VB reads Viz

A couple of years ago, I did a fairly well-received read of a contemporary issue of The Beano and a rather more objectionable read of a late issue of The Dandy. Well, I figured I might as well revive that idea and read another long-running, popular British comic. Here and now, I read Viz # 236.

Unlike The Beano and The Dandy, I've never read Viz before, so this will be a new experience for me.

The cover is promising. The main image is a bunch of funny-looking fairies prancing around while some wanker in a sailor hat is about to swat them. One elderly man fairy is shouting "Equal Rights for Lesbian Sprites!"

Around the main image, we are promised Pippa Middleton's Arse's guide to the World Cup, Payday loan shame of the Game of Thrones stars, and There are Sex Fairies at the bottom of my garden ("My story will turn your stomach!"). This looks like it could be fun, so let's dig in.

The first strip is titled 8 Ace, and it's in black and white on high-end newsprint. That's surprising - most comics these days are full colour on glossy paper. Still, there's nothing inherently wrong with using a cheaper product if it gets the job done, and I doubt there are many devoted Viz collectors who insist on pages that will last until the Sun explodes.

The dialogue is in Geordie, and for some reason I have a harder time reading it than I do Scots despite Geordie being more similar to Queen's English. Maybe I'm just more used to the Scottish accent.

Anyway, the strip concerns a guy named Eight who really likes something called Ace, which I surmise is some sort of alcoholic drink. The story involves a set of photos he had taken with his kids arriving in the mail, but his wife being angry because he spent the money on Ace, got a set of smaller, free photos in which he visibly gets drunk, fights his kids, and vomits on them. Wife decides he needs to be neutered to avoid bringing any more misery into the world, and the last panel if of the two at a vet which is offering spaying for £1.49, Eight dressed in a cat suit.

OK, that was dark. Still, it told a complete story, almost entirely in dialogue, in just one page. This should be required reading for anyone planning on writing a serious comic as to the importance of pacing.

Next up is Mrs. Brady: Old Lady, which takes up about 60% of the next page. Mrs. Brady's friend comes for a visit, but Mrs. Brady refuses to let her in as she's paranoid everyone might be an imposter come to rob her. At the end, as the friend leaves, Mrs. Brady readily lets in an incredibly obvious drug dealer who says he wants to read the meter, casually letting slip where she keeps her life savings.

That... actually had some subtle satire in it. We're so paranoid about those we deal with every day, yet seem to trust strangers who mention they're totally legit, honest. Kudos, writers. Perhaps there's more to this comic than crude and dumb humour after all.

Below Mrs. Brady we have Toss McCoin, about a bloke who decides to entrust every decision in his life to a coin toss. He tosses to decide whether to help and old lady across the road or jam a rusty, japped pipe into his penis, and the inevitable happens. The doctor gives him a choice of replacing his penis with a super-prosthetic that has a built-in fanny magnet or a chewed-up pen lid that will lead to everything below his waist going septic, and the last panel if of him tossing a coin once again.

Again, great pacing. A complete, funny story in less than half a page, and while crude, this displays a definite and keen grasp of comedic pacing. Nice work.

Over the page is Spoilt Bastard, which immediately strikes me by being in colour. Just one colour, mind - parts of it are coloured blue, like the Beano and Dandy in the late 70s and early 80. Huh. I'm actually a little nostalgic for something from before I was born.

Anyway, Bastard is the sailor-hatted man from the cover. Turns out he's actually a 14-year-old boy named Timmy who's playing Grand Theft Auto V, and demands his mother get him a PlayStation 4 so he can play with the box it comes in. Yeah. When his mother agrees, she finally gets to tell him her news - she's gotten them a car, which he's thrilled about as it means they can drive to the shop to buy a PS 4, only he's somewhat less thrilled when he sees it's a £50 second-hand car and not something featured on Top Gear.

Since Timmy refuses to sit in any seat other than the driver's he sits on Mum's lap as they drive. When they get pulled over, the last panel if of Timmy ordering the cop to leave, as he's completed over 500 missions on GTA V and run over more cops than the cop's had hot dinners.

