Viz Comic: How Newcastle Produced Britain’s Filthiest Magazine

Chris Donald and his brother Simon began producing Viz in the tradition of punk fanzines that had spread through British youth culture in the late 1970s. The content was influenced by the British comic tradition – Beano, Buster, the comics that Chris and Simon had grown up reading – but filtered through the sensibility of teenage boys in Jesmond who found those comics funny for reasons that the editors had not intended. The humour was crude, scatological, deliberately offensive in the manner of adolescent transgression. It was also extremely well constructed – the jokes worked because the comic timing and the visual grammar were as precise as those of the publications it was satirising.

The early issues were produced in tiny numbers – 150 copies, 500 copies, sold in Newcastle pub toilets and at the student union. The distribution expanded through the network of independent record shops and alternative bookshops that existed in British cities before Amazon and internet retail made them unviable. By the mid-1980s Viz had a national distribution deal and was selling tens of thousands of copies.

Several things. The comic timing was genuinely good. The satire of British tabloid culture was acute at a moment when tabloid culture was reaching its own peak absurdity under the influence of Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun. The Viz letters page and competition parodies understood the language of tabloid journalism with the precision of people who had spent years reading it. The strip characters were archetypes of northern working-class life drawn with both affection and ruthlessness – Sid the Sexist was recognisable to anyone who had been in the pubs he inhabited. Johnny Fartpants was a child’s joke taken to its logical conclusion.

The Newcastle identity was present throughout without being sentimental about it. The comic was Geordie in its reference points and its sensibility without making Geordieness into a brand or a tourist attraction. The Fat Slags went to the pub because that is what people did. Biffa Bacon came from a specific understanding of the dynamics of family violence in deprived communities that was neither romanticised nor demonised. It was accurate in the way that very good comedy about specific communities is accurate.

The publisher John Brown signed Viz in 1987 and the distribution and marketing that followed produced the sales explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the peak, Viz was a national cultural event. The Fat Slags went on television advertisements. The comic spawned a board game, calendar, and various merchandise that Chris Donald approached with increasing unease. The commercial success changed the nature of the enterprise in ways that the original bedroom production ethic had not anticipated.

Sales declined from their early 1990s peak and Chris Donald sold his interest in the comic in 1999. Viz continues to publish under different ownership and editorial direction. The later issues are not as good as the peak years, which is true of almost everything. The original run from 1979 to the mid-1990s constitutes one of the most sustained achievements in British comedy publishing and it came entirely from Newcastle. That is not a coincidence. The specific combination of regional identity, class awareness and genuine satirical ambition that the city produced in that generation was the condition for Viz’s existence. It could not have come from London or from anywhere that was not, specifically, Newcastle.