Get Yer Ha-Ha’s Out

“Zits,” which depicts the adventures of 15-year-old Jeremy Duncan, is being hailed as one of the freshest and most imaginative comic strips of recent years. It’s also becoming one of the most popular, appearing in more than 650 newspapers barely 18 months after its debut. Already, the first collection of strips (also called “Zits”) has been published (by Andrews & McMeel).

Ironically, “Zits” grew out of a discussion in which writer Jerry Scott and artist Jim Borgman decided they didn’t want to do a comic strip together.

Scott, who lives in Malibu, also writes “Baby Blues.” Before he started doing his own strips, he took over “Nancy” after the death of its creator, Ernie Bushmiller. Borgman is the political cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991.

They got to know each other in 1994, on the way to a National Cartoonists’ Society meeting in Florida. Their plane blew a tire in Atlanta, and they spent hours waiting for its replacement, “yakking,” Scott recalls, “about everything.” A short time later, Borgman had to give a speech in Phoenix and asked Scott, who was living in Arizona at the time, to suggest a place to spend a few days afterward.

“I recommended my favorite place in Sedona, a group of little cabins above a creek,” Scott recalls. “I sold it so well, I said, ‘I’m coming too! We’ll each get a cabin, and we’ll just not talk about cartoons for a day or two.’

“[But] both of us brought our sketch books, and I brought along an idea for a comic strip I’d been working on about this teenager. Everything I was doing felt right, but it wasn’t looking right. I showed it to Jim and said, ‘What’s wrong with this thing?’ ”

“I love drawing teenagers,” Borgman interjects. “They’re at that wonderful, colorful moment of life when all the changes they’re going through internally are there to see visually. I did what turned out to be the first drawing of Jeremy based on an editorial cartoon I had done a few days earlier, of a kid sitting in front of a TV.”

The two men spent most of the night talking and sketching but agreed they didn’t want to take on a new strip. Scott was busy with “Blues”; Borgman was drawing six cartoons a week. But they kept faxing ideas and drawings back and forth and in six months had a pile of work they liked well enough to submit to King Features, which promptly bought it.

Unlike most comic strip kids, who tend to be either smart alecks or saccharine philosophers, Jeremy is a believable teen with some traits exaggerated for humor. He experiences the unsettling doubts that afflict adolescents; he can be unresponsive. But the reader always senses that underneath the moods is a decent, sensitive kid who loves his parents, though they drive him crazy (and vice versa).

Slouching to class in baggy jeans, a loose shirt and out-sized sneakers, Jeremy resembles a badly wrapped package--or a typical 15-year-old. He’s partly based on Borgman’s son.

“Most of what I contribute to the writing of the strip comes out of my family,” Borgman says

“I’m very careful not to expose my son’s private life, but themes come up: him fixing my computer when it goes down, the boundaries [involved in] going out on your own . . . those kinds of things.

“There’s a surface resemblance to life in my home, but the real guts,” Borgman stresses, “come from Jerry’s memories.”

“I take what my life was like when I was 15 and add excitement, interest and humor to make it worth looking at,” Scott comments wryly. “But the base emotions are what I remember about being that age: It’s just an awful age--’I’m not enough old to drive, but I’m too old to do this’--just being right in the middle of that tension.”

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Anyone who attended the same school as an older sibling can understand one of Jeremy’s biggest tribulations: living up to the glittering achievements of his brother Chad, who, as Jeremy puts it, is “four years older than me and about a million times smarter.”

“Chad is my older sister, who was an academic whiz,” Scott says. “When I went to high school, the teachers all said, ‘Oh, we enjoyed your sister so much, we can’t wait to have you!’ ” He imitates the sound of a bomb falling, then continues:

“Having to live up to an older sibling seemed like a rich area to mine.”

Jeremy’s best friend is Hector Garcia. Latino characters are rare in the almost exclusively white world of the comics. Borgman, who regularly includes ethnic characters in his editorial cartoons, says he thinks “there’s something authentic about Jeremy’s being plugged into a world that includes different kinds of people.”

Scott and Borgman never allow Hector to degenerate into a stereotype, nor do they idealize him. He’s a little brighter and less maladroit than Jeremy but still credible. Jeremy envies the vibrant warmth of Hector’s crowded household as well as the “awesome” food his Spanish-speaking grandma prepares, and he complains that his own home is so “white bread.”

“Hector was a really fun character to design and flesh out,” Scott says. “I like the fact that he’s heavy, and I like his kind of mushroom-cut hair style. Making him Hispanic just seemed to fit.

“We’ve begun to explore Hector’s home life: He has three or four brothers and sisters younger than he is, and his grandparents live with them. He’s always amazed that Jeremy’s got the privacy of this whole house with just his parents, but Jeremy think he’s living in hell.”

Most of the misadventures that Jeremy and Hector share involve ordinary problems, although Borgman and Scott occasionally tackle more serious issues. In one strip, a girl told Jeremy that one of their classmates had a baby. It was put up for adoption and the girl had to catch up on three weeks of work and assimilate back into school.

Jeremy’s response: “So, in other words, I should stop whining about how hard these word problems are.”

“There are people who say that if the strip doesn’t go after AIDS and things like that, it’s a fluff job. I really bristle at that,” Borgman says firmly. “Those problems are real: I don’t mean to minimize them, and you’ve got to learn to navigate around them. But that’s not day-to-day life for millions of teenagers in this country.”

“We don’t rule out doing that stuff, and if the strip the leads to those topics, we’ll do them,” Scott says. “You go where the strip leads you; you don’t arbitrarily go through those hoops because it will supposedly make you edgier.”

Although they live thousands of miles apart, Borgman and Scott work closely together, talking on the phone every day. Scott writes the strips and does rough drawings, which he faxes to Borgman, who redraws them and adjusts the dialogue. He faxes them back to Scott, and they review them together. Each is quick to praise the other’s contributions.

Scott complains that the reduced size at which “Zits” is printed prevents readers from appreciating Borgman’s drawings. Borgman respects Scott’s understanding of “the structure of humor--pacing and timing--which has never been natural to me.”

Scott sums up their approach:

“In a successful comic strip, if you cover the top and can’t read the words, you won’t understand what’s going on; if you cover the pictures and just read the words, you won’t understand what’s going. When you need to see both elements, it’s a good strip.”