The Zits genesis

The Dallas Morning News has an interesting story about how Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman got together to create their hit feature “Zits.”

Sketches in hand, he ran into Jim Borgman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist from Cincinnati, at a conference. ” Look at this,” Mr. Scott asked. ” Tell me why it doesn’t look right.”

Mr. Borgman looked, and he saw way past the residue of Nancy and Sluggo in Mr. Scott’s sketches. “I’ve got teens,” Mr. Borgman says. “They are tall, lanky. They wear cool, loose clothes. So I started drawing them that way ? draped over chairs, ducking through low doorways, very loose.”

It was one of those moments, Mr. Scott says. “We stayed up all night, kind of like high school. Scheming. Drawing. Laughing. Drawing.”

Then the conference broke up and everybody went home.

“But every once in a while, the fax would bleep,” Mr. Borgman says. “Jerry’d sent me something, and we’d tinker back and forth. Pretty soon, there was a pile of good stuff.”

It’s a good read whether you’re a Zits fan or not.

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