Viz comic: Encyclopedia II - Viz comic - Regular Features

Viz comic - Regular Features

Viz comic - 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
• 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 variation on Badly Drawn Boy who is seen busking outside his local bank because he's skint
• Balsa Boy – a take on Disney's Pinocchio, in which a lonely old pensioner makes a 'son' from balsa wood
• 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
• 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". 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 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
• 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)
• 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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 (UK).
• 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'Donalds", 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!"
• 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
• 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
• Pathetic Sharks – a group of sharks who are ridiculously incompetent and never manage to catch any prey
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Spoilt Bastard – a fat, ungrateful boy who manipulates his weak-willed mother
• 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)..."
• 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

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.

Viz comic - 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; one example was 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. 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.

Viz comic - Letterbocks

This section features letters 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. 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.

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. An example would be something like "My uncle used to run a shop where one customer had once said 'Hello!' to an actor who played a supporting character on Eastenders."

Viz comic - 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."

Viz comic - 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.

Viz comic - 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Regular Features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki