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.
Showing posts with label Jim Borgman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Borgman. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Around Epinions in 80 Days: Jeremy Duncan Navigates Adolescence, Zits and All
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.
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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