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.

The 2010 LOST Calendar Is Rather Generic But Still a Treat for Fans

In less than a month, the sixth and final season of LOST will begin. As the mind-warping island drama is my favorite TV series, not only of the moment but probably ever, I knew I would have to snag the LOST calendar for the third year in a row. I regret missing out on the first two calendars - only I don’t regret it that much, since the intense care that is lavished upon the series is not put into the calendars. Nonetheless, I certainly intend for us to have one of these characters on our living room wall as we watch the remaining episodes.

As with past calendars, the 2010 edition’s cover shot showcases the whole cast, and in this case, it’s rather creatively done. The photo attached to this listing is actually the cover of the 2009 calendar. The 2010 cover has two photos, side by side, with no border in between. Both feature the same ominous bluish-gray backdrop. On the left, against a bleak, industrial-looking cityscape, are Ben Linus, Sayid Jarrah, Kate Austen, Jack Shepard, Sun Kwon, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes and Desmond Hume. The middle five are members of the Oceanic Six, who returned to Los Angeles after three and a half months away to much fanfare. Ben and Desmond, meanwhile, made quieter entrances, and few in the outside world have any inkling that they spent time on the same island as the famed castaways. Perhaps as a reference to how little he appears in the fifth season, Desmond is cut off by the edge of the photo.

Meanwhile, the photo on the right features John Locke, Charlotte Lewis, James “Sawyer” Ford, Juliet Burke, Daniel Faraday and Miles Straume standing on a grassy Island expanse. In season five, these Left-Behinders face the daunting task of figuring out why the Island is skipping around in time and how to stop it before they all die of time traveling sickness. It almost seems John, who eventually makes his way to the mainland in an effort to bring Jack and the others back, ought to stand in the middle, with one foot in both photos, but that would require a bit of shuffling, both to avoid him covering Desmond up entirely and to make the right side more even with the left. At the very least, ageless Richard Alpert could have been featured on the right side; he has a role in more fifth-season episodes than Desmond does. It also might have been nice to include a representative from Dharma’s heyday, as that plays a major part in this season; I’d nominate hippie-ish leader Horace Goodspeed. Oh, and why is Jin completely missing?

The first page of the calendar, featuring four miniature calendar pages for September through December of 2009, includes a more traditional cast photo that nonetheless incorporates elements from both the city and the Island. All 13 characters pictured on the front also appear here. Throughout the calendar, the top portion of the two-page spread includes photographs that spill into the lower portion, leaving about two-thirds of the lower page for the grid itself. The background color on each page is a shade of brown that darkens around the edges, while the squares containing the dates are a very light shade of khaki. Each calendar grid also features a watermark of a generic DHARMA patch. As before, I bemoan the lack of LOST-specific details. I would think it would be very easy to add, in tiny print, “Season Six Begins” to the square for February 2 or Oceanic 815 Crashes (2004) on September 22. Additionally, the calendar is entirely devoid of quotes or trivia of any kind, even in the upper portion with the photographs.

The general feel of this calendar is similar to 2009’s, though the look is slightly different, as that one had each month set up like the Dharma monitoring station. The pictures this time around are a bit bigger, but again, there are just two photos per page, with the exception of one month, which I’ll get back to. For eleven of the twelve months, it’s one particular character per month. At least one of the photos is a publicity shot, while the other is sometimes a still from one of the episodes.

January is Jack’s month, and I’d say both of his are posed, with the larger one showing him standing against a leafy background and the smaller one showing him sitting in the same set used for the four-month group photo. February features Jin, with the large photo a leafy publicity shot and the second a photo of him looking forlorn and somewhat bedraggled against an ocean backdrop, probably coming from his sojourn with Danielle Rousseau’s science team. March shows John standing, smiling, against a backdrop that looks like the Orchid station, making his publicity shot the most interesting of the bunch. Similarly, his smaller photo has a grungy-looking John wandering through the jungle, a pack slung over his shoulder.

Ben, for April, is the first character whose unposed photo is the larger of the two. Ben, too, is wandering through the jungle with a pack over his shoulder. We only see him from the shoulders up, so the gun sticking out of his pack is clearly visible, as is the chest hair I never noticed before. Ben’s publicity shot, like John’s, looks similar to the cast photo, but it looks like he is in a cozy house, perhaps his home in Otherville. Sayid, in May, has a big publicity photo of him amongst the trees and a smaller one of him looking startled amidst the weeds, probably from his first on-Island season five episode. Juliet’s jungle-backdrop publicity shot is the larger of the June photos, while the smaller features her in the jungle, staring ahead with a disdainful expression.

