Customer Reviews

Random Zits: A Zits Treasury

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4 star:		(3)
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This is the fourth treasury in the wonderful life of the Zits comic strip. It includes comics from Sketchbook's 7 & 8, "Road Trip" and "Teenage Tales", respectively. Hopefully, you've learned that treasuries are the most cost-efficient way to get every comic for the best value. Random Zits continues the Zits tradition of following 15-year-old Jeremy along his journies of girls, friends, music, and parental rebellion. It is a wonderful coming-of-age strip that has taken the place of "favorite comic book" for many Calvin & Hobbes fans looking for a new #1. This collection continues to put Jeremy in new situations, with a lot of strip scenarios running for multiple pages. This helps keep the strip new and interesting. Relationships around him change, and his different interests keep him from being a one-bit character. Zits is the funniest strip in the funny papers today, and this treasury is a great example of this. Included in the book is a large fold out poster that resembles the cover.

What is it like to be a fifteen-year-old boy? If "Random Zits," the anthology of the sixth and seventh "Zits" books, is any indication, then it's not exactly fun and games.

Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott (of "Baby Blues") continue to chronicle teenage angst, and the angst that comes with raising a teenager, as Jeremy continues to struggle with high school, romance, and the crippling embarrassment that comes with having parents.

In this treasury, Jeremy encounters new problems: his mother's birthday and only twenty-five bucks to buy a present with, time on the beach with his pals, an illegal jaunt with Hector in their run-down van, reading "Moby Dick," and a forced family vacation where he spends the whole time playing video games.

On the home front, Jeremy also has to deal with the hopelessly uncool parents he's stuck with: clashes with his parents on dating, curfews, laundry, and surfing on the ironing board. On the other side is Walt and Connie, who try to interact and communicate with a son who acts in strange and inexplicable ways (such as storing the relish on his computer).

And the supporting characters have a few life changes as well. Hector is still with his militant vegetarian girlfriend, while "perforated American" Pierce finds his soulmate and performs "decorative" orthodontia on himself. And the Posse (three superficial airheads) finally get taken to task for their weird manner of speech.

"Zits" shows no signs of wearing out its welcome in this latest treasury; Scott and Borgman perfectly capture the angst of a teenager who has no real right to angst. But they don't just have contrived teenagerhood, but also his confused parents, weird friends, and perpetual struggle to be an adult, but still burdened with the mind of a kid.

And they perfectly capture the surreality that can come with different generations, such as Walt wailing, "Who ordered a pizza at 7 am?", only to have Jeremy say, "Ahhh! Breakfast!" But they also include the sweeter side, with Connie bringing back an old kitchen rug, because of Jeremy's fond childhood memories of it.

Borgman and Scott's strip is kind of reminiscent of "Calvin and Hobbes." Not just because of the blonde protagonist with an active imagination, with a deadpan pall, but the funny imagery. When Jeremy's excuses "don't hold water," we see water dribbling out of his speech bubbles.

Though Jeremy should by now be in his early twenties, the perpetual fifteen-year-old slogs through more of the trials of teenhood in "Random Zits." Funny, surreal and very true to life.

Im a fourteen year old boy. I Have almost all the zits books and love every word. They relate perfectly to a son or a parent. They capture life today perfectly. I think they are really funny and would recommend them to any teenage boy or their parent.

... because it has the VW-bus-on-the-lawn story and a lot of Pierce gags. Can't really go wrong with Jeremy. I found Jeremy to fill the gap Foxtrot left behind.

If you're a parent, this book is for you. This book is going to help you find out what your teenager is thinking, and how they think.

If you're a teenager, this jokes in the strips strike so close to home it's impossible not to laugh. For example, having high school fantasy about girls, or guys, or teachers!

I think every teenager and parents can relate to Zits. It's almost like a documentary, told in panels, to the point of déjà vu.

I also love the art drawn by Jim Borgman as well.

I've all series of Zits treasuries, and will buy if there are more in the future.

This particular book contains comics from the two individual books, Zits Unzipped and Busted!.

(Check out my Amazon profile for other books I've reviewed.)

Excellent comic book!!! Fresh and hilarious humor, that will definitely help you to bear your teenage son/daughter.

This is one of the funnest teenager comics. If you need a "relief" from parenting a teen this is for you!

In this fourth mega-sized collection of strips, Zits hits its stride. There are more connected storylines than the earlier volumes had, and the resulting developments in the characterizations of Jeremy and his posse are rich. I found a lot of humor in this book, and shared a lot of the strips with my wife, and my 10-year old son, who is a Jeremy-in-Waiting.

The Zits series is a good series. It consistently makes me laugh. However, I'm tired of all this talk of how accurate and exposing it is to the teenager's life. I laugh because of the jokes, the cluelessness of either the parents or Jeremy, his relationship with his teachers, friends and girlfriend, and so on. However, it is not funny because it hits on any truths, because it doesn't. These may seem like little things, but if you're going to build a comic strip on things like this, they need to be taken issue with. I am 14 years old as of now, and have seen probably 7-8 R-rated movies. Most kids I know have probably seen 25-30. My curfew is fairly strict, and my parents respect my privacy. Jeremy's mother refuses to allow him to see an R-rated movie, is rigid about his curfew, and is so incessantly nosy that I dislike her character. The way she is portrayed makes it extremely hard to feel sympathetic when Jeremy is sarcastic toward her. This could just be a metaphor for how teenagers see their parents, but it's not carried well. However, Jeremy's friends and girlfriend are portrayed excellently in terms of how they interact with Jeremy. What I also don't like is a habit the series makes along these lines. Jeremy's mother or father will leave him alone or allow him some sort of responsibility, and his mother or father (usually mother) will worry about him. The other will say, "Maybe it's time we treated him like an adult." Just before they entrust this to him, Jeremy will say something of such idiocy ("the black box with the holes is the stove, right?") that makes his parents continue to treat him like a child. Also, in one strip, Jeremy's parents leave him at home for the night. His mother calls him, but instead of honestly checking up on him or just having a conversation with her son, she doesn't say anything, in order to 'listen for party sounds.' This is part of why I dislike her character. In this part of the strip, Jeremy watches three violent horror movies, but he immediately confesses that he is terrified to his dad. To start, this probably wouldn't happen, and if he was scared, the strip has already established that he wouldn't feel comfortable about telling his parents this (although Jeremy, later in the series, has come out more to his dad). It is only when Jeremy is interacting at school or in his social life that the strip is ever truly accurate. When he's with his parents, the only joke is either how his parents are tired of his sarcasm or how he's being embarassed by his parents. When it tries to mix his social life and his parents, things get worse, because the only outcome is his mother being nosy, Jeremy being embarassed by his parents, or his parents being angry over his embarassment. However, this book is probably one of the best, as Jim Borgman has settled into his art style more and Scott gets it better this time. However, if you hold the same opinion as I do, do not read earlier books, as they get it even less right (Jeremy's girlfriend is surprised by the fact that he supposedly drinks coffee, which wasn't anything special even when I was 12). Listen to a real kid. Read it in a bookstore or at the library, but don't get it before knowing what you're getting.