Viz Highlights

[madhair60]

[Jittlebags]

Did it go "skreek, skreek, skreek" or similar?

What was the ghost one where the boarding school girls used to find ectoplasm in their underwear drawers ?

[idunnosomename]

There's a load of early viz on archive.org. you can download them all by clicking the file format (is PDF the purest?) and then the download next to 30 files or whatever and they'll come down as a zip

https://archive.org/details/vizuk026octobernovember1987

https://archive.org/details/viz-uk-049-august-september-1991/

[Glebe]

A while back someone (probably madhair) posted a strip about Ian Paisley. Anyone got a handy link to that?

[imitationleather]

Yassss. Thanks @Glebe

[Gurke and Hare]

[madhair60]

[SpiderChrist]

There's not a single thing about this that isn't incredible. The shopkeeper's face in the third panel and Gilbert's conspiratorial deranged joy in the last panel.

Just one of my favourite Viz strips. Total joy from beginning to end.

There was also a letter about manners in Thailand that I can't locate on the webs that was spectacularly filthy.

[ajsmith2]

There's a load of early viz on archive.org. you can download them all by clicking the file format (is PDF the purest?) and then the download next to 30 files or whatever and they'll come down as a zip

https://archive.org/details/vizuk026octobernovember1987

https://archive.org/details/viz-uk-049-august-september-1991/

Thanks for this. I find the early issues really interesting from a historical POV in how different and fanziney they are and how you see the elements of the Viz we know to come in bit by bit, but there's no doubting it definitely got significantly  funnier from the late 80s on, peaking in the 90s imo.

[madhair60]

There's a period when I find Viz flirts uncomfortably with "reactionary", with characters like T****y Magnet (which Lew Stringer has expressed regret over), Anna Reksik, etc.

[imitationleather]

Yeah I read some issues from the '90s and it has not aged well. The era isn't as golden as people say.

[king_tubby]

There's a period when I find Viz flirts uncomfortably with "reactionary", with characters like T****y Magnet (which Lew Stringer has expressed regret over), Anna Reksik, etc.

Yeah, that whole Ratboy/Kappa Slappa era put me off. Alex Collier's work, I think? Punching down with malice rather than the previous punching down with celebration.

[ajsmith2]

I wasn't necessarily endorsing all the social attitudes of the 90s (and 00s) stuff which is a seperate issue anyway, but I was more meaning it's kind of amazing how relatively sophisticated the humour had become by that apex point considering they started from mainly short punkish strips where someone appears in the first panel and their arse falls off in the second one and that's the joke, which is about the going rate for a lot of the really early 80s stuff. It's a pleasure to watch the humour get more sophisticated (not more high brow) as the issues go by, and it's only really from the late 80s on that stuff becomes consistently LOL funny (in my experience anyway).

[Pink Gregory]

I'd be interested to know how long it was before they started doing the rhyming one off strip titles (Jeremy Futcher, His Dad's A Butcher etc) because they evolve beautifully into nonsense like Benjamin Britten's Embittered Bittern above.

[Moj]

Yeah, that whole Ratboy/Kappa Slappa era put me off. Alex Collier's work, I think? Punching down with malice rather than the previous punching down with celebration.

In Alex Collier's defence, he came to it straight from school, and Kappa Slappa was a takedown of the popular kids in his year. I reckon at the time Collier would have seen his work as punching up, if anything.

I vaguely remember Ratboy being based on a real thing - some teenage burglar who used to leave a shit on the floor of the places he broke into.

Re Davey Jones - his first stuff was 1987. The Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats were 1992. The earliest ones in that vein were Burrowing Church and Flying School, both from 1991.

[zip o lightning]

There's a load of early viz on archive.org. you can download them all by clicking the file format (is PDF the purest?) and then the download next to 30 files or whatever and they'll come down as a zip

https://archive.org/details/vizuk026octobernovember1987

https://archive.org/details/viz-uk-049-august-september-1991/

Interesting!

