Talk About The Massive Plums

Strangely, I remember it vividly. It was the summer holidays and I wasn’t feeling very well, so I was still in bed sometime after 9 am. Being eight years old, this was a rare occurrence when normally I’d be out throwing rocks at a tortoise or whatever unpleasant things grubby eight year olds do. To entertain me, my mum brought me breakfast in bed along with a comic. Brilliant. I was a comics obsessive and grabbed any new title I could get my hands on. Little did I know that the two-tone periodical I’d just been handed was resolutely not for me. Hell, it even said so on the cover. But how was my mum to know what Viz comic was?
As I flicked through its contents (“My Top Ten Sizzling Love Tips By The Queen”), it dawned on me that this was something I shouldn’t be seeing and like a fool I told my mum, who had assumed my Dad had got it for me as she’d found it in the kitchen that morning. After that, I was obsessed with Viz – to the point of utterly torturing myself over it, especially when my friend Chesh nicked some off his stepdad some years later. Eventually, I just gave in and bought the damn thing – well, my mum did. But I’d asked this time. And that issue still rests in my collection with a full set of Viz annuals, spin-offs and waning-era merchandise….well it would hadn’t my Uncle Craig nicked it…but nonetheless it cemented me as a lifelong fan of Fulchester funnies. So who better to choose ten interesting issues in the life and times of Britain’s most impressive organ (fnarr)…
Issue 1 (December 1979)
Originally put together as a local scene fanzine to help Chris Donald, the soon to be regular editor of Viz get in with the slightly cooler blokes who ran Anti-Pop Records, a local Newcastle bunch who put regular punk nights on at nearby haunt The Gosforth Hotel, which is where the nascent Viz (then titled simply ‘The Bumper Monster Christmas Special’, although published by ‘Viz Comics’) would be launched to bemused patrons on Monday December 10th, 1979. Priced 20p (or 30p to students), the 12-page black and white comic was the first proper publication Donald had put together after early one page photocopied efforts “Arnold The Magazine” and “The Daily Pie” had gone down well with friends. Initially 150 copies were printed at the local Free Press at a cost of £41.52, meaning Donald lost money on every copy sold. Still, each one came with a free ice cream as a sales point (or at the very least a lino-cut printing of an ice cream) and soon the comic would become a local student phenomenon…

Issue 13 (August / September 1985)
And a jump of six years as after a dozen of sporadically released local issues produced from the relative comfort of Chris Donald’s Jesmond bedroom, Viz is signed up by John Brown of Virgin Books to be produced on a bi-monthly National basis. Many of the comic’s most popular characters had already made their debuts within its monochrome pages by this point, including Roger Mellie The Man On The Telly (Issue 6, 1981), Biffa Bacon (#7, 1981), Sid The Sexist (#9, 1982), Billy The Fish (#10, 1983) and Johnny Fartpants in the previous issue from 1984. The team had a lot to live up to and as such, needed their debut comic to go exactly according to plan. It did not go exactly according to plan. A parody of teen girl mag photo stories about a pair of star crossed lovers running away to London against the wishes of their parents did not go down as well as hope – mostly because the lovers in question were in fact toddlers. Despite being completely obvious in its intent to satirise similar strips with over the top silliness (such as them being offered a bottle of heroin), rather than encourage child endangerment, Lew Baxter of The Sunday Mirror found the material perfect to get angry about and shock his readers with as part of their “Drugwatch” campaign – completely out of context, of course. The resulting hoo-hah stirred up by Baxter and the article lead to the comic being pulled from Virgin Megastores throughout the country, as reported gleefully by the Sunday Mirror the following week (“Heroin Comic Ban”). For the team’s first issue under the Virgin banner, it wasn’t the best of starts.
Issue 17 (April / May 1986)
The crispy battered cover. As Chris Donald says in his essential Viz history “Rude Kids”: “After a couple of issues John [Brown, then-publisher of Viz] expressed the opinion that my cover designs all looked a bit too similar. In response to this I decided to make Issue 17…look totally different by coating it in crispy batter. There were no illustrations and very little text….the resulting magazine was virtually unrecognizable and only the most determined or perceptive readers were able to spot it on the shelves. Consequently sales of that issue were disastrously low, and John kept his ideas to himself for a while after that.”

