The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin in Memoriam

The Buildings Are Barking is Bill Griffith's tender, poetic, deeply felt comics tribute to his wife, life-long partner, muse, copy editor, and fellow cartoonist Diane Noomin. "I'm still unable to accept her death. I relive all 49 of our years together every day. How could anyone so alive, so funny, so lovely, be gone? Who am I without her?" Griffith summons all of his comics-making expertise in order to bring his beloved Diane back to life in a remarkable act of mourning and memory.

His cartoon avatar Griffy has long provided grounded, snarky counterpoint to the pop-culture-damaged flights of fancy uttered and enacted by Zippy The Pinhead in the Zippy strip. Here, it's the Griffith character who is damaged enough by grief to become sincere and express his emotions, while both Noomin and her avatar Didi Glitz (in artwork taken from her own comics) manifest to bounce off the bereft Griffith with wisdom, advice to live life, and sharp sarcasm of her own.

Returning to Noomin and Griffith's shared origins in underground comics, The Buildings Are Barking is Bill's first original work for the single-issue comic-book format in over forty years. His comic strip Zippy has run in daily newspapers since 1985, after a decade as a weekly, and he has recently created several graphic biographies for the book market, including Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead (Abrams, 2019) and Three Rocks: The Story Of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy (Abrams, 2023). Fantagraphics has published a dozen Zippy collections and other Griffith anthologies since 1990, and his 2015 book Invisible Ink: My Mother's Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist is still available in hardcover. Diane Noomin's best-of collection, Glitz-2-Go (Fantagraphics, 2012) is available in paperback.