December 21st, 2010

Drive

by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman

The page proofs for our new spring Zits book Zombie Parents and Other Wishes for a More Perfect World were in our hands, we’d read them a dozen times and were down to our final few days for comment before giving our official OK to Andrews McMeel Publishing and sending them off to the printer. The book looked great. There wasn’t a pixel out of place. The cover artwork had come together effortlessly and we’d all agreed a book cover based on a popular series of strips we’d done around Halloween was a brilliant idea. There wasn’t a thing wrong with the book…

…except everything.

Somehow we’d failed to appreciate that the nine-month stretch of strips in the book included the rather significant development of Jeremy getting his driver’s license. It was a story that had been ten years in the waiting, but the title failed to notice.

I ventured a timid email to Caty Neis, our ever-patient editor at AMP. “Um, we may have missed the boat. Could we possibly blow up the cover and start over?” With an absurdly brief week to go before our printing date, Caty must have poured herself a drink and answered, “Sure!”

So Zombie Parents will step aside for the moment and make way for Drive! Watch for it in April.