The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids - Chris Donald страница 13

Название: The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids

Автор: Chris Donald

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007571833

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ shoving each other. Their respective fathers were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage and you’d have expected them to intervene. But instead of reining his son in and telling him to behave, the heavily tattooed father sitting closest to me leaned forward and whispered in his son’s ear, ‘Go on, son, I’m right behind you.’ From that sprang the simple idea of a bully whose father eggs him on rather than spanking him with a slipper. In fact his parents are more violent than he is. Issue 7 also featured a significant strip by Simon called the Lager Lads. This was inspired by a series of what seemed to us unlikely TV commercials for McEwan’s lager in which three young lads went into pubs – laughing, smiling and drinking McEwan’s lager – and never once got pissed or glassed anyone. The Lager Lads was the forerunner of Sid the Sexist.

       Biffa, Mutha and Fatha Bacon

      With a TV appearance in the pipeline I’d boldly ordered 2000 copies of No. 6, double the previous print run, at a unit cost of just over 11p, and I stuck with 2000 for issue No. 7. By 1981 the comic was reaching cult status among the student population of Newcastle, and sales in city centre shops were taking off. Brian at the Kard Bar was ordering an initial 500 copies of each issue, on condition that he had the comic at least a week before any other shops. By now I’d talked Virgin Records into stocking Viz, and HMV followed suit not long afterwards. Volume (formerly Listen Ear), Virgin and HMV were now all ordering fifty copies on an almost weekly basis. On the one hand this meant I could now retire from hawking the comic around the pubs, but it also posed one or two logistical problems. I couldn’t drive and I had no car, so all the deliveries had to be done on foot and by bus. On at least one occasion Simon and I pressed two of my granny’s ‘Mrs Brady’ style shopping trolleys into service to deliver comics to town on the 33 bus.

      Getting HMV on Northumberland Street to stock Viz was a huge boost. The manager, Keith Armstrong, approached me in the pub and asked how it was that his shop was the only record shop in town that didn’t sell Viz. Frankly I’d never asked because I didn’t think there was a cat in hell’s chance of a mainstream music store like HMV touching it. Keith immediately started stocking it, right alongside his tills for maximum exposure. This put Viz under the noses of ordinary people who went to HMV to buy their Rod Stewart and Phil Collins records, and almost inevitably Viz wasn’t to every Phil Collins fan’s taste. One miserable old cow – probably the same woman who reported me to the boss at the DHSS – complained to the HMV head office about the contents of the comic and Viz was immediately banned from the shop. But that didn’t stop Keith from selling it. He simply ignored the ban, kept on stocking it by the till, and told his staff to whip the comics out of sight if they saw anyone from head office entering the store.

       Big Vern

      The HMV shop had also joined the growing list of advertisers in the magazine. Keeping the adverts funny depended entirely on the cooperation and understanding of the client. Some people just couldn’t get their head round self-parody. Sometimes if a client turned down what I thought was a really funny advert, I’d put the ad in anyway and simply not charge them. But Keith was game for anything and as a result HMV’s ads tended to be among the funnier ones.

      Issue 8 came out in May 1982 with a print run of 3000, and as sales rose so the new characters kept on coming. This one saw the birth of two familiar faces, Big Vern and Mr Logic. Big Vern was my tribute to The Sweeney. Like most of my cartoons it was intended as a one-off, a manic précis of the entire 1970s Euston Films genre, all compressed into a silly half-page throwaway strip. A straight man, Ernie, and a funny man, Vern. The same thin joke – that Vern is paranoid about the police – is repeated a few times, and at the end Big Vern kills himself. That was it. Artistically speaking there was nowhere else for Big Vern to go, besides which, from a continuity point of view, he’d already blown his brains out. But people liked it, so Big Vern was duly resurrected and the fact that he always killed himself at the end of the strip became part of the joke.

       Mr Logic

      Mr Logic was different. He was based very much on real life. The product of a rare collaboration between myself and Simon, Mr Logic – an extreme social misfit – was unashamedly based on our big brother Steve and his hilarious Mr Spock behaviour. It wasn’t until years later we discovered the real name for it was Asperger’s Syndrome.

       Celibacy and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll

      One underlying reason for Viz’s growing success was probably the fact that I wasn’t getting my end away. I had none of the distractions of a serious relationship, or indeed any relationship at all. I was a bit of a detached, emotionally independent sort of teenager myself. I’d only had one real girlfriend who I’d ditched when she declared herself a Saturday Night Fever fan in 1977. She was the type of girl who expected you to open doors, brush your hair and take regular baths, and I found all that a bit restrictive.

      With a CV that featured train-spotting and a record collection that featured the Seekers, my prospects with the girls had never been good. And from a practical point of view living at home had also become a handicap. By now my bedroom, overlooking the railway in Lily Crescent, had almost totally metamorphosed into a design studio. It was a big room, about 20 feet wide by 14 deep, but I’d managed to fill almost every square inch of it with furniture. I had my drawing board, shelves cluttered with ink, pens and drawing materials, a wardrobe full of back issues, my record collection and hi-fi system crammed into a corner, a filthy old settee, the card table for a drawing board, a plan chest, a wooden writing desk, a small set of drawers for my clothes, and finally, amidst all this mess, a very untidy single bed. To add to the romantic atmosphere there was always a whiff of Cow Gum in the air, and what little carpet remained visible wasn’t, due to the amount of litter on the floor. The walls were painted in dismal two-tone green bands – based on the British Railways class 47 diesel locomotive livery of the early 1960s – and there was a large paint stain on one of the curtains where I’d managed to knock a two-and-a-half litre tin of paint off a stepladder. The place hadn’t been properly cleaned or dusted since 1970. It was just about functional as a workspace, but far from the ideal bachelor pad.

      I led a solitary existence at home, rarely exchanging more than few pleasantries with Mum and Dad. My social life centred entirely around the pub, and even there I preferred playing pool to talking. I could get on the pool table at 6.30 p.m. and still be winning by closing time. That, and two pints of Whitbread Trophy Bitter, made for the perfect night out. Then, in 1982, my late-running sexual awakening finally arrived.

       Karen

      Karen was an eighteen-year-old history student at Newcastle University. Andy Pop had told me that a group of girls were interested in starting an Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos Fan Club and asked if I’d liaise with them. The girls in question all lived together in an attic flat not far from me. It was at the top of a huge, double-fronted Victorian house belonging to the University, and as I clumped up the communal stairwell I realized that all four levels of the house were completely full of teenage girls. I felt a bit uncomfortable. I found my way up to the top-floor flat and was introduced to three of the occupants. Then the fourth appeared from her bedroom. Her hair was dark and so were her eyes. She seemed quiet СКАЧАТЬ