974, when Zippy was primarily a sidekick for Griffith’s first major character, Mr. The Toad. Also included is a 19-page, unfinished, never-before-published comics version of the first few scenes from the Zippy movie screenplay, Zippyvision. Intended as a companion piece to the unproduced film, the story details Zippy’s sideshow origins and his later life in a boarding house catering to showbiz wannabes.

Previously uncollected later work features Griffith’s comics for High Times, The National Lampoon, The San Francisco Examiner and The New Yorker.

Bill Griffith: Lost and Found finally collects the work of one of the great, pioneering cartoonists.

29-page excerpt (download 5.7 MB PDF):

Video & Photo Slideshow Preview (view in new window):

"Prefaced by Griffith’s long, anecdotal accounting of his work and including stories featuring other characters who’d eventually join the strip’s cast as well as 48 pages in full color..., this collection attests the perdurable wit, style, and smarts of one of the greatest of the 1960s San Francisco underground cartoonists." – Ray Olson, Booklist (Starred Review)

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