Last Christmas, my brother received the first four seasons of The Office
on DVD and quickly succeeded in getting the rest of us hooked on the
quirky comedy about a Scranton, PA paper company and its bunch of
oddball employees. This year, I bought my dad the daily calendar,
featuring quotes from one of the characters on each day, and he
cheerfully relegated it to the downstairs bathroom, the one room in the
house that always has a boxed calendar in it. I always get a chuckle out
of the quotes, but I confess I still miss the 2009 calendar, which
featured my favorite comic strip, Zits.
I first happened upon Zits
in the late 1990s when the woman who designed a Moms’ group newsletter
that we received frequently included copies of a couple of the strips.
As this was a church-based publication and I’d never heard of the strip
before, I thought for the first couple of years that it was specifically
designed for church newsletters, though it rarely had specifically
Christian content. Then it made its way into our Sunday newspaper and I
really started to get to know Jeremy Duncan, the sandy-haired,
lackadaisical teenager at the center of the strip, along with his
parents (orthodontist Walt and psychologist Connie) and his little group
of close friends, particularly affable Hector, anarchic Pierce and
Sara, Jeremy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. Since I began working at a
calendar store in 2003, we’ve had a Zits calendar nearly every year, but our store didn’t sell them this year, so I’ll have to rely on the newspaper to get my Zits fix.
The strip was created by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, whose artistic style I prefer to Rick Kirkman’s, Scott’s partner on Baby Blues, another of my favorite strips. While that deals with the stresses of raising young children, Zits
is all about the trials of teenagers. Scott and Borgman are
equal-opportunity bashers, though; while plenty of strips feature
Connie’s justified exasperation with Jeremy’s messiness, laziness and
insatiable appetite, just as many show Walt puzzling over how to use
gadgets that are second nature to Jeremy. Some of the strips sympathize
with the parents, while others demonstrate how trying those parents can
be for a typical teenager. One that we kept succinctly shows the
personality differences among the main characters. In the first panel,
we see Jeremy tapping away at his keyboard, with the label “Xanga”. In
the second, Connie snuggles under a blanket, reading (“Facebook”), and
in the third, Walt lounges on the back porch, gazing at the stars
(“MySpace”).
There’s a lot of angst, embarrassment, disbelief and terror to go around in Zits,
and Borgman illustrates it all expertly. He’s particularly adept at
capturing exaggerated facial expressions reminiscent of Brad Garrett’s
frozen faces on Everybody Loves Raymond.
Sometimes just a glance is enough to make me start giggling before I
even have a hint of context. But it’s not all bad vibrations in the
Duncan household. As irritated as they get with one another, it’s always
clear that these three love each other, and sometimes that is front and
center. In one of the calendar’s strips, for instance, Jeremy comes
downstairs to find breakfast waiting for him, along with a just-because
card and some lunch money. He comments on the gifts and then, attempting
to settle his face into a grimace, remarks that his parents make it
difficult to be mad at the world. In another, before heading off to
school, Jeremy calls “I love you” to his parents - shocking them so much
they take him in for drug testing!
Last year, I believe for the first time, the Zits
calendar was printed in full, glorious color, with barely a change in
price from the black-and-white version. This makes the strips, vibrant
enough by virtue of their superior content, especially eye-popping. Each
calendar page is about four and a quarter inches in height and five and
a quarter inches across. The date is printed in large lavender print
on the bottom right-hand corner, while the left hand corner has the day
of the week in green and the month, in all caps, in lavender. Holidays
are indicated in tiny black print above the day. As with most boxed
calendars, it has one strip per day, except for weekends, when it’s one
strip for Saturday and Sunday. That adds up to more than 300 strips in
one year, many of which are part of ongoing stories that last for a week
or two, or sometimes have even longer arcs.
Several this year
caught my attention. There’s Jeremy’s continuing driver’s permit saga,
which involves Connie and Walt nearly having heart failure when he
drives and him being an insufferable backseat driver when one of them is
behind the wheel. Jeremy discovers the Beatles
and bonds with his dad as a result. Pierce gets his first job, working
at a movie theater. Hector, horrified to hear Connie refer to him as a good boy,
tries to change his image, with little success. In one of the oddest
but most delightful side trips, Jeremy takes up squirrel fishing. Late
in the year, he befriends Viral, an eclectic overachiever, culminating
in a pair of strips that seem taken straight out of Paul Simon’s Desert Island Christmas sketch on Saturday Night Live.
Of course, the trouble with reviewing this now is that the 2009 Zits
calendar is no longer useful for keeping track of the date, and it’s
rather hard to get ahold of as well, though it is available online at an
inflated price. You might think of this, then, as an endorsement for
the 2010 calendar, sight-unseen, because I can say with every confidence
that this year’s will be just as funny and true-to-life as the last. I
might still see about tracking one down myself. They’re available
online, but check the local stores first, since this is the time of year
when you’re likely to find it about 75 percent off. If you’re a pack
rat like me, you might want to keep the pages as you tear them off,
sticking them back in the box to peruse again later. I lost the battle
of wills with my mom on that point, but individual strips now hang on
the fridge and wall. Others have been affixed to a blank book in which I
am fond of collecting random oddments, and several have found their way
into cards and letters, particularly to my brother Nathan, who is in
college and on whom we sometimes suspect Borgman and Scott have been
spying. If you have a teenager in the house or are a teen yourself, or
if you have vivid memories of either, chances are that you will wonder
if those two have been peeking in your windows as well. Never has a
comic strip hit home so often for me as Zits has, and I hope that the Duncans will continue to crack me up for many years to come.
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