Viz (comics): Difference between revisions

This article deals with the British comic magazine. For other uses, please see Viz (disambiguation).

Cover of Viz (issue 57)

Viz is a popular British adult spoof comic magazine.

The comic's style parodies the straight-laced British comics of the post-war period, notably The Beano and The Dandy, but with very adult language, crude toilet humour and either sexual or violent story lines (and often both). It also sends up tabloid style newspapers, with mockeries of letters pages and daft competitions with rubbish prizes. It also often satirises current events and politicians, and pretends to be obsessed with celebrities, including half-forgotten ones (eg. Shakin Stevens and Rodney Bewes) from the 1970s and 1980s; although most celebrities actually enjoy being mentioned in it. Its success has led to the creation of numerous rivals, most crudely copying the format Viz pioneered; none of them has managed to seriously challenge its popularity. It once enjoyed being the third most popular magazine in the UK. Circulation has since dropped to just over 300000 (from 1.2 million) probably because, by their own admission, it's not as funny as it used to be.

Some of its comedic devices, for example, generating the illusion of an entire comic-strip "universe" with a "one off" strip, often based on a surrealistic pun, were widely employed in the earlier and now-defunct American humor magazine National Lampoon, which was itself more or less a sophisticated version of Mad Magazine.

Many Viz characters have featured in long-running strips, becoming well-known in their own right, including spinoff cartoons. Characters often have rhyming or humorous taglines, such as Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly, or Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres. Others are based on stereotypes of British culture, mostly via working class characters.

In a recent lavish coffee table book celebrating 25 years of Viz, cartoonist Graham Dury is quoted as saying: "We pride ourselves on the fact that you're no cleverer when you've read Viz. You might have had a few laughs, but you've not learnt anything".

History

The comic was started in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1979 by Chris Donald who produced the comic from his bedroom, with help from his brother Simon and friend Jim Brownlow. It came about at around the time, and in the spirit of, the punk fanzines, and used alternative methods of distribution such as the prominent DIY record label and shop Falling A Records which was an early champion of the comic. The first 12-page issue went on sale for 20p (30p to students) in a local pub that hosted punk gigs, and within hours the run of 150 copies had sold out. What had begun as a few pages, photocopied and sold to friends, became a publishing phenomenon. To meet the demand, and to make up for Brownlow's diminishing interest in contributing, freelance animator Graham Dury was hired and worked alongside Chris in his bedroom.

After a few years of steady sales, mostly in the North East of England, circulation had grown to around 5,000. As the magazine's popularity grew, the bedroom became too small and production moved to a small office in Newcastle docks. Donald also hired another freelance animator, Simon Thorp, whose work had impressed him. For over a decade, these four would be the nucleus of Viz. In 1985 a deal was signed with Virgin Books to publish the comic nationally every two months. In 1987 the Virgin director responsible for Viz, John Brown, set up his own publishing company, John Brown Publishing, to handle Viz. Sales exploded, and at the end of 1989 passed one million, making Viz for a time the biggest-selling magazine in the country. Inevitably a number of imitations of Viz were launched but these never matched the popularity or success of the original.

Sales steadily declined from the mid-1990s to around 200,000 in 2001, by which time Chris Donald had resigned as editor and passed control to an "editorial cabinet" comprised of his brother, Simon, Dury, Thorp and new recruits Davey Jones and Alex Collier. In June 2001 the comic was acquired as part of a £6.4 million deal by I Feel Good (IFG), a company belonging to ex-Loaded editor James Brown, and increased in frequency to ten times a year. In 2003 it changed hands again when IFG were bought out by Dennis Publishing.

Soon after, Simon Donald quit his role as co-editor, taking Collier with him to start a career in television.

Much of the non-cartoon material such as newspaper spoofs are now written by Alex and Joel Morris, the authors of the Framley Examiner.

