Tag Archives: comics

RIP Diane Noomin (1947 – 2022)

Diane Noomin in Zippy the Pinhead as DiDi Glitz

Diane Noomin was an American comics artist associated with the underground comics movement. She is best known for her character DiDi Glitz, who addresses transgressive social issues such as feminism, female masturbation, body image, and miscarriages.

Here she is in a Video West Zippy the Pinhead episode broadcast in 1980 starring Jim Turner as Zippy and Diane Noomin as DiDi Glitz.

Noomin was married to Bill Griffith, the man who created the character of Zippy.

RIP Quino (1932 – 2020)

Quino was an Argentine cartoonist best-known for his satirical comic strip Mafalda which ran from 1964 to 1973.


Mafalda is a 6-year-old girl. On the one hand she is a real child who hates soup and loves pancakes. Yet, at the same time she is very much concerned with humanity and world peace. An political episode of Mafalda that is often cited is the one with the ‘south-up map orientation’.

Umberto Eco wrote a piece on Mafalda when she made her book debut in Italy with Mafalda la contestataria (1968), ‘Mafalda the rebel’.

In the same period, she is also on the cover of another Italian book, Libro dei bambini terribili per adulti masochisti, (Book of Terrible Children for Masochistic Adults), also from 1968.

RIP Claire Bretécher (1940 – 2020)

Claire Bretécher was a French cartoonist, co-founder of L’Écho des savanes.

I used to buy issues of L’Écho des savanes in the late 1980s, a particularly fruitful time for comics, with highlights such as Tanino Liberatore, Enki Bilal, Wim T. Schippers, Jacques Tardi, Guido Crepax, Jean Giraud, Milo Manara, Georges Pichard and François Schuiten.

There was something subversive about the whole comics scene in those days, what you may now call the pre-internet days. Shops all of over Europe catered to the tastes of underground comic lovers, or so it seemed.

Only now that Claire Bretécher is dead, I discover her Agrippine character who was the heroin of nine albums. On the first self-titled album of 1988 Agrippine is shown reading the fictional Heidegger in the Congo (1988), a reference to Tintin in the Congo (1931).

I have not had the time to fully investigate  Heidegger in the Congo but I suppose the link is that Heidegger was a Nazi and that Hergé’s album in the Congo is now considered racist.

Above, you will find an episode of the televised  Agrippine.

Alas. No subtitles.