This site is dedicated to presenting the best comic strip of the day, or at least one that made me laugh, which sets it aside from all the bitchy little websites that post comics they don't like and make snarky comments about them.

Which means that, when I come across a hackneyed cartoon about those kids and their giant backpacks, I just blow by it. I don't put it up here and go into a rant about what tired tripe those jokes are. It wouldn't be fitting, and I wouldn't do it.

So here we have today's Zits, in which Jeremy is toting a giant backpack, which, yes, is one of the major tired gags about teenagers, along with those saggy pants they wear and the crazy music they play and variations on the well-established worn-out stuff middle-aged cartoonists have used when they were facing a deadline and didn't have anything bright or funny or creative to say.

Same hacks, that is, who will soon be looking ahead to their December deadlines and dusting off the unwanted-fruitcake jokes and the bear-trap-in-the-fireplace jokes.

However, while I agree to some extent with an earlier comment on this post suggesting that Zits had fallen into a rut lately, I think it's a very shallow rut and that Borgman and Scott alternate between being in a rut and being in a groove. Today, they are in the groove.

One of the things that came out in the profiles I reprinted here is that they try to alternate between jokes at the expense of Jeremy and jokes at the expense of his parents, and I think the rut comes when they get hung up on one to the exclusion of the other, at which point the strip can flounder for a bit.

This is a good gag, worthy of being designated Comic Strip of the Day.com, because it is a gag for Jeremy, not one at his expense. And it certainly addresses the Giant Backpack issue.

When I was in high school, we had full length lockers, with room for our books on a top shelf, a winter coat on the hooks and more space on the floor. Since we never listened to our mothers and wore our boots even in the depths of an Adirondack winter -- salt-stained penny loafers being the default fashion of the season -- that floor space was available for books, folders, binders and random papers that wouldn't fit on the top shelf. It got a little crowded, but it all fit.

That was then and this is now. Or "that was there and this is here," because I was also in a fairly small, compact school where you could return to your locker in the three minutes between classes and swap out your books.

I've talked to students about the Giant Backpack thing, and they have two explanations: One is that they don't have room in their lockers, because they have half-height lockers that barely hold their winter coats and are sometimes shared with another student, and the other is that they don't have time between classes to return to their lockers and swap out books anyway. At best, they can get down to a "before lunch" and an "after lunch" load, and lunch may be the third period of the day as the school struggles to get a large number of kids through a limited-size cafeteria.

At my granddaughter's (now former) junior high, for example, they don't have any time between classes. Literally none. There is one bell that signals both the end of the current period and the beginning of the next. If the teacher in the current class holds them in their seats long enough to finish a sentence or to assign homework, they are late for the next class and may be marked down for it. The idea of going to the bathroom or returning to your locker between classes without being punished or at least forced to explain yourself does not exist in their universe. And few junior high kids want to walk into class late and be forced to explain themselves in front of the group.

This is, of course, their universe and so they accept it as normal, at least until an exchange student from a civilized country arrives, throws up his hands and says, "What the hell kind of system is this?"

But even then, the answer is, "It's our system." Some wealthier schools give kids a second set of books to have at home so they don't have to carry so much back and forth, but most struggle just to have one set for each student. And you never see "quality of life" in the list of why other nation's students outperform ours as we seek solutions, rather, in the form of piling on more homework and extending their hours.

All of which, Dear Reader, is to say that I think Borgman and Scott have turned in a fine piece of work today, and I say that aside from how much I wish other cartoonists would get to know some kids before they pick up their pens and start drawing, though I realize that they aren't drawing for kids and that too much background knowledge would make it harder for them to justify cranking out the golden moldies.

I also say it aside from the fact that Borgman and Scott have been known to do a few Giant Backpack gags themselves. Most of their Giant Backpack gags are ones that could also be "messy bedroom" gags, and might, a generation or two ago, have referenced the aforementioned locker floor, which did tend to become something of a compost heap by the end of first semester.

Fair commentary in both cases and potentially pretty funny.