Regular Features

Featured Strips

Recurring or notable one-off strips include:

• Acker Bilk – (See Jimmy Hill)
• Aldridge Pryor – a pathological liar whose lies are ludicrous, such as The Nolan Sisters living in his fridge
• Anna Reksik – A model who repeatedly vomits in order to keep her thin shape. She has attracted controversy because some people have seen her as ridiculing eating disorders, cocaine addiction and media pressure on women to be thin.
• Badly Drawn Man – the singer Badly Drawn Boy is named after a one-off Viz cartoon character, who on the whole was very badly drawn
• Badly Overdrawn Boy – a parody of Badly Drawn Boy, who is seen busking outside his local bank because he's broke
• "Balsa Boy" – a take on Disney's Pinocchio, in which a lonely old pensioner makes a 'son' from balsa wood.
• Barry the Cat - a one-off parody of The Beano's acrobatic crimefighter Billy the Cat. Unlike his Beano equivalent, Barry is incompetent, hopelessly uncoordinated, and is immediately recognised despite his "cat-suit" disguise. The final panel shows him in hospital, suffering from multiple injuries, being told that he has acted "very foolishly".
• Bart Conrad – A store detective who takes his job far too seriously
• Baxter Basics – an extremely amoral and sexually deviant Conservative MP who first appeared at around the same time as John Major's Back to Basics campaign, and a transparent statement on the hypocrisy of politicians
• "Bertie Blunt (His Parrot's A Cunt)" – a boy who owns an extremely violent, foul mouthed parrot that insults everyone and encourages him to commit suicide. When the parrot kills Bertie's grandmother, who leaves them all her money, Bertie fights back by spending his inheritance on a microwave oven which he then uses to cook the parrot alive. Chris Donald, creator of Viz, has said that in the early days of the magazine he would not permit the "c word" to be used, until an outside artist sent him this strip which he found to be so good he decided to use it anyway.
• Biffa Bacon – (initially The Bacons); a boy and his Geordie family, all of whom are violent psychopaths. This was very much a parody of The Dandy`s Bully Beef and Chips cartoon strip
• Big Vern – a stereotypical London gangland career criminal, who is convinced the most ordinary everyday activity (a trip to the supermarket, say) is in fact a major criminal "job". Nearly every episode ends with him taking his own life for the most trivial of reasons – "you'll never take me alive, copper!" usually with a graphic depiction of him shooting himself in the head with a shotgun
• Billy Britain - a proto-Hitler ultra-nationalist who appeared in two very early strips. Chris Donald considers him an early prototype of Major Misunderstanding.
• Billy the Fish – half man, half fish, he is a star footballer despite being drawn with no legs (he does apparently own a pair of football boots, but it is not clear why). He is a satire on, or homage to, the popular football comics of the 1960s and 1970s – Roy of the Rovers and also satirises current football incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Harry Enfield
• Billy No - Mates – a miserable, antisocial teenager who has an obsession with pornography
• Black Bag – a black bin liner which lives the exciting life of a sheepdog; a parody of The Dandy's Black Bob and the anthropomorphisation of animals
• The Bottom Inspectors – a parody of Hitler's SS, or perhaps the Stasi. A fascist organisation who knock on people's doors in the middle of the night and inspect their bottoms. Any transgression is dealt with arbitrarily and cruelly. It has been revealed that the bottom inspectors are actually based on the ticket inspectors of the Newcastle Metro system (Chris Donald in a 'Picture of Tyneside', BBC 4, June 2005)
• Boy Scouse – a thieving schoolboy from Liverpool. MP Louise Ellman complained that it set a bad example and petitioned to have it banned.
• Brown Bottle – a superhero who gets blotto on Newcastle Brown Ale to induce his super powers. He is of course totally useless.
• Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles – a good-hearted and otherwise normal lad who could solve some ordinary person's problems with his ridiculously large testicles.
• Captain Oats "The polar explorer who's always exploring his own pole!" A one-off strip lampooning the Captain Oates of Scott of Antarctic fame. An explorer, obsessed with pornography and masturbation, he is depicted skiing across the icy wastes, dragging a wardrobe. Presumably to store his stash of porn mags. Highlight of the strip is when he and his fellow explorers come across an abandoned camp belonging to Roald Amudsen, in which Captain Oats discovers Amudsen's stash of "scan-mags" which "make my stash look a bit tame". Captain Oats' efforts to have a wank are continually frustrated until he finds himself alone having fallen into a crevasse. Unfortunately his penis is frost-bitten and falls off.
• The Critics –pretentious and shallow high-culture critics who lampoon the perceived elitism of the "chattering classes"
• Cockney Wanker – a swaggering, bigoted Londoner who speaks in rhyming slang. The character is loosely based on actor Mike Reid and broadcaster Danny Baker
