The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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       Dolores

      My opening line to Dolores was, ‘I bet you were born in the same street as Alex Higgins.’ I reckoned their accents were exactly the same. ‘Alex Higgins is from Northern Ireland,’ she said. ‘I’m from Galway, in the Republic.’ I was only 150 miles out. I met Dolores again at a New Year’s Eve house party at the end of 1984. She was sitting on the stairs dressed in a flouncy, 1950s party dress, her eyes sparkling like Christmas tree lights. She seemed to be the only person in the house who’d made an effort to dress up for the occasion. We sat and talked all night. After that she started coming to the Trent House and often ended up having to watch me play pool all evening. She must have had some riveting nights. Then at Easter 1985 Dolores and matchmaker Soo persuaded me to take a week off work and we booked a small holiday cottage in a village called Allendale in south Northumberland. I had a lot of work to finish first so I arrived a couple of days late, and Soo had to leave early for some reason. That left me and Dolores alone together in a cosy country cottage. On that, our first night together, I cooked a romantic meal of Bird’s Eye chicken pie and Smash mashed potato. And then, after a couple of bottles of wine and a comprehensive crawl around the village’s five pubs, we staggered up the stairs to bed. I staggered up the stairs of that cottage a boy, but when I awoke with a headache the next morning, I was a man. Again.

      My other new relationship, with John Brown from Virgin Books, was looking equally promising. He eventually got back to me on the evening of 18 February with the good news that Virgin wanted to publish Viz. John outlined his proposed deal over the phone. I would put the comic together as usual and deliver the artwork to the printer. Virgin would handle all the printing, sales and distribution, and pay a royalty for every comic sold. I scribbled down the bones of the offer and sat up for most of that night trying to work out whether or not it would be viable. At the time Viz was selling over 5000 copies. If all went well perhaps we could sell 40,000 eventually, 1000 for every Virgin store. Then just for a laugh I did another calculation based on the NME’s sales figure of around 100,000. That was the dream scenario.

      I told John to make the contract out in mine and Simon’s names jointly, and when it arrived in the post we both took it to a solicitor to get his comments. Richard Hart-Jackson had been recommended to me because he specialized in publishing. Music publishing as it happened, not comics, but it seemed close enough. In the event his advice proved invaluable. One crucial suggestion he made was that royalties should be paid on every comic that Virgin printed, not every comic they sold. This ‘mechanical’ royalty was much easier to account for, and of course it meant that we’d get more money. But the single most important piece of advice he gave me was this: ‘If you sign this contract you and the publisher are entering a three-legged race,’ he said. ‘You cannot afford to fall out.’ Negotiations with Virgin dragged on for a little while. One problem was the frequency. They wanted Viz to be monthly, and I didn’t think I could achieve that. Certainly not to begin with. We eventually agreed on bi-monthly, once every two months, with the aim of increasing this to monthly as soon as possible. Before signing the contract I asked John if we could come down and take a look around the Virgin Books offices.

      Virgin’s squat, bunker-like single-storey building at Portobello Dock, alongside the Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal, was in complete contrast to IPC’s sky-scraping headquarters overlooking the Thames. It felt as if we were going to meet a lock-keeper, not a publisher, as Simon and I negotiated the tricky path to the front door. John was in a meeting so we waited patiently outside his office. When the door opened John briefly introduced us to his previous visitor, Tony Parsons, who was just leaving. Then John showed us around and introduced us to Bev, his secretary, and Mike, his young production manager. We looked around the studio where all Virgin’s books were produced and I couldn’t help noticing how tidy it was. There didn’t seem to be a scrap of litter anywhere. It was as if these people never did any work.

      We signed the contract in July 1985 and it was agreed that the first Virgin comic, issue 13, would be published in August. To meet the deadlines I knew I’d have to be a full-time magazine editor from now on, so I had the pleasant task of going round all my graphic design customers and telling them to stick their last-minute, penny-pinching jobs up their arses. During negotiations with Virgin I’d published one last comic myself, to plug the gap between issue 12 in November 1984 and 13 in August 1985. This was issue 12a, another compilation featuring edited highlights of issues 5 and 6. In order to save time I gave the job to a commercial printer, Wards of Gateshead. Sadly the Free Press had printed their last comic.

      Virgin’s attempts to find a new printer suffered an early setback. One large company in Birmingham flatly refused to handle it, describing the contents as immoral. If and when they СКАЧАТЬ