The Atlantic profiles Zippy the Pinhead ceator Bill Griffith:
How did Zippy come to be? In late 1970, Griffith was asked to contribute a story to “Real Pulp Comics #1,” edited by cartoonist Roger Brand. His only editorial guideline was to come up with a “Young Lust” type tale, possibly involving a menage a trois, with two normal people and one “very weird” person. “I’d been hanging out with another underground cartoonist, Jim Osborne, who had a large collection of circus sideshow postcards,” Griffith explains. “Among the photos in the pile was ‘Schlitzie,’ a pinhead I was familiar with from seeing the 1932 Tod Browning movie, Freaks. It brought back the fascination I felt toward the pinheads in the film. They seemed oblivious to the camera and spoke in quick, disconnected sentence fragments. Aha, I thought, here’s my ‘very weird’ person.”