What Is the Zits Comic Strip?
Zits is a daily American comic strip written by Jerry Scott and illustrated by Jim Borgman, which debuted on July 7, 1997 in more than 200 newspapers through King Features Syndicate. It follows Jeremy Duncan, a 15-year-old high schooler (he started as a freshman and has aged slowly to a junior), and his daily collisions with parents, friends, girlfriend, and his own teenage brain. The strip caught on fast: within about a year it was running in more than 1,700 papers across 45 countries and translated into 15 languages, and it remains in well over 1,500 newspapers today.
Meet the Duncans and Jeremy's World
Zits keeps a small, sharply drawn cast, which is part of why its world feels lived-in rather than gag-to-gag. The regulars are easy to recognize at a glance — by design.
Jeremy Duncan
The teenage protagonist: an aspiring rock musician, perpetually misunderstood, perpetually hungry. Most of the strip is filtered through his exaggerated point of view, which is the engine of its visual humor.
Walt and Connie Duncan
Jeremy's parents. Walt is an orthodontist with dad-joke energy; Connie is a part-time child psychologist who, ironically, cannot decode her own teenager. They are the grounded straight-men to Jeremy's chaos.
Sara, Hector, and the band
Sara Toomey is Jeremy's on-again, off-again girlfriend; Hector Garcia is his loyal best friend and bandmate. Jeremy's garage band cycles through gloriously bad names like Goat Cheese Pizza and Jughead's Hat — a running gag in itself.
Why the Art Is the Joke
What separates Zits from an ordinary talking-head teen strip is that it draws the inside of adolescence literally. When Jeremy's room is messy, he physically tunnels through a landfill of laundry to reach his bed. When he feels small in front of his parents, he is drawn tiny; when he is overwhelmed, the panel distorts around him. This surreal exaggeration is no accident: artist Jim Borgman spent years as a newspaper editorial cartoonist and won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1991, a discipline built on turning an abstract feeling into a single vivid image. Zits applies that skill to teenage emotion, which is why a single panel can land a joke that a paragraph of dialogue could not.
A Two-Person Studio: Writer Plus Artist
Zits is also a clean example of a split creative model that most readers never think about. Jerry Scott writes the strip but does not draw it; Jim Borgman draws it but does not write it. Scott is a serial collaborator — he also co-creates the family strip Baby Blues — and the writer-artist division lets each person work to their strength: tight gag construction on one side, expressive cartooning on the other. The partnership has been decorated accordingly, with Scott winning the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 2001 and the pair taking the society's award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip. It is a useful reminder that a comic does not have to be a one-person job.
Where to Read Zits and What It Teaches
Because Zits is a King Features strip, its online home is Comics Kingdom, and it is also carried on comics-aggregator pages such as ArcaMax and in newspapers worldwide. Beyond the laughs, Zits teaches a concrete lesson for anyone making their own strip: show the feeling, do not just say it. A consistent, recognizable character drawn with deliberate exaggeration carries more comedy than a literal illustration ever will. That is exactly the kind of expressive, on-model character a comic character creator is built to keep consistent, and a comic strip generator lets you stage those exaggerated beats panel by panel without redrawing the cast each time.