Many of the strip's best moments, for me, play creator and creation against each other. Per his self-caricature from the earlier "Observatory" strips, the needle-nosed Griffy is congenitally critical of everything he considers shallow & distracting in American culture (e.g., last year's big fantasy flicks). Alter ego Zippy, though, is pure uncritical impulse. In real life, he'd be a babbling street person; in a comic strip, he gets to be an accidental savant. Zippy occasionally relates to other characters - a female pinhead named Zerbina, who may or may not be his wife; a lumpen bumpkin named Claude; a desperate trend follower called Shelf Life - but the soul of the strip lies in the Griffy/Zippy split.

Nearly as profound, though, are the character's regular dialogs with discarded commercial statuary. In a post-9-11 Sunday strip, for instance, the pinhead talks to a statue of a giant Christmas elf. "Nothing is normal anymore," he tells the elf, "we can't have a normal holiday," and the joke lies in the fact that normalcy for our hero includes regular dialogs with inanimate objects (giant muffler men, in particular). Walking through an abandoned amusement park, Zippy says in a rare moment of lucidity, "Nothing sadder than a defunct rotting away, pre-computer kids' theme park!" as gingerbread men plead for our hero to save them. Zippy hears everything our artifacts are saying: hallucination as cultural satire.

At times in this collection, you can feel Griffith straining to maintain his Zippyness (one too many strips with our hero repeating the same phrase through all three panels, for instance). But then he'll follow it with an entry that flips your view of the world around you. If it wasn't for "Zippy," who'd memorialize such American oddities as the Oregon big bunny statue built from a former muffler man? ("I don't look Disneyesque enough for ya?" the statue challenges. "Well, life isn't a theme park. . .Life is a big scary bunny!")

In another extended sequence, our hero struggles to save his favorite comic strip, "Nimrod," from being cancelled by his local paper (a plotline parodying the temporary cancellation of Griffith's strip by the San Francisco Chronicle). "Since we're vaguely embarrassed that comics still bring in large numbers of readers," the paper's editor states at one point, "we like to take a cavalier attitude toward th' ones we choose to publish!" That "Zippy" continues to run in papers every day alongside tripe like "B.C." is a triumph of cultural subversion.

Long may his muumuu wave.