In "Rude Kids", Chris Donald talks about an incident with issue 38:

"On 14th December 1989 John (Brown) was taken in to New Scotland Yard for questioning by the Anti-Terrorist Branch. They were making enquiries into an item that had appeared in issue 38 (October 1989), namely a Top Tip on the letters page that the police felt might constitute an incitement to commit an offence"

I just looked at the upload above and one of the Letterbocks pages is missing! And I don't think Chris got the issue wrong - I have a copy of the annual with the sticker over the reprint of the offending item and the pages before and after are in the upload, but the Top Tips page is missing.

I have always been curious to what it was. Even tried peeling the sticker off, but it was surprisingly well applied.

Can anyone help?

[zip o lightning]

Don't think so - I think Roger Irrelevant was his first. Major Misunderstanding was probably earlier then the VBFGs too.

According to Davey himself, his first published Viz Strip was "Vlad The Impaler and His Cat Sampson"

https://twitter.com/DHBJones/status/1159455036658921473/photo/1

[Gethin Grave]

Interesting!

In "Rude Kids", Chris Donald talks about an incident with issue 38:

"On 14th December 1989 John (Brown) was taken in to New Scotland Yard for questioning by the Anti-Terrorist Branch. They were making enquiries into an item that had appeared in issue 38 (October 1989), namely a Top Tip on the letters page that the police felt might constitute an incitement to commit an offence"

I just looked at the upload above and one of the Letterbocks pages is missing! And I don't think Chris got the issue wrong - I have a copy of the annual with the sticker over the reprint of the offending item and the pages before and after are in the upload, but the Top Tips page is missing.

I have always been curious to what it was. Even tried peeling the sticker off, but it was surprisingly well applied.

Can anyone help?

Wasn't it a Top Tip along the lines of "Late for your plane? Simply phone up the airport and tell them there's a bomb on board." ?

[Morrison Lard]

Wasn't it a Top Tip along the lines of "Late for your plane? Simply phone up the airport and tell them there's a bomb on board." ?

Yup, that's the one, just looked in my copy of #38

[idunnosomename]

That's a great run of tips

[imitationleather]

I was just thinking that myself.

[kalowski]

There's a load of early viz on archive.org. you can download them all by clicking the file format (is PDF the purest?) and then the download next to 30 files or whatever and they'll come down as a zip

https://archive.org/details/vizuk026octobernovember1987

https://archive.org/details/viz-uk-049-august-september-1991/

What a joy! Clicked on one at random and managed to find one of my favourite letters

[Twilkes]

I vaguely remember a (possibly one-off) strip of a guy trying to sell someone a fridge in an electrical shop, but someone else came in and asked what they were doing in his living room, the drawing pulling back to reveal it was indeed a living room. Until someone else came in and said it wasn't his living room, what were they doing in his garden, and someone else climbed up a ladder and said it wasn't his garden, what were they doing in his treehouse etc etc etc. Probably early 90s, anyone remember this and can post it up?

[Cold Meat Platter]

Sounds like the sort of things that happen in a Terry Fuckwitt strip.

[jobotic]

Yeah, gotta be Terry

The budge seed letter is also one of my favourites.


I also loved three letters that appeared in one issue from a bloke who kept hiding and spying on his wife. In the last she was doing the washing up but "but little did she know I was observing her from a small hole I'd drilled into the kitchen unit" which he'd climbed into.

[petril]

I love when they have a back and forth conversation going in Letterbocks, all in the same issue

[Cold Meat Platter]

I loved the letters about what the sign "VEICULO LONGO" on the back of a lorry meant across multiple issues with speakers of various suggested languages writing in and saying 'sorry, it's not my language and therefore I sadly have no idea what it means'.

[Replies From View]

Has anyone ever discussed before that Viz and the Simpsons had their creative peak around the same time?  Both have kept going since then and gone downhill so it might be interesting; on the other hand I don't know if there's anything more to say about it.

[Replies From View]

Anyone remember a Top Tip for people to make their own teabags using after eight mint envelopes punctured with thousands of needle holes?

And further down the page they had the reverse - use empty teabag papers as handy after eight mint envelopes.

I liked it.

[Replies From View]

Also some issues of Viz here in case you were unaware:

https://britishcomics.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/viz/