Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was left with insufficient time to work on the next part of my Byrne Superman Reboot deep dive (or at least knee-high wading) so with luck I’ll get to it next time. And to the person who suggested I change the category tag for those posts to be a little more specific than just “Byrne reboot” — yeah, you have a point. Unless I decide to do a whole series on Byrne’s reboots/relaunches of various titles, in which…nah, I think I’ll just change the tag. I’ll do that soon.
Anyway, in the meantime here’s a look at a little mini-comic thingie I just acquired. It’s a 12-page mini-comic created for a 1980 Bill Griffith art exhibit:
…featuring the man’s own autograph inside the back cover:
Pretty neat! Also, I just noticed a couple of the pages aren’t cut along the top edge, so now I have to decide if I want to cut those apart with my old and shaky hands. We’ll see.
This makes like the third item I own signed by Mr. Griffith, which is pretty good considering I’ve never even met the man. The other items were a hardcover of full-color Zippy strips, and one of the Fantagraphics Best Comics of the Decade hardcovers (this volume also signed by Matt Groening).
Okay, back to 1980s Superman next time, where I will discuss his most famous piece of dialogue: “Yow! Are we having fun yet?”
A Zippy-Bizarro team-up needs to happen!
Just an aside to say that Bill Griffith’s ‘Invisible Ink’ is very easily one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. A fascinating ‘deep dive’ into various family members’ lives, most notably his mother, told with a level of incident, affect and detail that even a traditional literary biography would struggle to match.
“Are we having fun yet?” was such a ubiquitous phrase when I was in high school and college — I had no idea until now that Zippy coined it!