Sun, wearing a cut-off t-shirt that shows how much her character has changed since her conservative early-season-one days, is set against a blurry brown backdrop in July; it seems like the jungle, but I don’t detect any green. Her smaller shot is similar to Ben’s, perhaps a hint of the importance of Ben’s old house to their season-five development. In August, Hurley stands, hands in pockets, against airplane wreckage with the ocean visible in the background. Again, this is one of the more interesting publicity shots. He also has perhaps the best screenshot - of him in the midst of his welcome to the Dharma Initiative. An indistinct character is fuzzily visible in the background, but it’s cropped in close around Hurley’s head and shoulders, just low enough to show us his Dharma chef patch, along with the lei and seashell necklace recently bestowed upon him. Upon his face is a soulfully wistful expression.

September is the one month that deviates from the pattern by presenting mid-sized publicity shots of Miles, Charlotte and Daniel (who, ironically enough, are the only featured characters who weren‘t on the Island in September of 2004). To emphasize the connection between the two characters, Dan and Charlotte each stand against a beige wall near a window as vines creep around them. Miles’ photo has him standing alone by the shore, next to a curtain and a very bright light bulb, which I’m guessing is in some way representative of his odd Ghost Whisperer ability.

But maybe not, since Kate gets the same backdrop in her larger photo for October. The smaller photo shows her with her more sedate post-Island look, most likely engaged in conversation with Cassidy, Sawyer’s old flame. November’s big photo is Desmond against the ocean, a publicity shot that I’m pretty sure has turned up in a previous LOST calendar, while the smaller is yet another publicity shot showing him in the beige, vine-laden room. Finally, the most seasonally-inappropriate of the bunch is Sawyer for December. I think the larger photo, set against a blurry green jungle background, is a publicity shot, but it’s possible this was a screencap; it has less of a posed look to it than the others do. I imagine there are a lot of people wishing the smaller photo, showing Sawyer bewildered and shirtless in the season premiere, were the main photo of the month, in spite of how summery the picture looks.

These are nice photographs, and most LOST fans should be moderately pleased. Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking it seems just a little skimpy. For one thing, I find publicity photos rather boring in comparison with in-the-moment shots. I would have preferred more of the latter. And considering how important side characters are to the overall series, it would be nice if, instead of featuring two photos of each person solo, there were a photo showing that character with a more minor but still-significant character. Frankly, I wish both photos would be that way, so we could have, for instance, Sawyer presenting Juliet with a flower and conversing with the grossly underused Rose and Bernard; Hurley pelting Ben with a Pizza Pocket and reluctantly explaining to Miles his intention to send George Lucas his tweaked reconstruction of the script of The Empire Strikes Back; Desmond sailing blissfully with Penny and little Charlie and raging against Daniel’s mother. This is a celebration of season five, and I could have used a little more specificity. A few quotes would have been a very nice touch as well. Perhaps whoever put together this calendar wanted to avoid spoilers, but it seems to me that at this point, anyone who’s a big enough fan to want a calendar would be caught up by now.

Despite my mild disappointment with the generic nature of some of these photos and the lack of quotes and trivia, I’m happy to have my LOST calendar for the year. I just bought it a couple days ago, and I expect most people will be able to find one if they go out looking in the next week or two, and for a reduced rate at that. So if you expect your year to include a lot of LOST, why not use this calendar to help you mark the months?

The 2009 LOST Calendar is Rather Generic But Lovely Nonetheless

The first time the television show LOST released a calendar, it was a Big Deal at the kiosk where I worked. Every year there seems to be a calendar or two that just flies off the shelves, and in 2005, that was it. I was glad, as I had a gut feeling that LOST was a Very Erin Sort of Show, but as I hadn't yet managed to get caught up on it - and refused to start watching partway in - I didn't nab the calendar. The following year, I managed to get myself up to speed, but by the time I finished with season two, which was depicted in the calendar, we were all sold out. So it wasn't until post-season three that I first bought a LOST calendar for myself. I don't know if they'll continue making them beyond the conclusion of the series, but I'll certainly be snagging the ones for season five and six.

