Twenty-Five Years of Viz
Edited by William Cook Boxtree, 220pp, £20
ISBN 0752225251
Rude Kids: the unfeasible story of Viz
Chris Donald HarperCollins, 378pp, £20
In 1979, a 19-year-old Department of Health and Social Security clerk called Chris Donald put together a rude, 12-page comic with a friend and his own younger brother. They gave it the meaningless but somehow appropriate name Viz, printed 150 copies, and hawked it at pub gigs around Newcastle. The comic sold out, and slowly, with only two or three issues appearing every year, built up a cult following. As its visionary founding editor sensed, Viz filled a hitherto unrecognised gap in the market. What the great British public really needed was a sweary, anarchic version of the Beano - one tireless in its references to masturbation, farting, tits, bums, piles, and so on.
Unfortunately, the faint-hearted world of publishing wasn't yet ready for such a publication. So Donald continued to produce the comic on a shoestring from his bedroom in the suburb of Jesmond. For five years, it made no money at all. Without his fanatical dedication, and the Tories' enterprise allowance scheme, Viz would have petered out, and the rest of the country would never have discovered Roger Mellie the Man on the Telly, Sid the Sexist, Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, the expression "Fnarr! Fnarr!" - as well as more recondite classics such as Black Bag the Faithful Border Bin Liner and the Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats.
Luckily, in 1985, Viz was picked up by John Brown, an enterprising publisher at Virgin Books, who gave it nationwide distribution. By the end of the decade, it was the UK's third-bestselling magazine. It appealed to most of the young male population, from squaddies to public-school boys, and many others besides - Michael Palin, Jilly Cooper, Keith Richards and Alan Clark, for instance, were all ardent fans. A quarter of a century later, sales are well down on the levels of Viz's heyday, but the comic is still going: the silver-anniversary edition is out in the shops this month.
Now, celebrating two and a half decades of superior lavatory humour, come two books telling this unfeasible story. Twenty-Five Years of Viz is a large, "distinctly fancy" collector's item, with lavish illustrations and a text by William Cook. The tone of jubilee-year commemoration is slightly incongruous - retailing at £20, it really should have been called something more Viz-like, such as The Bumper Crap Rip-Off Coffee-Table Book. Still, Cook's short history of the comic and its best-known characters is well worth reading. The accounts of the magazine's scrapes with authority are very amusing: the Boy Scouse, a strip about a troop of Liverpudlian Scouts who earn badges for benefit fraud and mugging old ladies, caused predictable outrage in the north-west, while a one-off called the Thieving Gypsy Bastards even merited a reprimand from the United Nations. Cook also collects some amusing pieces of Viz appreciation. Auberon Waugh, for instance, suggested that "if the future generations look back on the literature of the age, they'll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents". And the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell wrote that "the begetters of Viz are true classicists of the toilet form" - reminding us that Rubens, too, was a tit-and-bum man.
The second of the two books - Chris Donald's autobiography Rude Kids - is, for the most part, a very good read. It is briskly executed in the Viz house style: a rude and brutally accurate tabloidese. One pornographer, for instance, is deftly summed up as "the pint-sized wank- magnate David Sullivan". And the story it tells is pretty interesting. Donald came from a self-improving working-class family; his parents regarded comics as worthless trash. Like most of Viz's six or so core contributors, he went to a tough inner-city comprehensive, but lived in a slightly more comfortable area - so he was somewhat removed from the world that came to be depicted in the comics. He was inspired to write Viz by Newcastle's punk-rock scene, which goes some way to explaining its cut-and-paste, two-fingers-to-the-world attitude.
Yet Rude Kids is, in other ways, a distressing book. Like most extremely funny people, Donald is clearly rather odd: when he gave up Viz in 1999, he devoted his new free time to building a huge, insanely detailed train set in his workshop. When he had finished, his sense of anti-climax was such that he broke it to bits. He is also a heroic bearer of grudges - particularly against anyone who doesn't get the joke. People who pissed him off in 1987 are given another going over, as if the argument happened yesterday. In the second half of the book, when not detailing slightly Alan Partridge-ish celebrity encounters, Donald mostly describes his and John Brown's dispiriting attempts to exploit Viz's success with a series of pitiful spin-offs. As the awful Fat Slags film deservedly disappears from British cinemas, this leaves you wondering: why didn't Donald just say no?
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