Chris Donald - The Inside Story of Viz - Rude Kids

Viz ’s reputation continued to spread, largely through word of mouth but also through the music press. We’d had entirely positive reviews in Zig Zag, Sounds and the NME , not to mention a two-page spread in the Loughborough Student. Jamming , a short-lived music magazine of the day, described the comic as ‘a fantastically irreverent load of shit’. In the twenty-two years since then I don’t think anyone has described it more succinctly than that.

Fanzines also provided an important method of spreading the word. By 1982 my untidy bedroom was linked to a dozen or so other untidy bedrooms across the land via a national network of fanzine editors. Many of them would ask if they could reproduce Viz cartoons in their own magazines and I’d always agree on condition that they gave the comic a plug. One such editor – a teenager in Leeds called James Brown – used a couple of Viz cartoons without permission in his magazine, Attack On Bzag. I granted him retrospective permission and in return he agreed to distribute Viz for me in Leeds. The editor of Real Shocks fanzine in Kent, a bloke called Roger Radio, also produced a comic called Cosmic Cuts. That was about the closest thing to Viz anyone else seemed to be doing, and Roger soon became a regular contributor to Viz , specializing in lazily drawn, poor-quality, one-frame jokes. Pilot: ‘Enemy plane at one o’clock!’ Gunner: ‘That’s good. We’ve got half an hour to spare then,’ for example.

By now the appearance of a new issue was so rare the event would be celebrated with a party. These ‘ Viz Receptions’ began with an afternoon soirée at a hotel in Jesmond to celebrate the launch of No. 5. By the time issue 10 was published in May 1983 the venue had switched to Dingwalls, a nightclub in Waterloo Street where I’d previously had the pleasure of watching exotic dancers from Nottingham perform during a Friday lunchtime outing from the DHSS. I’d been having trouble shifting issue 9, and with 10 being a summer issue – the students were away on holiday – only 2,500 were printed. The most notable cartoon début was perhaps Billy the Fish, albeit on a rather small scale. His first strip took up only two lines at the foot of the second last page. I loved football adventure strips like Roy of the Rovers , particularly the disparity in time that always seemed to exist between the players on the field and the spectators off it. Time seemed to freeze as a shot was taken and members of the crowd would carry out lengthy conversations in the time between the ball being kicked and arriving at the goal line. The name Billy the Fish came first, a take on the Dandy ’s Billy the Cat. It then occurred to me that if somebody was born half-man, half-fish, they would most likely be able to swim through the air and would therefore make a very good goalkeeper. There was a bit of a football theme to issue 10. Chris Waddle, a gangling youngster who had just broken into the Newcastle team, was a big fan of Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and in order to promote their final record, a live LP, Waddle agreed to meet the band for a photo session at a pub in Gateshead. A few other players, including Terry McDermott, also turned up. I was the official photographer and took a couple of extra pictures, later making up my own story about Arthur 2 Stroke winning a music industry award after a penalty shoot-out.

Billy the Fish

Wavis O’Shave as The Hard

On the back cover there was a poster of former Anti-Pop artiste Wavis O’Shave posing as The Hard, his Tube TV character. To get the photo Simon and I visited Wavis’s house in South Shields where he lived with his mother. This was the first time I’d met him and he turned out to be a highly intelligent and articulate individual. Then he started telling us about the trouble he was having with the Greek god Pan, who had recently trotted into his living room (Pan was half-man, half-goat) through the wall next to the bay window. As Wavis explained this to us his mother came into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘Mutha. Tell them aboot Pan, how he come through that waaaall,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right, he did,’ said his mother, who then gave us her own description of the event, followed by the question, ‘Do either of you take sugar?’

Following Anna Ford’s Bum , Wavis recorded a second album under the name Foffo Spearjig and a single from that was released on Eccentric Records, ‘Tie Your Laces Tight’, with the brilliant B-side ‘You Won’t Catch Me on the 503’. I spent weeks designing a cover for the album, which would have been called Texican Raveloni , had it ever been released. The last time I saw Wavis was in the mid-nineties. I was sitting watching TV and suddenly there he was on Stars In Their Eyes , calling himself Callum Jensen and doing a terrific impression of Steve Harley. Unfortunately Mario Lanza won it.

The cost of printing 2,500 copies of issue 10 was £393, or around 16p each. I could sell these to shops for around 20p, making a theoretical profit of about 4p on a cover price of 30p, but it wasn’t a very healthy profit margin. Despite the fact I’d never taken a penny out of the proceeds, or paid any of the cartoonists, the comic was barely breaking even. In the autumn of 1983 my mentor, Brian from the Kard Bar, told me it was essential that I get a new issue out in time for Christmas. Realistically there was no way I could do it. I had my hands full with design work and at the rate new cartoons were being drawn a single issue was now taking six months to assemble. So Brian suggested reprinting some early back issues to satisfy growing demand and hit the Christmas market. I hastily threw together a ‘best of’ compilation of the first four issues and called it No. 10½. In order to beef it up a little, Brian had another idea. Why didn’t we give away a free pop poster with it? He had rooms full of unsold posters dating back to the early 1970s if I was interested. Brian led me through the confusing warren of dark, dusty storerooms behind and above his shop like the Phantom of the Opera leading a captive performer to his lair. We eventually arrived in a small room full of unsold Osmond posters, crates of David Cassidy key rings and sacks of Bay City Roller scarves. Fashions were short lived in the pop world and Brian had clearly had his fingers burnt on more than one occasion. He pointed out a stack of boxes which he said were T-shirts for the hugely popular ET movie. Anticipating the huge demand he’d ordered them all well in advance, before the film had been released in the UK. Unfortunately he ordered all of them in medium and large sizes, not realizing ET was going to be a strictly under-twelves phenomenon. In another corner of the room were parcels of wall posters, some of them still unopened, featuring David Cassidy, the Bay City Rollers and the Osmonds. ‘Unfortunately most of them are too big to fit inside the comic,’ said Brian, ‘unless you folded them somehow.’ ‘That’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘We can chop them into quarters.’ Quarter of a picture of the Bay City Rollers would be much funnier than the whole thing, I reckoned. So we carted the posters off to the Free Press, guillotined them, and inserted the severed remains of the seventies’ pop icons into the middle of the comics.