The 2002 collection of Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead" strip, Zippy Annual, (Fantagraphics) opens with a sequence that shows the cartoonist at his most playful. In it, a tearful retro comic strip femme - redolent of the kind of kitschy figures Griffy used to parody in his Young Lust underground days - mysteriously appears in the panels of the "Zippy" strip. Who is she? Neither our microcephalic lead nor his creator know, so the cartoonist decides to search through the "few remaining 'realistic' strips in the newspaper," walking through such dinosaurs like "Rex Morgan, M.D." and "Mark Trail," only to be rebuffed by their straight-laced leads. Unsuccessful, Griffy returns to his own strip to discover that the teary woman isn't from the funny pages at all - but a seventies romance comic book. "I hope it isn't too late to save Zippy from her politically incorrect enticements," he says before racing off to rescue his lovestruck hero.

Periodically, I marvel at Zippy's continued life on the mainstream comics page. The strip remains a model of everything that "typical" comics readers are supposed to hate: a decidedly uncuddly muumuu-clad lead, non-liner storytelling, intellectual in-jokes, plus a point of view that embraces rigorous critical thought (even as it recognizes its limitations). Doesn't Griffith know that we're an anti-intellectual culture? Who does he think is the audience for this concatenation of cross-cultural japery, anyhoo?

Actually, the cartoonist tells us, "all the non-sequitars . . . all th' obscure references . . . the convolution . . . th' 'giant beings'" are for one person: Grace Sturm. Who is Grace Sturm? "If I knew the answer to that, big guy," Griffith tells the questioning pinhead, "I'd save thousands in shrink bills!"

Turns out that Miz. S. is a newspaper editor who "occasionally understood" Zippy. This li'l factoid is revealed in a "pindex" at the back of the annual (a typical Griffith touch: who else would deign to annotate a daily comic strip so compulsively?) The rest of us, most likely, just let Griffith's comically surreal blend of cultural critique & lowbrow fetishizing wash over us. Nuthin' wrong with that, of course. It's what Zippy'd do.

As a newspaper strip, "Zippy" uses the parameters of its chosen form better than any other extant comic. Even the casual titles at the top of each sequence are part of the gag, often add needed context to what otherwise might pass for echolalia. Nobody else in mainstream comics is so conscious - and willing to make the reader conscious - of the confines of the three/four panel strip. Nobody else is as willing to dash full tilt against 'em.

It helps that Griffith got his early training in the undergrounds: his sideshow hero first appeared (w/o the trademark stream-of-consciousness dialog) in a calculatedly tawdry 1970 ug entitled Real Pulp, while Griffy himself first started doling out trenchant observations in an alternative press strip named "Griffith Observatory." Where most strip artists enter the field embracing its conventions, Griffith had already spent years deconstructing 'em. In one of the Sunday strips, for instance, we see the printing company's code numbers corresponding to the colors used on each character: "Thank goodness we're color coded," Zippy tells his readers.