Yup, spoiled teenagers are horrible. Still, as I keep saying, I'm quite impressed with how much the writers manage to cram into a small space. Kudos.

Overleaf, there's a parody tabloid page about a woman who calls police over fairies holding orgies at the bottom of her garden. It's a pretty funny parody of British tabloids, and good stuff. (Also, naturally enough, it is quickly apparent that the fairies are just the imaginings of a lonely old woman who really wants some attention and company, making this rather touching as well as funny).

After that there's Letterbocks, a letters page which I can't tell how much of it is made-up parody and how much is user-submitted parodies of letters to the editor. Whatever the portions, this got several laughs from me. There are also a couple of short strips which, while adult-oriented, are completely inoffensive.

After that there's a 1.5-page spoof article about the history of chefs wanking in people's food. Now this is the gross, lowbrow humour I was expecting. Mostly it's just an excuse to call a bunch of people dipshits.

Also here is a short strip, Finbarr Saunders & his Double Entendres. Finbarr is another 14-year-old boy. The strip concerns a repairman who comes to fix the TV so Finbarr and his mother can watch the England match. The repairman makes a series of double entendres as he fixes the TV, which Finbarr laughs uncontrollably at. 10 minutes after he finishes, Finbarr is engrossed in the football while mum gives the repairman a blowjob behind the couch. Heh.

After that comes We Buy Off Yur Back. This concerns a family on welfare living in a downmarket hotel who decide to raise some money by selling their clothes to a second-hand shot, though they can only get rid of a few bits because most of them are soiled or damaged. The father insists it'll be OK because his claim will totally come through in a day or two.

Come Christmas the family is huddled around a candle, the mother angry about selling the bedding.

Well that was dark. Moving right along...

Our next strip up is Farting Dilemmas with Archie McBlarter, which again has some colour - this time it's a sort of yellowish green, like particularly crusty snot. Archie goes into a sex shop to buy a full-body gimp suit, but when he tries it on (... O_o), a fart builds up, which leads to it popping and him being propelled into a public park in tatters. The last panel if of Archie in court charged with unlawful demolition, atmospheric pollution, and public indecency, but the only thing on his mind is another fart building.

Mediocre writing, but with some fun ickiness. There's a distinct Calamity James feel here with lots of funny background gags which really lift the strip up.

After that there's Crime Scene Investigation Bollocks, which is done in a clean, realistic style in contrast to the cartoonier art we've seen so far. It's a quite funny parody of CSI which derives most of its humour from how ridiculously over-the-top precise and accurate the techniques are. Good job.

We now have the longest strip so far, Nicholas "Scoop" Witchell: Ace Reporter, lasting a full page and a half. Scoop is a journalist who goes to investigate a theft of gold bullion at Newcastle, er, Fulchester Bank. As he investigates a conspiracy, he accidentally slips on some soap and gets his head wedged up Queen Elizabeth's bum, and so he keeps up a running commentary about what a fine rectum it is. Eventually, the queen literally farts him out and he stumbles upon a the conspiracy, which nets him a Pulitzer. Sure enough, at the award ceremony, he trips and gets his head wedged inside Kate Middleton's backside.

The good: Scoop's commentary on the queen's nether regions is pitch-perfect TV commentator style. The bad: there's a bad case of Captain Obvious going on, as everyone keeps stating facts they already know. I get that you need to clue up new readers, and this is a parody of the As You Know rampant in British children's comics, but still.

Below that is a spoof tabloid article about Roy Hodgson replacing his the team's trainers and physios with clips of Richard Whiteley's puns. I chuckled.

Over the page we have a short spoof article about a millionaire who left his entire fortune to his wife's vagina (I laughed out loud), a spoof ad for LSD carpets (again, I laughed), and strip called Millie Tant.

Millie is the kind of radical feminist men's rights activists are always complaining about, and who I accidentally identified as a man when I talked about the cover. Here, a pregnant woman goes into labour in the middle of a supermarket, but fortunately there's a kindly doctor right there who calls an ambulance and helps the lady. Then Millie butts in and announces that the woman shall have what she truly wants, a traditional home birth right there in the supermarket (despite this not actually being the woman's desire). In the end, Millie faints at the baby starts the crown - the ambulance arrives, and Millie takes advantage to get some care for her hurt head, leaving the new mother high and dry.

