I recently bought a print of this strip. At this point, with three prints of Zippy strips, I may have spent more money buying work by Bill Griffith than any other living artist--which should pretty seriously embarrass me in front of my incredibly talented friends whose work I don't seem to get around to actually spending money on.
But how can you not fall on your knees at the altar of Zippy? Bill Griffith and Raymond Pettibon are the kind of artists I admire, am inspired by, and furiously envy. An artist whose work seems perfectly right for you, whose work seems to you to incarnate your own sensibility and resonates with all the ideas you insist that you've thought yourself but simply happen never to have expressed, both redeems the world of that depressing feeling you have to get sometimes that nothing smart or interesting or exciting is going on these days (in whatever field), and inspires in you the probably entirely false feeling that at least someone "gets it" the way you "get it"--when in all likelihood, you don't get it at all. Like the mingling of pity and fear in tragedy, the mingling of feelings of closeness and distance to the work of any artist who's actually mature, developed, articulate and occupies the territory you always thought was eccentric in yourself gives rise to rich and complex feelings that agitate as well as satisfy--in this case, something that mixes the response of "Sheer genius" with "Hey, I could do that."
I know I've always felt that everyone has a personal canon, not of artists they admire so much as artists that feel like their gang. In the most embarrassing possible way, you come to feel that some people you know only through reading or looking at their work are actually your friends--even worse, you imagine that were you to meet, they would like you. (I wonder if Walt Whitman would have wanted to, you know, hang out with me.) It's embarrassing, as I say, but gee, I'm not sure I've ever met an artist or writer who wasn't powerfully or even primarily motivated by this feeling. (And yes, I do know about The Anxiety of Influence.)
I've always said that it's interesting that the smartest people I know or read always seem to agree with me. The ones that disagree--well, I know they must have their points, but secretly I suspect them of just being kind of slow.