Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"If you’re into non-fiction, Bill Griffith’s Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead (Abrams, March) looks unmissable: the biography of Schlitze Surtees, the real-life sideshow performer who appeared in Tod Browning’s legendary film Freaks." -- The Guardian
“With dense cross-hatching and lively, expressive character design, Griffith’s art straddles the line between absurdity and realism. Griffith gets at the central paradox at the heart of freak shows: while exploitative and demeaning, the shows created a loving, tight-knit community... Much like in Freaks, the revelation found in this illuminating work is that the true monsters are the “normal” people who line up to laugh at or abuse Schlitzie.” -- Publishers Weekly
“Griffith is renowned for his absurdist comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, inspired by Schlitzie’s iconic image, and on some level this biography seems to be an attempt at restoring some dignity to a life he’s mined for his own purposes. He succeeds wonderfully.” -- Library Journal
“…a masterpiece of absurdity and humanity. After all these years Schlitzie still triggers laughter and tears.” -- Steve Heller, Print Magazine
"It's also partly autobiographical, exploring how Griffith partly based his creation Zippy on Schlitzie - whose story is rendered here in painstaking pen and ink, not to mention a great well of empathy; our hero myay have been a sideshow attraction, but we laugh with, rather than at him." -- Total Film
“…a heartfelt, meticulously researched graphic-novel biography of the real Schlitzie Surtees... The book’s a haunting tour of the ”old, weird America” of carny sideshows and ballyhoo, drawn with such attention to detail that you can practically smell the sweat and stale fried dough.” -- Boston Globe
“..a vibrant, energetic, sad, epic story that drops you into the American sideshow of the mid 20th century, a strange world that has all but disappeared.“ -- Boing Boing
"Griffith’s graphic biography of sideshow “freak” Schlitzie the pinhead is a captivating labor of love that integrates American sideshow history and segments of the author’s life and research process." -- Booklist, Top 10 Graphic Novels: 2019
