35 years ago this week, a cartoon boy with a black crystal (and a small braid in the back) went to the beach, turned on a cute girl but was too shy to make a move. Day after day he reached the shore but did not take a rudder out of his mouth, until the sun beat him completely. Luckily that girl felt the same way, got sunburned as well and ended up like him at the dermatologist, where the full picture became clear: they are stuck with each other for years to come.
For those who weren’t big fans, this story is the plot of the first comic in the “Zabang!” series, or in its full and yeezy name for God’s sake “Beware of stolen teenagers”. Within a few years, the comic became a huge phenomenon with tons of books, the subsidiary series for children “Zevangela”, “Yoman Zeveng” and the mythological “Zeveng Haggadat for Passover”, a TV series, merchandise and also “Zeveng newspaper”, which continues to be published to this day. But why him? What exactly made this strange comic, full of the private obsessions of its creator, Uri Fink, and bathed in hormones such a big hit? We have a few explanations.
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A small piece of the puzzle. Wave on the cover of a Zebang newspaper issue! the first one
The undisputed hero of “Zabang” is Gal, the classic straight man who just wants to hang out with friends, make out with his girlfriend Sigal and enjoy… whatever is popular at the time of writing the episode. But Gal is only a small piece in the huge puzzle that “Zabang” has become over the years, with masses of characters, fixed locations, a private world of concepts and a wholesale amount of puns, the dumber the better. Over the years, there have also been storylines that continued from episode to episode (due to Gal and Siegal’s breakup and comeback), but the comics as a whole have no real plot but a set of characters and fixed dynamics on which to dress up the affairs of the day.
Something dramatic happened in football? Gal and his father, perhaps Herzl or Golan or Asher, are called in to explain. Has something embarrassing happened in Israel again? Lucky that we have Nir the snob to take everyone’s feelings of contempt to an extreme. Is there a new band that’s been playing on the radio all day? Don’t worry, my lame sister’s band is already on the way to respond to the issue. There are characters that were created or adapted to certain cultural phenomena, such as the spiritual Aisha in the Shanti-Banti days of the beginning of the millennium or Stav as the representative of the goths and depressives of the nineties. Other characters have changed items of clothing, hairstyles and hobbies according to the changing fashions, everything that has passed through Maya’s heads and which has passed over the years. A seminar paper could be written about the changes Yaron went through over the decades according to the geek stereotype and the status of the geek culture in Israel.
This will not end well for him. Redhead in “Zabang” by Uri Fink
“Zabang” tells about high school students and was originally intended for high school students, but younger teenagers and children who have not yet grown up for the first time have also become addicted to it. “Zabang” was not an “educational” comic, but was still considered something worthy of consumption by children. It is a dangerous and very very addictive combination. Let’s start with the elephant in the room – this is the comic that put the link between kinky sex and chocolate syrup in our heads. “Zabang” was, to put it very mildly, sex-positive. is very. Not to mention horny. Not to mention, sometimes, a bit creepy. We will not dwell here on the fact that the generic design for female characters was thin and shapely with ample breasts and tight clothing. We will also dwell on recurring plots such as “Gal wants to sleep with Segal but she won’t” and the redheaded creep who spends his days peeking, stalking and spitting. True, he also had a sensitive and deeper side, like all the characters in the series, and it can also be argued that the stories about him have a moral, because he tends to come to his punishment at the end – most of them end tied inside himself in positions that the human anatomy does not really allow.
“Zabang” can be seen as an example of a sexist and offensive work, another Nineties relic that has aged badly, but there are also opposite examples of stories with surprisingly feminist or humanist messages. Segal was often portrayed in a screwed-up or disgusting way, but she was still an activist feminist who wasn’t afraid to follow her heart and express a protest against the injustices of the world. Maya also had a backstory that was revealed in one of the beloved episodes of the comic, in which she herself engineered her transformation from an outcast geek to the coveted class queen. And there were also really dark and disturbing episodes on a philosophical or just a physical level – body horror, bathroom jokes and one of my disgusting ages.
She invented the figure for herself. Maya in “Zabang” by Uri Fink
Even in real time, each reader had moments that he preferred to skip, but there was also something tempting in being exposed to forbidden or fucked up things. With more than half a tributary of material, it’s pretty much expected that some stories won’t survive the test of time of good taste, or will prove to be weak and lazy compared to others. Zabang has always been a comic intended for the masses and created on the fly, not a complex work created in a calculated and planned manner. We returned to Zebang again and again because we loved the silly jokes, the sharper and less pointed commentary on our own lives, the forever-young world where the characters stay in high school year after year. Daring but undisturbed escapism, controlled and safe youth rebellion. A kind of big brother who is generally a good boy, even if sometimes he likes to tell really graphic stories. and draw nightingales in a notebook.