CSotD: I like seeing bigger Zits
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One of the issues in comics, as in TV sitcoms, is how you work with the basic concept over an extended period without going stale.
I mention TV because I heard an interview with Garry Marshall on Weekend Edition yesterday, and Scott Simon asked him to comment on how Henry Winkler's character took over on "Happy Days."
I might have phrased it "Why'd you let Fonzie swell totally out of proportion and completely ruin that show?" but his response suggested that he was there to entertain the public and not to create some monument to creative genius.
Fair enough. But even the commercially successful move of allowing that popular character to become central eventually played out and "Happy Days" spawned the term "jump the shark" as well as the memorable flop "Joanie Loves Chachi."
Sic transit gloria fonzi.
Some comic strips make moves to remain fresh and some play too long on the same chords until they jump the shark, but, since newspapers never run accurate polls to determine actual popularity, a strip can go into rigor mortis without leaving the page.
I'm not just talking about strips that have been around forever. Many, if not most, of the "sardonic talking animal" strips that were all so fresh and funny when they launched about a decade and a half ago are, well, creatively finished, and just repeat the same tired snark over and over each morning.
So I think that the Garry Marshall interview set me up for today's Zits, which depicts a Jeremy who is somewhat older than the character in the original strip.
The original Jeremy didn't have a girlfriend on this level. He and his buddy Hector were a pair of young guys who sat in their hollow VW van and dreamt about the day it was rebuilt and they were old enough to drive it.
In the 15 years since the strip launched, Scott and Borgman have brought Jeremy to a place where he dwells in a world more reminscent of Wally, Eddie and Lumpy in the final year or two of "Leave It To Beaver," young men who could still do stupid things but were starting to deal with larger matters.
This is not the only strip that has freshened itself by allowing the characters to age and grow, and the advancement is more subtle than what is generally seen in other strips.
Greg Evans has aged Luann from time to time with quantum leaps, while, in Jerry Scott's other strip, Baby Blues, he and Rick Kirkman have done much more to let the kids age than he has done with Jim Borgman in Zits.
Doonesbury has done the quantum leap, Stone Soup the slow meld and then there was the odd style of Peanuts, in which babies grew and aged until they became about eight years old like everyone else in the strip.
And, of course, For Better or For Worse, in its glory days, was founded on the principle of real-time aging, which put it in its own category.
What I think struck me about today's Zits (aside from the Garry Marshall timing thing), is that, first of all, there are aspects to the teen/parent conflict that are becoming stale. Yes, his room is a mess. Yes, he leaves his shoes in the middle of the livingroom. And he always needs more pocket money.
Those horses have been ridden long enough and I find myself shrugging and moving on to the next strip more often than I want to, given the genius artwork and the overall quality of the strip.
But having Jeremy moving into greater independence, and making his circle of friends into a stable supporting cast, opens the strip to "young man" gags that can be Seinfeldian in the way they go beyond "Porgie and Mudhead in High School Madness."
It's not an entirely new aspect of the strip — This example is a decade old:
But there is more latitude for those settings now: This one is only three years old, and required that Jeremy and Hector get the bus off its blocks and that Jeremy get a drivers license:
This is a gag that relies on his inexperience, but could also feature George Costanza buying a car that proves impractical — it's a gag carried by brilliant graphics and that is not locked into the "Teens and Parents" format.
Bottom line is that I'm noticing more of these "young man" gags and I think it's a good direction for the strip, because the "clean up your room" gags are getting pretty stale.
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