Jeremy and His Parents Exasperate Each Other in Zits Unzipped

If you were to ask me to identify my favorite comic strip, I would most likely tell you Peanuts. Charlie Brown, Linus Van Pelt, Snoopy and the rest of the gang have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, always bringing a smile whether I find them on a greeting card or a Christmas ornament. But if you wanted to know which strip makes me laugh hardest on a regular basis, I would probably have to go with Zits.

I first became aware of this strip by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman my freshman year of college, when Jeremy Duncan, the central character, reminded me of my brother Benjamin, then In high school. Nowadays, he reminds me even more of my brother Nathan, who just graduated from college. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the strip and felt like Scott and Borgman must have a surveillance camera trained on our house. No two teenagers are alike, but these two seem to have tapped into something fairly universal when it comes to capturing the struggle of adolescents to make sense of school, friends and parents. While Jeremy is the primary focus, we also get plenty of the other side of the coin as we get inside the heads of Jeremy’s mom and dad, Connie and Walt. While teens can laugh at all the exasperating things the adult Duncans do, parents can sympathize with them as Jeremy makes them want to tear their hair out.

In Zits Unzipped, published in 2002, we get about 120 pages of black and white comic strips featuring Jeremy, his parents, his mellow best friend Hector, his girl-next-door-type girlfriend Sara, his offbeat buddy Pierce and various other friends and acquaintances. A majority of the strips deal with Jeremy’s home life. Connie is over-involved and high-strung, while Walt is oblivious and square. Jeremy is surly and uncommunicative. He’s also a pretty good kid, though, and Connie and Walt are pretty good parents. They’re all just muddling along together. The biggest laughs tend to involve Connie’s abject horror at some aspect of Jeremy’s personality, but I love the more gentle humor of Walt’s cluelessness as he tries to grasp modern pop culture and technology.

This is a fairly early collection, and while most of the characters look pretty much the same as they do now, Jeremy looks slightly off, and Pierce, who is introduced in this book, has a significantly different appearance. He’s still very recognizable with all those piercings, however. Minor characters like attached-at-the-hip Richandamy and know-it-all Brittany don’t seem to have changed much, nor have Hector, Connie or Walt.

While the look of the strip is generally fairly realistic, it often incorporates unusual techniques to achieve a certain effect. For instance, in one strip, Connie is driving somewhere with Jeremy in the passenger seat. As she jabbers, we see Connie’s head on wheels with a bored Jeremy sitting inside. In another, Jeremy and Walt have the house to themselves, and the sight of two bears raiding the kitchen gives us an idea of the disaster they leave in their wake when they get hungry. Some such moments incorporate pop culture references as well, like the strip that alludes to Cast Away as Walt tries to converse with Jeremy. Gradually, he seems to grow masses of facial hair, while a palm tree pops up in the background and Jeremy’s head morphs into a volleyball.

The book contains a mix of individual strips and those that tell a story stretching across several pages. It’s nice to have a liberal sprinkling of both. The one-offs are great for a quick laugh, while the multi-strip stories allow greater investment. Two of my favorites in this collection involve Jeremy and Sara exchanging Christmas presents and Jeremy having an ill-advised horror movie marathon when his parents go out of town overnight.

Zits is a comic strip that continues to delight with its keen insights into the dynamics of parent-teen relationships and the pressures of contemporary high school life. If a weekly or even daily dose of Jeremy, his parents and his friends isn’t enough for you, Zits Unzipped is a wonderful book in which to immerse yourself.