Zits: What's on your playlist, Mr. D?

One of the nice things about comic strips is the way your relationship to them changes as you age. Take Zits, for example. Not all that many years ago, I used to relate exclusively to Jeremy. But now, I have at least as much in common with old Papa Zit here. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, but his series of podcasts on the history of Minoan bull leapers sure does sound interesting.

Zits: Why do you get that approcing-a-waterfall-in-a-canoe look on your face whenever I want to talk to you?

Like most of the jokes in Zits, this joke is old. But like many of the jokes in Zits, it's also funny.

Zits: Universes.

Walt does not appear to have a very high opinion of his wife's body. It's a good thing she hasn't eaten any of Gunk's Flyspeck Island peanuts.

Zits: Hi Jeremy! Like my new jeans?

This comic is hilarious because Jeremy's erection is so enormous that it has caused his van to tip over.

Zits: Are these people related?

This comic is hilarious because these two people are, in fact, related.

Zits: I don't need a GSP!

Sometimes changing up a formula can be fun! And sometimes it can make no sense and completely undermine years of characterization.

I'll let you decide which is the case in re the Duncans' relationship with technology in today's Zits.

Zits: "Girl" is my favorite flavor.

So Jeremy is a cannibalistic serial killer.

I am actually kind of surprised by this.

Zits: I'll be in here squandering what's left of my youth on an in-depth examination of the symbolism in chapter seven of Gulliver's Travels.

Gulliver's Travels is the shit, so Jeremy should shut the fuck up.

Baby Blues: Anyway, that's what it feels like to be me lately.

Considering that Jerry Scott created both of them, it's not surprising that Baby Blues and Zits are very similar strips. And so pretty much everything I wrote about Zits here applies to Baby Blues, too. The characters are sometimes too broadly archetypal (though, slightly sharper than the characters in Zits) and it sometimes leans too heavily on relatability, but the drawing is often terrific.

Such is basically the case with today's installment. The image in the second panel is just top-notch absurd humor. The faucet-breasts, in particular, are especially funny.

Peanuts, Zits, Cathy and Pluggers: When will you have a baby? or The limits of relatability.

One of the things that makes Peanuts so great is how relatable it is. In today's reprint from 1962, for example, we can relate to Linus because, while we've probably never been blown over by a Beagle, we have all had our assumptions and expectations unexpectedly overturned.

But there's other stuff going on here, too. The characters are (obviously) very well-defined, and their interaction is realistic within the world of the strip. The drawing, meanwhile, is expressive and sufficiently illustrates the absurdity of the joke.

In Zits, the characters are somewhat less well-defined, being at times little more than broad archetypes. In this strip, Jeremy isn't really a specific character so much as a stand-in for every teenage male everywhere; the same goes for Connie, who is just a stand-in for every mother of a teenage male everywhere.

As such, the strip has a tendency to lean a bit too heavily on relatability, which is the case here. The drawings, however, are often very well done, which is also the case here. While the joke isn't really anything special, basically just amounting to "Kids sure do eat a lot, don't they?", the image of Jeremy detaching his jaw and swallowing an entire ham in the second panel is funny enough that the lazy premise gets a pass.

I'm not generally in the target audience for Cathy, but I can relate to this particular strip. And that's a good thing! But it's still not funny.

The problem is that merely being relatable isn't enough. The characters in Cathy, like the characters in Zits, tend toward the archetypal. (The other big working woman comic, Sally Forth, actually has far better characters, despite being written by a man.) Cathy Guisewite's drawing, meanwhile, just isn't expressive or absurd or, just in general, good enough to be funny on its own. And so there's a lot of times when all the strip has to recommend it is its relatability. Which very nearly makes it Pluggers for working women. And that's not a good thing to be.

Because as much as I thoroughly despise Pluggers' self-congratulatory blue-collar populist bullshit, that's not its biggest problem. Pluggers' biggest problem is that it's basically relatability porn, so much so that it's actually written by the readers. The characters are not even archetypes, but instead completely blank slates onto which the readers are to graft themselves. And the drawing rarely has anything to recommend it; the characters exist as animals, for example, but for no good reason.

Today's installment isn't a great example for making this point. The joke is actually decently constructed, and the dog-husband's mortified facial expression is almost sort of amusing. As such, it's probably the best Pluggers comic I've ever seen. And, yeah, that's probably the faintest praise ever.

Of course, a lot of people like Pluggers. And a lot of people like Cathy. Because those comics are simple, and people understand them. Readers don't have to think about them or read them carefully or really even look at the drawings. And that's the problem. Relatability is a good thing, but using it as a crutch isn't. Doing so cheapens the relationship between the readers and the comics, turns it into something lazy and cheap and superficial. That's where Pluggers started, and where Cathy is at now, and where Zits could end up if its not careful. Peanuts never did give into that impulse. And that's another one of the things that makes it so great.

Pickles and Zits: Bye, Mom!

Jokes like the ones in Pickles and Zits today annoy me, because they manage to demean both men and women, in that they:

1. Characterize men as overgrown children incapable of caring for themselves and
   
2. characterize women as being primarily responsible for taking care of men.

Also, they're not funny.

That said, Pickles at least gets credit for the clever punchline in the last panel, which is more about a turn of the phrase in the third panel than the sexist set-up in the first two panels.

Zits: But with less nutritional value.

Yet more of the "spouse is away" trope. I'm not really sure why seemingly half the comics in world are going to this well all at virtually the same time, but the important consideration here is whether or not Mama Zit is going to get herself kidnapped by a zebra.

Hagar the Horrible and Zits: They taught him too well...

In yesterday's post about Beetle Bailey, I wanted to compare it to a strip or two that used exaggeration well. Unfortunately, there were no good examples of well-employed exaggeration yesterday. Fortunately, there are today.


Neither of these is particularly brilliant, but both are competent. They tell actual jokes that rely on exaggeration. In Zits, the premise is that teenagers eat a lot. The joke is Jeremy's exaggerated appetite, which requires that he make a snack to tide him over for the thirty seconds until dinner is ready. In Hagar the Horrible, the premise is that animal training consists of the animal only doing what the owner asks. The joke is this premise taken to such an extreme that Snert requires absurd precision in his instructions before he will do anything. I'm not exactly doubled over in laughter here, but the jokes make sense and are affable enough.

In yesterday's Beetle Bailey, on the other hand, there was no joke, and the exaggeration did not follow logically from the premise. It was, in other words, an epic fail.