• Crap Sharks– (AKA the Pathetic Sharks). An occasional strip featuring a group of sharks, much feared, not for their ferocity, but their mind-numbingly boring and pathetic behaviour and conversational style. Instead of hunting for prey, they ask people on the beach for crisps, ice cream and toffee, except for one shark who claims to be "lactose intolerant". Generally the strip consists of some sort of shipwreck or holiday-by-the-seaside theme; the initial apprehension at the sighting of shark fins turns into abject horror: "Oh no! Crap sharks!". In one strip a group of WWII shipwreck survivors blow themselves up with a hand grenade rather than face the Crap Sharks. The series is based on a pun on the slang expression for a professional gambler specializing in the game of craps.
• "Crap Jokes" – a diverse range of verbal and visual puns or one-liners, usually deliberately corny or old. The best known of the Crap Jokes are seemingly endless "Doctor, Doctor" gags, with the reader's sympathy drawn to the endlessly hapless straightman Doctor
• Darren Dice - A young man who is obsessed with gambling. Sadly, he often chooses to gamble with the wrong crowd
• "D.C. Thomson The Humourless Scottish Git" – created in retaliatiation after D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd threatened legal action over a variety of Viz spoofs based on characters from The Beano and The Dandy, including Biffa Bacon, Black Bag, "Roger the Lodger", "Wanker Watson", "Arsehole Kate" and many more. The title character was portrayed as a miserly Scotsman who goes about looking for breaches of copyright he can report, such as threatening to sue a woman who calls her son Dennis a "menace" in his earshot, and demanding that a pet shop owner removes an advertisement for "Three Bears for the Price of One" from the shop window. When the Dandy subsequently made a deliberate jibe at Viz in a later comic strip, Viz responded in kind by parodying Korky the Cat as "Korky the Twat" in the next issue.
• Danny's District Council – a one-off story parodying General Jumbo of The Beano, in which a young boy commands his own electronic radio-controlled district council. The tiny robotic council workers are all lazy, corrupt and incompetent and eventually switch their allegiance to the villains.
• Desert Island Desk – a dialogue-free strip about an office desk which has been marooned on a desert island; title refers to Desert Island Discs
• Desperately Unfunny Dan – parody of barrel-chested Desperate Dan who tries to hard too impress people with his superhuman feats of strength.
• Doctor Poo – a spoof of Doctor Who depicting the title character unable to find a toilet in the whole of space-time
• Drunken Bakers – two alcoholic bakers, who, because of their affliction, hardly ever manage to bake anything
• Eminemis The Menace – starred in a one-off strip, a cross between Eminem and Dennis the Menace.
• Eight Ace – an alcoholic who drinks "Ace" beer (eight cans for £1.49) and struggles to stay on the right side of his wife and many children as a consequence. Real name 'Octavius Tinsworth Ace'
• Farmer Palmer – a paranoid farmer whose catch phrase is "Get orf moi laaaand!"
• The Fat Slags – two enormous women (San and Tray) with huge appetites for sex and chips - starred in a spinoff cartoon and a live-action movie
• Felix and his Amazing Underpants – a boy with underpants which he believes have amazing powers. They are in fact simply bizzarely large underpants
• Ferdinand the Foodie – self-proclaimed culinary expert and restaurant critic
• Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres – a boy with a good ear for homophones (he's homophonic – Fnarr fnarr)
• Fru T. Bunn – a "Master Baker" who makes his own sex dolls out of gingerbread
• Gilbert Ratchet – a boy who can invent anything, usually to solve people's bizarre "problems" as he comes across them. However, his inventions invariably cause far more problems of their own. Usually the entire premise of the strip turns out to be a highly contrived misunderstanding
• Goldfish Boy – a schoolboy who lives in a goldfish bowl
• Grassy Knollington – schoolboy conspiracy theorist
• "The Thieving Gypsy Bastards" – an infamous strip seemingly aimed to solely offend the Roma, about the "Mc O'Dougles", a group of Gypsies who descend on a middle-class front garden and steal and vandalise everything in sight, with the approval of the local council. Anticipating, no doubt, the inevitable flood of complaints about the strip, the publishers included a "compensatory" story entitled "The Good Honest Gypsies" in the same issue. Nevertheless, the complaints did come, and the next issue contained a 'cut-out-and-keep' apology, subtitled "what every gypsy's been waiting for!"
• Ivan Jelical – a fanatical fundamentalist Christian
• Jack Black – a young amateur detective who gets people arrested for minor technical transgressions
• Jimmy Hill – The bespectacled and bearded television sports presenter
• Johnny Fartpants – a boy afflicted with extreme flatulence
• Laurie Driver – the schizophrenic long - distance driver of an articulated lorry, who murders female hitchhikers and dumps their bodies by the roadside
• Little Big Daddy – Schoolboy who seems to think he's 1970's wrestler Big Daddy.
• Luvvie Darling – a melodramatic self-important actor who is always out of work
• Major Misunderstanding – an elderly, immaculately dressed reactionary who misunderstands everybody he meets, and consequently bewilders them with his right-wing rants.
• Mickey's Miniature Grandpa – a senile old man, convinced that he's four inches tall
• Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped – a motorised scooter which uses simian semen as fuel
• Millie Tant – angry feminist
• The Modern Parents – and their long-suffering children
• Mr Logic – ("such is my name, therefore one may infer that this strip is in some way about me") a serious young man with no sympathy for other humans. Mr. Logic was inspired by Chris Donald's own brother, Steve, who was much later diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome
• Mrs Brady the Old Lady – spends all her time exaggerating her age and complaining about the young people of today and how things were different in her day
• Nobby's Piles – about a character with incredibly bad haemorrhoids
• Norbert Colon – an old miser
• The Parkie – An extremely angry park keeper who abuses people that seem like they are breaking park rules, when in fact they are not - he even creates his own rules just so that he can abuse them
• Paul Whicker, the tall vicar – A deliberately crudely-drawn cartoon of a misanthropic vicar
• Playtime Fontayne – a middle aged bank manager who behaves like a primary school aged child. He made his first appearance in the comic along with his opposite "Little Old Man", a more short - lived character of a young boy who acts like the stereotype of an elderly man
• Postman Plod "The Miserable Bastard" – a bad-tempered postman with a serious attitude problem
• Raffles, Gentleman Thug – a late 19th century aristocrat who behaves like a stereotypical 21st century thug
• "Randall and Diana (Deceased)" – a controversial one - off parody of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) with the late Diana, Princess of Wales taking the place of Hopkirk to become "the people's ghost private detective." She and Randall investigate into the claims of a man who believes his wife is having an affair, only to discover that the woman is in fact selling land mines to Africa; at which Diana promises "Dead or alive, I'm determined to put a stop to it." Naturally, the strip attracted a huge number of complaints.
• Ravy Davey Gravy – a young man who breaks out into strange dances whenever he hears any kind of repetitive beat, including car alarms and road drills
• Real Ale Twats – three rather pompous men who speak in an affected style and only drink real ale, even going so far as to keep extensive "reviews" of all the real ales that they have supped
• Reverend Ramsden's Ringpiece Cathedral – a vicar with a church up his bottom
• Roger Irrelevant ("He's Completely Hatstand") – a young man with a very strange mental problem where he continually produces irrelevant and surreal streams of language and behaviour
• Roger Mellie ("The Man on the Telly") – a foul-mouthed and violent TV presenter, whose activities satirise real TV shows and incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Peter Cook
• Rude Kid - one frame strip where a young boy answers the most polite request with a rude word or phrase. This comic actually predates Viz, featuring in some of the proto-Viz fanzines created by Donald in the 1970s
• Sid the Sexist – a young man with no sexual experience who boasts of his success with women. Starred in a spinoff cartoon
• Simon Lotion, Time and Motion man – a hopeless male parent who insists his family reorganise every mundane household and leisure activity to fit his "professional", pedantic view of how the world should be run more efficiently. This always results in the complete failure of the proposed activity to meet any kind of performance or time constraint, with pathetic yet humorous consequences.
• Spoilt Bastard – a fat, ungrateful boy who manipulates his weak-willed mother into satisfying his hollow and selfish desires, usually with serious health-threatening consequences for her.
• Stan the Statistician – a nerd who tells everybody the probability of every event
• Student Grant – a student at Fulchester University who is determined to be fashionably "right on" and a left-wing radical, though when things go wrong, it's always his "bourgeois" rich parents that bail him out. Very popular with students
• Suicidal Syd – a manic depressive. He makes various unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. He usually cheers up, only to die in an accident immediately afterwards
• S.W.A.N.T – a crack paramilitary police team with "Special Weapons and No Tactics" which parodies American SWAT teams
• Tasha Slappa – originally Kappa Slappa, after the sportswear brand, but changed on "legal advice", a teenage girl with a belligerent "punk" attitude and hatred towards all men, lives at home with her irresponsible mother and drug-dealing older brother
• Terry Fuckwitt – the stupidest boy ever
• The Human League (In Outer Space) – 1980s pop band coming to the rescue in outer space...
• Things, The – Bizarre aliens that were contrived into situations whereby the human participants could say things like "These things... (situation)..."
• The Mcbrowntrouts – Scottish Family often getting up to toilet related humour. Comical twist on the twee strip the Broons.
• Tina's Tits – A schoolgirl with unreasonably large bosoms. She is convinced that they possess magical powers, when they clearly do not
• Tinribs – a badly constructed "robot"
• Tommy "Banana" Johnson – an influential early strip since reprinted in different formats such as a 12" remix and an 'on ice' version
• Tranny Magnet – a short, balding middle-aged bachelor who is irresistibly attractive to transsexuals and cross-dressers, although he desperately wants to find a non gender-variant woman
• Victorian Dad – a father who applies strict Victorian values to himself and his family, even though they are living in the present. This also appeared during the Back to Basics campaign, and could be seen as a satirical commentary on it
• William's Pissed Wellingtons – a young boy and his alcoholic wellington boots. The name is a pun on the UK children's TV cartoon series William's Wish Wellingtons.
• Yankee Dougal – an English kid who thinks he is American.