I say the 2009 LOST calendar is a reflection of season four, though that's not entirely accurate. The main photos on the top page are publicity shots for the fourth season, I think; With the exception of Sun, each character is set against a leafy jungle background; trees are prominent in Sun's picture as well, but at more of a distance, as she is situated in across from a tree-lined beach, with water behind her. I'm having trouble putting my finger on just where she's standing; it seems like some kind of lagoon. The smaller photos mostly depict scenes from the fourth season, I think, though the moments are generally not as iconic as they could be. And none of the season's new characters make an appearance at all. Perhaps the calendar creators wanted to avoid spoilers; I was rather annoyed when a glance at the 2007 calendar tipped me off that Hurley and Libby had a relationship. But I wouldn't think they'd completely disregard all of the newbies just for that reason. I suppose they just weren't considered important enough.

The calendar is set up in homage to the Pearl station, whose occupants are tasked with the job of monitoring those in other stations. Each month features three rounded television screens in the style of those seen in the Pearl. The top page is entirely taken up by one screen with an upper-body shot of a particular character; nobody doubles up this time, even Sun and Jin. On the bottom page, the top half is occupied by two television screens. The left shows a scene from the series featuring the character of the month, while the right lists that person's name atop five blank lines to be used "to track character developments". This is according to a note at the very beginning of the calendar, in which the top page shows all twelve characters together against a stormy background and the bottom has two screens full of blank lines atop four mini-pages listing the months from September to December 2008.

It's nice to have an ample amount of room for pictures, but this leaves the actual calendar space for each month quite limited, restricted to a mere half a page. The rectangular boxes are still big enough to write in, but only just; I'm really not much for writing on wall calendars, but those who are may well find this an annoyance. Also, though I don't think previous calendars have done this either - and with the limited space it's probably not such a good idea - I think it would be fun to list significant dates in the LOST timeline on the calendar. Designate December 19th as Ben Linus's birthday and September 22nd as the date of the Oceanic 815 crash and March 22nd as the date the Black Rock set sail from Portsmouth, that sort of thing. I do like the design of the calendar portion, though; the grainy whitish-gray background and stocky black letters are very Dharma-esque.

January is Jack Shephard's month, and the bottom shot is of him standing, hands on hips, next to Sayid, probably in Confirmed Dead or The Economist. February is Kate Austen, and the bottom has her talking to Jack, her hands locked together. I'd put this one in The Beginning of the End, around the time of "Are we really going home?", though again I'm not positive. Her evasive stance in the main picture seems appropriate for her wishy-washy nature at this point on the Island, flitting between Jack and Sawyer and between wanting to leave and fearing what will happen if she does.

I like that on the main James "Sawyer" Ford shot for March, there's a bright gleam of sunlight peeking through the clouds, as if to indicate Sawyer's impending march toward redemption. He made fairly steady progress through the first three seasons but often backtracked; season four marks the true beginning of his leap from anti-hero to hero. I think the smaller picture, in which he stands near Sayid against a dark backdrop sprinkled with torches, is from The Beginning of the End, around the moment when, apparently swayed by Hurley's speech, he decides to join Team John. Sayid Jarrah, in April, is essentially by himself in his smaller picture; there's someone on either side of him, but I can't make out their identities or pinpoint the scene, in which part of the plane seems to be in the background.

May is Ben Linus, who looks shifty as always, and the smaller picture shows him and Sawyer sharing a not-so-cordial conversation in Confirmed Dead. June is Juliet Burke, who is shown in the smaller picture with Sayid covering Jack's back with guns, also in Confirmed Dead. July is Claire Littleton, and there's not much to go on in the smaller picture, except that someone wearing a watch is standing nearby. I'm guessing it's from The Beginning of the End when she's looking for Charlie as the survivors reunite. I think the smaller picture in August, Hurley Reyes's page, is from around the same moment; it's night, and he stands (sporting his thankfully misleading red shirt) with Sawyer and Sayid, with the cuff of Desmond's blue shirt just slightly visible. I would've preferred Hurley and Ben Share a Candy Bar from Cabin Fever, but this is fine.

September is Desmond Hume, standing with his hand reaching up to a tree branch, exposing his bicep. In the smaller picture, he's sitting in a kumbaya sort of pose near the plane; it looks more like a shot from season three's Left Behind, but I'm not sure. Desmond of all people ought to have something more iconic, since as far as I'm concerned - and I know many fans agree with me - The Constant was the best episode of season four. Couldn't we have had a shot of him with a phone in his hand, grinning from ear to ear? Jin Kwon, in October, also seems like it could be a season three shot; it looks like him enjoying a beer in the Dharma van in Tricia Tanaka Is Dead. But maybe this is him in the medical station or something.

