The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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       Jim Brownlow

      I didn’t much trust IPC, so when I got home I wrote to John Sanders asking him to confirm his offer in writing. Then I wrote again asking specifically about the copyright situation. I wanted his assurance that £1,500 was only paying for an option to buy this comic, and if they turned it down they’d have no rights to keep or use any of the material. The dummy I put together was a hotchpotch of the best of Viz to date, including a lot of material from issue 11 which had just gone to press. I redesigned old news features, had them properly typeset (in the comic I just typed the text columns on a typewriter) and obtained proper photographs to go with them from IPC’s photo library. I put in what I thought were the best of our cartoons, like Mr Logic, Big Vern and Paul Whicker, and I redrew the first episode of Billy the Fish and stretched it out to cover two pages instead of two lines. I realized I would have to spread material pretty bloody thin if Viz was ever going to be a fortnightly. At our meeting John Sanders had hinted that the political content would need to be increased so I made up a new story about a lorry driver who’d lost a consignment of cruise missiles as a token gesture not quite in that direction. I also commissioned a strip from Mick Kidd of Biff, later of Guardian fame, who had been a Viz distributor, as opposed to contributor, in London at the time.

      After sending the dummy off on time I was expecting a prompt, definitive response from IPC, but weeks passed and I heard nothing. We got our money, but no news. Then Bob Paynter rang up and asked for some additional material. He was making a few slight changes and wondered if he could have something a wee bit more political perhaps. Then in late July I got a shock when he sent me a copy of what he called ‘the actual dummy’. This was what he proposed to put before the board of directors. I was flabbergasted. The comic had been so much altered it was barely recognizable as our work. They’d truncated most of our cartoons, altered titles, changed punchlines and replaced entire chunks of the magazine with crap they’d written themselves. Some of the alterations were ridiculous. They’d changed the name Viz Comic to Viz Funnies. A cartoon called Frank the Princess had been altered to make the subject, Frank, gay. With a few subtle changes they’d turned it from a surreal fairy story into homophobic garbage. Sid the Sexist’s name had been changed to Sid the Smooth-talker. And in Mr Logic the word ‘penis’ had been replaced by ‘donger’. For fuck’s sake! They’d missed the entire point. Mr Logic wouldn’t say donger. He would say penis.

      I wrote to John Sanders and highlighted thirty or so similar instances of them ruining jokes. I also pointed out that their treatment had robbed the magazine of an important but difficult to define quality, the fact that the joke was on us. In our hopeless prizes, botched competitions, rubbish letters and pitiful news features, Viz was taking the piss out of itself more than other people. In their treatment of the dummy IPC had done away with this entirely.

      For the next few months we continued to send additional material to London for a new and definitive version of the dummy, but I was getting more and more frustrated at their inability to know a good thing when they saw it and their insistence on tinkering about with everything. It gradually dawned on me that I could never work with these people. While a final decision was being awaited I had to go to London again. The Hostages, the band that my mate Walter had got onto the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, had just been signed up by EMI. They’d been underpaying me for posters for ages and now they wanted to make it up by asking me to design the sleeve for their first hit single. Walter took me to EMI’s head offices in Manchester Square to be given a design brief by the executive in charge. His brief was very simple – I wasn’t doing the sleeve. Instead he wanted me to fuck off, and some mate of his with an airbrush would be doing the sleeve instead. It wasn’t the most positive outcome I’d ever had from a meeting, but my visit to Manchester Square did prove useful for another reason. On our way into the EMI offices we witnessed a remarkable scene as the band Tight Fit tried unsuccessfully to gain admission at the front door. They’d had a couple of hits a few years earlier, but apparently their credit was no longer good. There they were, dressed in exotic black leather outfits, screaming at the doorman. ‘Don’t you know who we are? We’re Tight Fit!’ But he wouldn’t let them in. I was able to use this story as an amusing music industry anecdote for several years to come . . . until the day I met Pete Waterman. But more of that later.

      By October 1984 I still hadn’t been given a decision by IPC so I wrote to John Sanders with an ultimatum. They could either accept the dummy or give us our artwork back. On 22 November he replied:

      Dear Chris

      I am sorry I have not been in touch. This is not waywardness; I have been giving a great deal of thought to Viz and discussing it here with many people.

      Very sadly, and somewhat against my own judgement, I have to tell you that we cannot publish Viz. It is thought that when it is toned-down sufficiently to satisfy IPC, what’s left would not be successful enough for the kind of profit-making that we need. This is because we are a big company in the mass circulation market and, put basically, Viz is not sufficiently mass circulation.

      I still think it has possibilities and I hope you make a go of it yourselves. I believe it has great potential and you should not regard this letter as the end of the road. Bob Paynter feels he has called upon your services to a greater degree than the value of the cheque we have already sent you, and he will therefore be sending you an additional cheque for £500.

      I am sorry about this decision, and I wish you lots of luck in the future.

      Kind regards

       John R. Sanders

       Managing Director

       IPC Youth Group

      In one sense he was perfectly right. When Viz was toned down to suit suit Sanders’s superiors on the IPC board it wasn’t funny. But in another sense he was spectacularly wrong. Viz could be mass circulation. It was just a question of finding a publisher with the bottle to take it on.

CHAPTER SIX

       Four-Letter Comic on Public Cash

      After the IPC rejection Bob Paynter called me up to say goodbye and good luck. ‘I hear Virgin are in the market for a comedy magazine,’ he said. ‘Why not send a copy to Richard Branson?’ After the trials and disappointments of the last six months I wasn’t in any hurry to contact another publisher. In any case, my first year of self-employment was now up and I was doing very nicely on my own. My accountant announced that I’d made a net profit of £4,448 for the year ending 31 November 1984. He didn’t seem impressed at all but I was positively delighted.

      Issue 12 finally emerged just in time for Christmas 1984. Inside was a new strip called Johnny Fartpants that had originally been intended for IPC. There was also a début for Felix and his Amazing Underpants, and another newcomer called Victor and his Boa Constrictor. This brand-new cartoon was the work of a brand-new contributor, Graham Dury.

      Graham hailed from Nottingham but was working as a postgraduate botanical research scientist at Leicester University. As far as I could gather his work involved messing about with the genetics of potted plants to make them look more attractive on shop shelves. He’d found out about Viz via his girlfriend Karen, a student at Newcastle Polytechnic. As well as a scientist meddling with things I didn’t understand, Graham was a keen cartoonist, and he rang me, offering to come up to Newcastle and show me some of his drawings. СКАЧАТЬ