Many strips appear only once. These very often have extremely surreal or bizarre storylines, and often feature celebrities. For example: "Paul Daniels's Jet-Ski Journey to the Centre of Elvis", and "Arse Farm – Young Pete and Jenny Nostradamus were spending the holidays with their Uncle Jed, who farmed arses deep in the heart of the Sussex countryside...". The latter type often follows the style of Enid Blyton and other popular children's adventure stories of the 1950s.

Most of the stories take place in the fictitious town of Fulchester. Fulchester was originally the setting of the British TV programme Crown Court before the name was adopted by the Viz team. Billy the Fish plays for Fulchester United F.C. There is an innuendo in the name. The Internet domain fuck.co.uk was at one time held by fans of Viz who claimed to be promoting the Fulchester Underwater Canoeing Klubb.

Viz also lampoons political ideas - both left-wing ideals, in strips such as The Modern Parents (and to an extent in Student Grant), and right-wing ones such as Victorian Dad and numerous strips involving tabloid columnists Garry Bushell ("Garry Bushell the Bear") and Richard Littlejohn ("Richard Littlecock"), portraying them as obsessed with homosexuality, political correctness and non-existent left-wing conspiracies to the exclusion of all else.

Occasionally, celebrities get the 'honour' of strips all to themselves. Billy Connolly has had more than one devoted to him trying to ingratiate himself with the Queen, Harold Shipman and Fred West got their own strip as rival neighbours trying to kill the old woman next door and trying to foil each other's plans (Harold and Fred - they make ladies dead! [1]), and Bob Hope had a strip of him trying to think up amusing last words (but ended up with just a load of swearing). Other celebs to have been featured in their own strips include Jonathan Ross, Esther Rantzen, Stephen Fry, Noel Edmonds, Jimmy Saville, Johnny Vaughan, Boy George, Freddie Garrity, Big Daddy, Trinny and Susannah and plenty more.

Spoof News Stories

Sprinkled throughout each issue are spoof news stories, serving to lampoon the tabloid media and obsess over celebrities. Viz invented a fictitious councillor called Hugo Guthrie, representing the real Black Country town of Tipton. Guthrie would be cited in spoof news stories as designing all kind of manic and incompetent schemes for the town, involving such ideas as a Disneyland to be called TiptonDisney. Guthrie may be based on the real inter-war councillor Doughty who infamously told his council clerk to buy just two gondolas for the town park's lake, as opposed to a dozen, on the basis that they could then breed from them and thus save money. He was evidently under the impression that a gondola is some kind of waterfowl.

Other stories include ludicrous "kiss and tells" and similar stories by people who are portrayed as mentally disturbed, often with highly bizarre elements; examples include allegations by a man who claimed that, on holiday touring in his caravan, he found a campsite run by Elvis Presley who, when plied with drink, admitted to the Kennedy assassination; another from a retired toilet attendant who described the nature of feces from various little-known celebrities and an expose' on the sex life of a 'mental hospital outpatient' who claimed to be having affairs with TV puppets such as Basil Brush, the Thunderbirds and Thomas the Tank Engine "Id never seen a train's cock before and it was huge." These stories appear to be inspired by Elton John's libel case against The Sun when it repeated unfounded allegations against him verbatim without any fact checking.

