Viz (comics)

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

File:Viz cover.jpg

Cover of Viz (issue 57)

Viz is a popular British adult comic magazine that has been running since 1979.

At its best, the comic's style parodies the strait-laced British comics of the post-war period, notably The Beano and The Dandy, but with incongruous language, crude toilet humour and either sexual or violent story lines. It also sends up tabloid newspapers, with mockeries of letters pages. It features competitions and advertisements for overpriced 'limited edition' tat, as well as obsessions with half-forgotten celebrities from the 1970s and 1980s such as Shakin Stevens and Rodney Bewes. Occasionally it satirises current events and politicians, but has no particular political standpoint. Its success has led to the appearance of numerous rivals, crudely copying the format Viz pioneered; none of them have managed seriously to challenge its popularity. It once enjoyed being the third most popular magazine in the UK, but circulation has since dropped to just over 300000 (from 1.2 million). This is partially because the price has increased sharply and it is more regular now (it used to appear six times a year, but now appears ten times), but mainly because its comic remit has become broader and its identity less unique.

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.

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 in his parents' Jesmond home, 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 Donald.

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 nearby Jesmond office. 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, in an attempt to develop a career in television.

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

Notable strips

For a complete list, see List of Viz comic strips

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 addition to this, the comic also contains plenty of 'in jokes' that refer to people and places in and around Newcastle Upon Tyne.

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[1].

One of the most pun based strips was "George Bestial", which centered around famous footballer George Best commiting bestiality. The strip was discontinued after the death of Best.

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" and "Robin Hood and Richard Littlejohn"), portraying them as obsessed with homosexuality, political correctness and non-existent left-wing conspiracies to the exclusion of all else.

In keeping with the comic's irreverent and deliberately non-conformist style, The Duke Of Edinburgh was once parodied as a culturally insensitive, dim witted xenophobe in a one off strip "HRH The Duke Of Edinburgh and His Jocular Larks" which centred on the Duke making outrageously ill informed comments to a young earthquake victim in China.

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! [2]), and Bob Hope had a strip of him trying to think up amusing last words (but ended up with just a load of swearing). The singer Elton John has also appeared frequently in recent issues as a double dealing Del Boy like character attempting to pull off small-time criminal scams such as tobacco smuggling, benefit fraud and cheating on fruit machines. Other celebs to have been featured in their own strips include Jonathan Ross, Esther Rantzen, Stephen Fry, Noel Edmonds, Jimmy Saville (as the headmaster of "Pop School" and as "Sir Jimmy Saville, the Owl"), Johnny Vaughan, Boy George, Freddie Garrity, Big Daddy, Trinny and Susannah and plenty more.

Other content

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 exposé 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 "I'd 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. If anything they slow you 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 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." and "Save money on sex-lines by phoning up the Samaritans and threatening to kill yourself unless they talk dirty." Some are totally inexplicable: "To make your husband's trousers heavier, hang onions from the belt loops". Some inspire volleys of running jokes: "Fun-sized Mars Bars make ideal normal sized Mars Bars for dwarves." -- "Normal-sized Mars bars make ideal fun-sized Mars Bars for giants." -- "King-size Mars Bars make ideal normal size Mars Bars for giants." -- "Normal-sized Mars Bars make ideal king-sized Mars Bars for dwarves."

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 had 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, and described the runners-up prizes as "frankly worthless", 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 'Jackie' 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 - 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 one-off TV programme "Viz - The Documentary" was shown on Britain's Channel 4 in 1990. It told the story of Viz in a way that spoofed serious investigative TV shows like Panorama or Dispatches.

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

The Fat Slags appeared in TV ads for Lucozade, a drink that they hate with a passion! These ads included a mixture of cartoon characters (the slags) and live actors (the men who drink Lucozade).

A movie based on The Fat Slags was produced in 2004 [3], but was disowned by the magazines' editors who threatened to stop running the strip in response.

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 words vide licit, 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 '90s. See no:Pyton (tegneserie). The Finnish translation of the Pyton comic continues as the comic Myrkky.

References

• Viz 25th anniversary book review in The Guardian

External links

• Official site
• Online shop selling original artwork from the pages of Viz Comic
• BBC report about Viz, concerning its cartoon based on Fred West and Harold Shipman
• Buy Viz back issues
• A scan of the "Eminemis the Menace" cartoon
• Cartoonist Alex Collier's MySpace