Sun Kwon is November, so she and her husband are only separated by a month. In the smaller picture, she stands with Claire, Kate, Desmond and Sawyer; this, too, is most likely from season three, probably Greatest Hits, since Claire and Desmond are never in a scene together during the day in season four. The calendar wraps up with John Locke, looking determined with his arms crossed and the knife on his belt clearly visible. The smaller shot is of him lying on the ground bloody and bewildered, apparently in season three's The Man Behind the Curtain or Through the Looking Glass after he finds himself in a ditch full of Dharma purge victims.

This is a good calendar, though I'm not sure if I like it quite as much as the 2008 one. For one thing, I liked that season three included quotes by the characters. For another, each character got several photos, though they were smaller than the ones here. Also, it just seems a little lousy that none of the supporting players from this season turn up at all. I suppose maybe everyone who appears in the calendar has to get paid for it, so whoever put this together didn't want to include any more than 12 characters if it could be avoided. But Daniel Faraday, Miles Straume, Charlotte Lewis and Frank Lapidus all deserve a little time in the spotlight, to say nothing of "Kevin Johnson," Captain Gault, Penny Widmore and Martin Keamy and the ever-neglected Danielle Rousseau, Alex Linus, Rose Henderson and Bernard Nadler. Another dozen characters right there, and that's just a start.

You won't get much of an idea of what season four is about by studying this calendar - and as much as I like the Pearl convention, it would be more appropriate for season two or three. Still, if you want a daily reminder of this fascinating show and some large shots of its stars, the 2009 LOST calendar is nice to have hanging around.

Don't Lose Track of the Date - Get the LOST Calendar!

Yes, that's right. I'm rising to new heights of dorkiness and reviewing the 2008 LOST calendar. After five years of working in a calendar kiosk, I suppose it's about time I showed a little love to the goods I keep hawking. Though I adore LOST, this is the first year I purchased the calendar. The first time around I was afraid of spoilers, and the second I just didn't grab one in time. But this year I'm prepared, and right now I have Jack staring out at me every time I walk in the living room, boldly declaring, "Nobody gets left behind!"

It's no surprise Jack is January, but the calendar doesn't focus disproportionately on Our Hero. February features Kate among the trees. March is Sawyer, which makes me laugh because my friend just told me he thinks that there is one particular line he says in which he always sounds Irish. In April, both John and Eko are on display, which is an interesting but logical choice since the two are such forceful characters whose destinies are deeply entwined.

It makes even more sense for Sun and Jin to be pictured together for May, and they look like a pair of vibrant spring flowers, she in a pink top, he in purple. In June, we get a close-up of Sayid, lost in an intense gaze. His eyes are perhaps the most arresting of all the characters, and the accompanying quote - "I am not a soldier anymore" - reminds us of all the pain that lies behind them. July is graced with an Aaronless Claire, only one month away from August's pensive Charlie. At this point it seems cruel to separate them, but I won't complain about having more of Charlie to pore over.

An insufficiently shaggy Desmond's hair is whipped about by the ill-fated winds of September. It's lovely to be able to stare at Desmond for a month, but even though I have this picture - albeit with a jungle backdrop instead of the ocean - as my desktop background, it seems out of place, since Desmond's hair hasn't been that short since the beginning of season two. Give the guy a beard already!

In October, Hurley's puppy dog eyes peek out from a face sunk into a sullen expression. I know our resident millionaire can't be happy all the time, but he possesses a certain joie de vivre that lights up the island, so it might have been nice to show a picture of him smiling. The year concludes with the Others, who we get to know so much better in the third season. Juliet is November, while lovably psychopathic Ben closes out the year, perhaps in honor of his birthday, or maybe because, as leader of the Others, he makes the perfect bookend to Jack.

Along with the full-page pictures, the bottom half of the calendar includes six small photos of the featured character, and these are generally a lot more interesting than the canned publicity shots. The cover shot, a green-drenched collage of characters, is fantastic too, and a border of jungle green surrounds both the photo and the calendar page for each month.

I wish there was a planner and page-a-day calendar for LOST, which would allow for much more pictures, along with trivia and quotes. I'd definitely snatch one of those up, but I've never seen one. Still, I'm satisfied with the wall calendar, on which Thursdays are not even marked because it's completely ingrained in my brain: 9:00 on Thursdays means LOST. I know right where I'll be.