Letterbocks

This section features letters both written by the editors and sent in by readers, often in the form of obviously fictitious anecdotes or various observations, such as the "children say the funniest things" type. Many make observations about celebrities (especially those who have recently died) or current events (a 2000 issue remarked "The Government spent £850 million on the Millennium Bug, and the only thing that crashes is Q [Desmond Llewelyn] out of the Bond films). Most employ deliberate misunderstandings for comic effect (e.g. "The speed bumps that have been built down my street don't work at all. In fact they make you slow down!")

Often letters are printed that criticize Viz, accusing it of "not being as funny as it used to be", condemning it as being offensive or of complaining about the frequent price rises. These are often published and sometimes even framed in a small section titled "Why I Love My Viz!", blatantly mocking The Sun newspaper's habit of printing (positive) comments in little frames titled "Why I Love My Sun!"

There are often invitations for readers to submit pictures, such as the request for examples of "Insincere Smiles", whereby people sent in pictures cut from newspapers and brochures of celebrities and politicians caught smiling in a manner that looks utterly insincere and forced (Tony Blair featured at least twice.) A similar series was of men who were wearing absurdly ill-fitting wigs. There's also "Up The Arse Corner", where photographs are submitted of people whose pose, and/or facial expression, could be misconstrued as being in the midst of an act of buggery.

Letterbocks also frequently features correspondence from, and has brought fame to Abdul Latif, Lord of Harpole, proprietor of the (real) Curry Capital restaurant (formerly the Rupali), Bigg Market. His Lordship often promotes his restaurant with spoof competitions and offers.

Lame to Fame

A semi-regular feature in Letterbocks is the "Lame to Fame" column, where readers can send in "claims to fame" where they explain how they are related to well-known celebrities. However, the relations are purposefully so distant or commonplace that the claim does not make the reader any more notable than any other bloke off the street. for example: " I once had a drink with a bloke who had caught Simon Le Bon's (out of Duran Duran ) dog after it had escaped from his big house"

Top Tips

A long-running segment has been the Top Tips, reader-submitted suggestions which are a parody of similar sections found in women's magazines that offer domestic and everyday tips to make life easier. In Viz, naturally, they are usually impractical or ludicrous. Some tips that are for ridiculous motives, such as how to convince neighbours that your house has dry rot, whilst others are for possibly sensible motives but with ridiculous and impractical suggestions of how to go about it, such as "convince your neighbours you are a rich, successful and workaholic stockbroker by leaving the house at 6:00am, not getting home until 10:00pm, never keeping social appointments and dying of a heart attack aged 40." Some are totally inexplicable: "To make your husband's trousers heavier, hang onions from the belt loops".

A more recent trend is for extremely sarcastic tips to be offered that are observations by the readers regarding other people's behaviour, such as someone (obviously a barmaid) who suggested male pub customers who are "trying to get into a barmaid's knickers" should "pull back your tenner just as she reaches to take it when paying for a round. It really turns us on."

McDonalds was accused of plagiarising a number of Viz Top Tips in an advertising campaign they ran in 1996. Some of the similarities are almost word-for-word:

"Save a fortune on laundry bills. Give your dirty shirts to Oxfam. They will wash and iron them, and then you can buy them back for 50p." - Viz Top Tip (published May 1989)

"Save a fortune on laundry bills. Give your dirty shirts to a second-hand shop. They will wash and iron them, and then you can buy them back for 50p." - McDonalds advert

The case was later settled out of court for an undisclosed sum (donated to Comic Relief), however many Viz readers believed that the comic had given permission for their use, leading to Top Tips submissions such as: "Geordie magazine editors. Continue paying your mortgage and buying expensive train sets ... by simply licensing the Top Tips concept to a multinational burger corporation."

