Zits Database
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we here at Zits World Headquarters have a sophisticated and well-guarded database for locating old strips when readers search for certain oldies. With a fan base of 450 billion readers, you’d think SOMEONE would have stepped up and indexed these things according to topic or keywords, right? Well, don’t look at us!
Truth is, we’d have as much trouble finding old strips as you do. When a request comes in from a publisher who would like to reprint a certain older Zits strip, our thought process goes something like this: “Mom is wearing a turtleneck sweater in the strip, so it’s probably autumn or winter, and Hector still has his old haircut, which puts it before 2010. I remember hearing Nightwatchman on the radio while I inked it — what year did Tom Petty’s live album come out?” Usually the search ends with one of us fanning through our book treasuries until we find the strip in an entirely unexpected decade.
This new Zits website now allows you to waste your own day looking through our whole archive, but who’s got the time to index that monster? Here are a couple of websites we’ve found that might help you find a certain strip:
The Cartoonist Group has a ginormous archive of comic strips by a whole bunch of people and most of it is searchable by keywords. They think of it as a business, but I’d call it a community service.
There’s also this site called the Comic Strip Archive which you might find helpful if the pages have come loose from your shelfful of treasuries, like mine.