Issue 38 (October 1989)
An otherwise average issue of the comic, soon to celebrate its 10th anniversary and biggest ever monthly sales (1,366,350) the following issue, bar a very small “Top Tip” which had been published that number which police felt “might constitute an incitement to commit an offence” - strongly enough to bring in John Brown to Scotland Yard for questioning in December 1989. Naturally Brown did what any publisher worth his salt would do – he denied everything and shopped the Viz editorial staff instead. Chris Donald was eventually questioned by the Anti-Terrorist Branch some days later and luckily released without charge. And thus the matter was closed…until two years later, when editing the 1991 compilation annual “The Sausage Sandwich” Donald forgot the controversial hint and included it for publication. Luckily, the books were caught before they went out to suppliers and replaced with the following sticker…

Issue 44 (October 1990)
One of the first issues of Viz I ever read at my friend Chesh’s house and without a doubt the strip that stuck most with us was the tongue-in-cheek “The Thieving Gypsy Bastards” – a tale of stereotypical Romany types which despite pleading from John Brown was published in issue 44 (on page 3 no less.) The team knew they were probably in for a bit of stick with it and thus included a slightly shorter three panel strip on the following page entitled “The Nice Honest Gypsies”. The tact didn’t work (although the Viz office only received four complaints) and the comic was soon contacted by the President of the Romany Union in Texas to accuse them of inciting racial hatred and demanding a retraction. Still, it was a really very funny strip…
Issue 71 (April / May 1995)
Since the start of its creation, Viz had always very clearly been influenced by the Beano and Dandy comics of the team’s youth and on occasion this became slightly more direct with spoofs such as Desperately Unfunny Dan (1988), Black Bag The Faithful Border Bin Liner (also 1988), The McBroons (1990), Roger The Lodger (1992), Little Plumber (1993) and Arsehole Kate (1994) – all of which had received rather sharp “cease and desist” warnings from publishers DC Thomson, with the latter in particular being the last straw for the Scottish magnate. Naturally, the team immediately stopped doing DC Thomson parodies…until issue 71 anyway, when “Wanker Watson – The Champion Masturbator Of Greytrousers School” was thought to good not to use and duly published. This time the lawyers weren’t going to be sated; they wanted the issue withdrawn from sale immediately. To ease the situation, a formal contract was written up which would prevent such parodies ever happening again, which the team were not in the least bit angry or bitter about. And when new character “D.C Thompson, The Humourless Scottish Git” appeared in issue 73 getting angry at anyone referencing words from popular comics (such as a fruit shop selling “little plums”), it was almost certainly a co-incidence. Snigger.
Issue 82 (February / March 1997)
The first issue I ever bought. Ok, well maybe that one is only interesting to me…
Issue 85 (August / September 1997)
When the Princess of Hearts tragically snuffed it that night in a Paris underpass eleven years ago, “Your Chance To Romp With a Naked Princess Di” was probably not the best thing the comic could have had on its front cover. Mind you, it’s probably better than “Frankenstein Must Di” that had appeared on the previous issue, complete with mocked up Royal monster. The issue would eventually be withdrawn from sale and returned to shelves without the offending line. And all was well again in the land of the Diana mourning….
Issue 91 (August / September 1998)
…until this issue, anyway. With the first anniversary of Di’s death looming, the fairly self-explanatory but light hearted photo-story “Randall and Diana (Deceased)” appeared in the pages of Fulchester’s finest. Amazingly only those bastions of justice The Sunday Sport took up the story (“Diana Ghost Joke Fury”), which naturally was ignored thoroughly by the masses.

Issue 100 (February / March 2000)
The first comic of the millennium saw the comic in disarray – Chris Donald had stood down as editor, sales had dropped to less than 300,000 a month and worst of all, they’d sold the rights to make a film based on The Fat Slags (although that couldn’t *possibly* happen surely…?) completely against the wishes of their main writers Graham Dury and Simon Thorp. And it was to get worse, IFG (run by Loaded founder editor and all round wanker James Brown) would eventually buy out the comic from publisher John Brown (along with Bizarre and Fortean Times) for £6.4 million – a sum total of none going to the creative team themselves. Soon the regularity of the comic was pushed from six to eleven issues a month, and with it, in many reader’s eyes, the quality went down rather considerably (Drunken Bakers anyone? Sorry, cheap shot.)
Then to top it all, IFG was bought out by Dennis Publishing in May 2003 and slowly, the charm and character that once made Viz such an exciting, naughty read was sliding ever further into the distance. I still buy every issue anyway. I can’t not. For every rotten issue, there’s invariably something utterly golden within its increasingly sex-line filled pages that makes whatever ridiculous price it is that week completely worthwhile. And as “big jobs” come, buying the “flagging organ” every time isn’t such a “hard one” to “pull off”…erm…Fnarr…
But, however you look at it, its a long way since that tiny bedroom in Jesmond, Newcastle…

Ben Baker suspects he wont be doing another comics week again in a hurry. Go buy “Rude Kids” already..