There is some satire in here, but it's of a severely overblown issue. Not bad, could have been better.

After that, there's a two-page strip, Silvio Berlusconi's Jaffa Cake Bunga Bungalow. Oh yeah. They went there.

The story concerns Silvio Berlusconi holding bunga bunga parties in his house which is a giant jaffa cake. At one particularly big party, attended by the attorney general and a bishop, a tax official from the town council arrives to tell him that since jaffa cakes are biscuits and not cakes, the house comes in under a much higher tax bracket and so has to be demolished. Can Runy Rubacouri get to the library in time to obtain the official decision that jaffa cakes are in fact cakes and not biscuits? (Yes. Yes she can).

This is one of the better strips. It's a nice parody of children's adventure stories, and the humour is the sort of thing one would honestly expect to see on a more topical version of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Well done.

Spread across the centre pages is another spoof article, about Game of Thrones actors getting payday loans from a sketchy Bolton lender who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and charges ridiculously high interest rates. If The Onion had a British edition, I could see this article running in it.

There's another spoof ad over the page, this one for the Mayflower 33 Frying Panophone, a combination frying pan and record player. Yup.

There are two strips opposite. On top is Biscuits Alive!, a very Beano/Dandy strip that looks to be a parody of General Jumbo, in which a boy's living bisuits rescue his football from the path of a steamroller, but are tragically crushed to death in the process. Simple, to the point, and dark. I like it.

Underneath is Fat Slags, which has two colours, blue and pink. San is out of toilet paper, so she calls for Tray. For an hour, because Tray is wearing headphones. Tray finally discovers that something is wrong when Baz arrives to help out San - it took him an hour to drive up from the beach.

Wow. Inoffensive, no crude humour... take out the cursing, change the title to something like Two Fat Ladies, and this would be right at home in The Beano.

Overleaf there's another tabloid parody, about David Hasselhoff using the power of music to bring down the Great Wall of China and thus liberate the Chinese. Now this is good satire - it's written just like The Sun, and much like the Sun's writers, clearly has no idea of the actual situation. Also in common with the Sun is a gratuitous photo insert of Pamela Anderson's boobs which also features Pamela Anderson, mocking the actual paper's insistence on sticking partially-dressed women everywhere on even the most tenuous connections. There's also an article about a band member showing up for a gig completely sober, forcing his distraught mates to perform without him. Very good, very funny. Again, Onion-level stuff.

Then we have Billy the Fish, about a half-man-half-fish who plays football and famous parody of Roy of the Rovers. Fulchester United have chosen to participate in an anti-hooligan campaign, only for their manager to tell them that their new sponsor is an upcoming movie called The Hooligan Factory about, you guessed it, an aspiring hooligan. However, the manager is ordered out by the supporters due to losing a friendly match the previous week (despite having won every single Premier League, domestic trophy, European Cup, and Champions' League for the last 27 years), forcing the team to appoint a 12-year-old as caretaker manager while they find a replacement, whereupon the English World Cup team are simultaneously injured, forcing Fulchester United to step in and play against Italy in Brazil.

Overall, not bad, but I can see why this is the least popular strip.

There's some more text over the next page, this one an exposé on Britain's over-generous welfare system encouraging immigration of lazy foreigners, written by Viz columnist and UKIP member Charlie Pontoon, who is clearly a populist, bigoted idiot. Pontoon goes on an absurd quest to prove that Soft Touch Britain is totally a thing, seeing ripoffs in the work of caring and hardworking volunteer and healthcare workers. More good satire on tabloid newspapers and the political system. I approve.

After that there's a strip called Drunken Bakers, about a pair of bakers who are drunk. They have a 13-year-old kid deliver some huge bags of flour, and reward him with beer. One of them likes that they don't have to pay him because he's on the dole, but then they kick him out when it turns out he's 13 and not old enough to draw dole. The bald baker gives him a sip of isopropyl alcohol to see him on his way, and whe he goes blind and vomits, turns him around and points him in the general direction of the police station.

That... was depressing rather than funny. Let's continue. What's next? Tasha's Mam, eh?

