The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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СКАЧАТЬ sure Simon was in the bedroom to give me moral support when Graham called. Graham arrived wearing a South American poncho, a large sombrero hat and cowboy boots. His clothes, together with waist-length brown hair and an overly generous moustache, made him look a bit like a young Gerry Garcia. The portfolio he brought with him displayed his considerable talents as a cartoonist – and also a fondness for drawing cowboy boots – but contained no cartoon strips. Just doodles. We suggested he go away and try drawing some finished strips and as he left we gave him one valuable piece of advice. If at all possible the names of the cartoon characters should rhyme. We were both impressed with Graham. Not by his drawings, or his Mexican attire, but by his personality. He seemed a really nice bloke and we’d got on with him easily. A short while later, sticking rigidly to our advice, Graham came up with Victor and his Boa Constrictor. I was a little concerned about the size of Victor’s nose and the appearance of cowboy boots in the strip, but I used it anyway. But as I was gaining one contributor I was gradually losing another. By now I was seeing very little of Jim. He was moving in different social circles and had started working for a friend as a builder. His contributions had always been a bit sporadic but now the supply had virtually dried up. Issue 12 was the first comic not to feature any of Jim’s material.

      The print run was now up to 5000 and sales in Newcastle were going berserk thanks partly to a useful piece of publicity in the local press. I’d recently designed a poster for a Red Cross charity event and mentioned to the customer, a John Dougray, that I’d been on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. ‘Really? How’s business?’ he asked enthusiastically. It turned out Mr Dougray worked for the Central Office of Information, the Government’s PR agency, and his eyes lit up when he heard that my business was still solvent at the end of the year. He asked if I’d mind doing a few press interviews to give the scheme a bit of positive publicity. ‘We’re always on the lookout for success stories,’ he said. Alas, this wasn’t going to be quite the success story he’d envisaged. I agreed to the interviews and all the local papers sent reporters round to talk to me. It wasn’t long till one of the hacks got a whiff of a bigger bone than the one he’d been thrown. He twigged that I’d been publishing Viz, a scandalous magazine, while on the Government scheme. The following day the Newcastle Evening Chronicle exposed this shocking state of affairs under the banner headline ‘FOUR-LETTER COMIC ON PUBLIC CASH’. The story snowballed from there, with an avalanche of press enquiries the following day and stories on the local TV news. All this bad publicity did me no harm whatsoever. In fact I received orders for 960 comics the day after the story broke. Unfortunately the outcome wasn’t so cheery for Mr Dougray. Not only did the COI end up with egg on their faces, but his Red Cross fund-raising event was cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales.

      By now the distribution side of the magazine was becoming too much for me to handle on my own. The Kard Bar were ordering 1000 copies of every issue, and selling them. Virgin Records sold over 1000 copies of issue 11. HMV were selling over 500 copies, and a tiny little comic collectors’ shop in Newcastle called Timeslip was selling 200. Pubs where I knew the landlords had started stocking it too: the Trent House, the Strawberry, the Egypt Cottage and the Barley Mow. Simon occasionally helped out with deliveries but he’d moved out of Lily Crescent by now and wasn’t around most of the time. Around Christmas 1985 I went into Virgin Records in Eldon Square to collect money from comic sales, and left with a bag containing £400 in cash. I remember thinking to myself, if one Virgin shop can sell this many comics, imagine what it would be like if every Virgin shop stocked it! There must be thirty or forty of them around the country. So on 7 January 1985 I took Bob Paynter’s advice and wrote a letter to Richard Branson.

      I knew that Branson must get shedloads of letters every day, each one of them trying to flog him some half-baked business idea or another. I’d be lucky if he got to the end of my first paragraph without throwing it in the bin. So I gave the letter my very best shot, and started by getting the date wrong:

      4th January 1984

      Dear Mr Branson

      I am 24 and I make a living publishing a magazine called Viz. The magazine has been around since 1979 and the circulation is at present 7,100 copies. Most copies sell in Newcastle as I have not been able to devote much time to getting distribution elsewhere. However several hundred copies go to London, Edinburgh and other cities where the comic is becoming popular, slowly but surely. Part of the reason I am writing to you is that Virgin Records store in Eldon Square, Newcastle, regularly sells over 1000 copies of each issue at a rate of over 30 copies per day.

      Viz has received very good reviews in the national music press and elsewhere (see enclosed cuttings) and we have featured on national TV programmes twice. ‘We’ being myself, my brother Simon, a contributor and helper, and a handful of other contributors.

      As a result of one of our TV appearances we were contacted by IPC magazines, the international publishing company of some repute. They displayed an interest in publishing Viz fortnightly and were confident, as we were, that we could achieve a mass circulation. We spent several months producing prototypes and dummy magazines for them. They eventually concluded that our original dummy, a slight variation on our existing product, was funny enough, but they dare not publish it. They also found that, once toned down, it was no longer as funny. So in December they finally decided not to publish Viz. IPC have for some time been aiming to fill a perceived gap in the market by publishing a humour magazine for 16 year olds and upwards. While dealing with them I was shown their efforts to date. I am confident that, with their reluctance to publish anything they consider slightly risqué, they will never be able to win that market. However I am now more confident than ever that Viz could, in some form, be a success nationally.

      To date every issue has sold out completely, and the circulation has increased with every issue. However, there is a limit to how far we can take it ourselves. Your reputation as an imaginative businessperson goes before you, and I hope you don’t mind me writing this letter, if only to let you know Viz exists. Someone close to IPC suggested that you may be considering the idea of publishing a national magazine with the same audience as ours. If this is the case, and you think we may be of any help to you, we would be only too willing to discuss the matter, at a length of your choice.

      If the subject of Viz inspires you in any way we would be glad to hear from you. I am convinced that the comic has a great deal of potential. I hope I haven’t wasted too much of your time with this unsolicited blast on our own trumpet, and I trust that the enclosed copies of our magazine may be of interest.

      All the best

       Chris Donald

      I needn’t have worried how Branson would react. He never even saw the letter or the comics that I’d enclosed. The package was redirected to Virgin Books, the publishing arm of Branson’s empire, where it landed on the desk of a man called John Brown.

      As their name suggested, Virgin Books were in the business of publishing books, not magazines. Shitty books to be precise. They specialized in mass-market paperbacks about pop stars, books by chubby, camp TV astrologers and stocking-filler comedy books like How to Be a Complete Bastard. An awful lot of shit must have rained down on John Brown’s desk too, so grabbing his attention wasn’t going to be much easier.

      As fate would have it John Brown had been ill on 20 May 1984. Instead of going to work as usual, he’d stayed at home and watched TV. At 1.25 p.m. on BBC2 he had stumbled upon a repeat of our Sparks programme. Like Bob Paynter at IPC, John Brown had been impressed by what he saw and had made a mental note to investigate further. Unlike Bob Paynter at IPC, by the following day John had forgotten the name of the magazine and so he never got round to doing anything about it. But he remembered the name, and the TV programme, when my letter came to the top of his in-tray.

      John rang me straight away and arranged to come and see me. He said he’d be flying up on Wednesday 30 January and I should expect him at about 1.00 p.m. At about 1.00 p.m. I СКАЧАТЬ