You spent your adolescence watching Beavis and Butt-head, we spent ours reading Zbeng!
As young “Tweens,” we were expected to pick educating, enriching books when visiting the library. To our parents’ disappointment, all we ever wanted to borrow was the new Zbeng! book in the series, and enjoy yet another meaningless, humorous chapter in the lives of its teenage heroes, invented by Israeli cartoonist Uri Fink.
The plot of the series focuses on the everyday life of an average Israeli adolescent, Gal Tichon, and his classmates at a fictional Israeli high school located in Gush Dan. The plot usually focuses in a humorous way on adolescent experiences as well as lampooning Israeli culture, society, and many aspects of the human condition. The characters' exaggerated personality traits are all based on common stereotypes (the geek, the bully, the queen bee, the evil teacher, etc.).
The comic series was first published in 1987 in the Israeli weekly youth magazine “Ma'ariv La'Noar,” on a weekly basis, and attained unprecedented success. Since then, Zbeng! has been developed into a series of colorful books, and to a line of products including student diaries; a spin off version, portraying the “Zbeng!” characters as children; a monthly magazine; and even a TV series loosely based on the comics.