This is another colour strip, in yellow. It's written with a Scottish accent, and is about a chav mum with a daughter named Tasha. Mam tries to sell a shitted mattress, notices a cleaning job down the dole office and, having forgotten her phone, just goes down to the address. Her husband/boyfriend shows up, they get drunk, and the house is destroyed. The last panel is of the owners of the house, now with no place to go, coming to buy that shitted mattress.

This was OK, but nothing special. Just the kind of crudeness Viz prides itself on.

After that there's the three-page-long (six pages including ads) Roger's Profanisaurus, a collection of aspiring slang terms submitted by the readers. There are a few funny gems in here, as well as a couple of spoof ads and minicomics. There's also a real crossword competition.

This is followed by another text page, Pippa Middleton's Arse's Guide to the World Cup 2014, which is a guide to football aimed at men who don't care about football but might be lured in by the presence of Pippe Middleton's thong-clad bum. It's deliberately ridiculously dumbed down, to the extent that even I, an avowed disdainer of football, already knew everything Ms Middleton's backside explained. Mission accomplished, then. Also on this page are an article about Coronation Street writers bringing back a subplot about Betty Turpin's hotpot three years after the actress died, and the comic's real contact information, which true to form does contain some jokes and funny observations.

The tabloid spoofery continues on the next two pages, with a two-page feature called Farage's Garages, which is selection of letters to editor Nigel Farage about readers' garages. In the corner, there's Dear Miriam, which is the advice column from the Mirror. No, not a parody, it's the same advice column, with the exact ame title, font, and Miriam. OK, the question and answer spoof the real one by being about garages instead of sex (but Miriam still tries to answer the question as if it's about sex), but still.

As for the part about sheds, it's something similar to Letterbocks, with 'readers' writing in to talk about their sheds. There's the lady who is completely oblivious that her husband is a serial killer who uses it to dispose of his victims, and accidental arsonist who now has eight sheets of asbestos to sell, a woman who looked for her cat in all the neighbours' garages despite not owning a cat, and lots more. There's also a boxout on garage-related conspiracy theories by David Icke. Funny stuff.

The magazine ends with another comic strip, The Real Ale Twats. It concerns a group of hipster neckbeards who obsess over real ale and traditional English pubs. After loud pop music interrupts the leader telling an amusing anecdote, the three head off to a country pub the next night for a traditional music session. Naturally enough, they scare off a pair of ladies who like Beyoncé by acting all high and mighty about folk music (despite not being able to pronounce the word bodhrán... is that an actual genius bonus?). The publican, a fellow neckbeard, appreciates that they are his sort of men and invites them to join and English folk music discussion group in the snug... and the last panel shows the group is a bunch of Nazi skinheads.

Wow. That got dark at the end. Still, a good send-up of beer hipsters, and a strong close to the magazine.

Also, the back cover reveals that The Hooligan Factory is a real movie, thus adding an extra layer of humour, and even intelligence, to the Billy the Fish story.

So, final thoughts. Overall, Viz was a lot better than I thought it would be. I came to it expecting crude humour and sex jokes, which I got a lot of. However, if that doesn't scare you off, there is some surprisingly good, even thought-provoking satire to be found, which makes it actually worth reading. At 48 pages including ads, there is plenty of material for your pound, so it's also pretty decent value for money.

The other thing I noticed is the editorial stance. It's pretty consistently left-wing, on both social and economic issues. Despite being founded on crudeness, I didn't see a single gay joke in this publication where such a thing would be all too expected. Perhaps it's just mocking tabloid culture, but the UKIP and their allies are a consistent target of satire, even when one would think that uncultured, working-class Britons who read the red tops and the Daily Mail would be among Viz's biggest buyers. So congratulations on the production staff for doing the right thing.

All in all, this is a comic that claims to be a lot stupider and lower brow than it really is. I don't think I'll be getting it every month, but it's definitely worth taking the occasional look at.

edited 12th Jun '14 2:02:47 PM by VampireBuddha

The bit about payday lenders charging absurd interest is real.

I knew you'd misidentified Millie Tant right at the start easily enough done, to be fair.

Yeah, I think that's the joke.