Spoof Adverts and Competitions

Viz has had many different spoof adverts for various items, such as ornaments, dolls, china plates and novelty chess sets. These poke fun at the genuine adverts for such items in magazines found in the colour supplements of Sunday newspapers. Naturally, those found in Viz are absurd, such as a breakfast plate that depicts Lady Diana's face in the middle of a fried egg, and "Little Ted West", a teddy bear dressed to look like serial killer Fred West. Recently, Viz actually manufactured some of these items for real and sold them, including a china plate that depicted "The Life Of Christ...In Cats", featuring tacky pictures of a cat in various stages of Jesus's life. A long running gag has been adverts for sheds, or rather surreal types of sheds ("TV Sheds", "Shed Bikes", "Shed Snakes", etc.).

Adverts for loan companies have been parodied frequently since approximately 2000, usually with an absurd twist, such as ones aimed at vagrants, offering loans of between 5 and 10 pence for a cup of tea. Roger Mellie has frequently starred in such spoof advertisements, both in separate sections in Viz and also his own strip. Mellie is portrayed as someone who is willing to endorse any product whatsoever for money or freebies (similar to Krusty the Clown in The Simpsons.)

Genuine competitions have been run by Viz, with proper prizes. One of the earliest was a competition to win 'a ton of money' a pointed satire of tabloid newspapers promising huge cash prizes to boost circulation - the prize was in fact a metric tonne of one and two pence pieces equivalent to a few hundred pounds sterling. Recently they were giving away a plasma screen television provided by the producers of Freddy Vs. Jason. Viz poked fun at the movie, describing it as "shite", in the competition description, which led to the producers refusing to hand over the prize for insulting their film.

Another spinoff was "Roger's Profanisaurus", a thesaurus of (often made up) rude words, phrases and sexual slang submitted by readers. It has been published as a book, complete with a foreword by Terry Jones. This also often features genuine regional slang.

Photo Strips

Occasionally issues feature a Photo Strip. These parody the format of supernatural and true love British comics such as 'Chiller' and 'Jacky' targeted at young girl readers that were popular in the late 1970s and the 'real life dilemma' photo strips often found in tabloid newspapers. One example is a young woman who is convinced the spirit of her dead husband has possessed the family dog and after some soul searching begins a sexual relationship with the dog. A running joke in these stories is that they often feature a car accident in which one of the characters is run down - in every case, the same man is driving the car, and always responds with the same line: "Sorry mate, I didn't see her!". The locations for the photo stories are recognisably in the suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne where the Viz team are based. On occasion, this is explicitly recognised - in the one-off strip Whitley Baywatch, a spoof of the popular American TV show Baywatch is based in the North East coastal resort of Whitley Bay. However, other stories purporting to be set in London or without a location are often also identifiably near to the Viz editorial offices in Jesmond. In 'He just loved to dance' (no. 103) for example, Komal's Tandoori restaurant in West Jesmond is visible. In 'Four minutes to fall in love' (no. 107), the Gateshead Millennium Bridge provides a backdrop to the denouement. An occasionally recurring actor in these strips is Arthur 2-Stroke, of the band The Chart Commandos. In his book Rude Kids: The Inside Story of Viz, the comic's creator Chris Donald claimed that the first legal action ever taken against Viz was initiated by a man who objected to the use of a picture of his house (taken from an estate agent's catalogue) in one of these photo strips, and that British tabloid newspaper the Sunday Sport tried to provoke media outrage over another photo strip which, taken out of context, could be misconstrued as making light of the problem of illegal drugs being offered to children.

Viz in other media

Some of the characters have had their own television series. They are:

• The Fat Slags
• Roger Mellie (featuring the voices of Peter Cook and Harry Enfield)
• Sid The Sexist
• Billy The Fish

A computer game using many Viz characters was produced in 1991.

A movie based on The Fat Slags was produced in 2004. [2]

Trivia

• Editor Chris Donald himself cannot remember where the name of the magazine comes from. The most he can remember is, at the time he needed to come up with a proper name for it, he considered the word "Viz" a very easy word to write/remember as it consisted of three letters that are easily made with straight lines. The word Viz itself comes from the Latin word videlicit which is usually abbreviated to "viz". It means "more appropriately or accurately; namely" and is often used interchangeably with i.e. For example: "He was a minor Duke in the House of Lords, viz. the Duke of Rochester."

See also

• British comics
• Pyton was a similar comic from Norway, that was quite popular in the Nordic countries in the 90's. See no:Pyton (tegneserie).

References

• Viz 25th anniversary book review in The Guardian

External links

• Official site
• BBC report about Viz, concerning its cartoon based on Fred West and Harold Shipman
• Viz back issues
• A scan of the "Eminemis the Menace" cartoon