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Beginnings

We all know the stories of how creative people get into the business of creating for a living, but how did they start using their imaginations in the first place? On the Beginnings podcast, writer and performer Andy Beckerman asks well-known and up-and-coming comedians, musicians, writers and artists about their earliest creative acts and about other formative childhood experiences.

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  2. Beginnings episode 96: Bill Griffith

Beginnings episode 96: Bill Griffith

May 2, 2013

On today's show, we talk to cartoonist Bill Griffith. Bill began his comics career in the late 1960s in New York before eventually heading out west to San Francisco to be part of the burgeoning underground comics scene in the 1970s, where he co-founded the comics anthology Arcade with Art Spiegelman. Around this time, Griffith also created his brilliant daily strip Zippy the Pinhead, which runs today in over 100 newspapers and has been compiled in numerous collections.

Earlier this month while in town for the MoCCA indie comics festival, Bill stopped by Andy's apartment in Harlem to discuss America as a nation of losers, the guilt and paranoia of influence, the Beat poets and Greenwich Village in the '50s and '60s, growing up in Levittown, having parents that lived through the depression and WWII, and the failed Zippy film.

Also, check out our 100th episode live in May at UCB East on the 7th with Sam Seder (Majority Report, Bob's Burgers), J.J. Sedelmaier (TV Funhouse), indie rock band Parquet Courts and musical guest Dan Friel (Thrill Jockey) + more! In the meantime subscribe on iTunes and leave a review. And why not follow Andy and Mark on Twitter?