The Fat Slags

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The Fat Slags is a comic strip appearing in alternative British comic Viz. The eponymous slags are Sandra and Tracey (known to everyone as San and Tray); two enormous women whose dual purpose in life is to eat as much as possible while also having vast amounts of casual sex. As with other Viz strips, the Slags' authors use a brash writing style, avoiding political correctness.

The slags' eating frequently follows a night of binge drinking, and the circumstances of the sex or the partner in question are rarely an issue - they have been known to leap on delivery men or workmen for gratification; with the targeted man rarely given an opportunity to resist, refuse, or escape. Both slags regularly enjoy carnal relations with Baz, a local jobless dropout who divides his time between drinking, committing crime, and having sex with San and Tray (even though Baz is already married). Baz's wife, Thelma quite often finds out that Baz is cheating on her, but invariably forgives him. The other major character in the strip is Baz's slightly more successful friend, Dave, who works as a refuse collector, but earns most of his income through massive benefit fraud.

Whilst most Viz characters are recognisably from North East England (the comic is largely written in geordie dialect), Sandra and Tracey are said to come from Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Their excessive lifestyle is a parody of British ladette culture.

In the summer of 1997, The Guardian carried an article entitled 'Time to take a stand against the Fat Slags'. It criticised the stereotyping of women the strip contained and argued that the parody of male behaviour in Sid the Sexist was not the same kind of sexism (on account of being too obviously fake behaviour). Viz creator Chris Donald refers to this in his book, where he mentions that at the time of these criticisms the Fat Slags had not appeared in the magazine for more than a year, but as a direct response to the criticism they were immediately resurrected for the next issue, in which they had a humorous run-in with the feminist Millie Tant. Donald later questioned why the Guardian had slated the portrayals of the Slags, but hadn't mentioned that the two male characters were portrayed as a cheating layabout and a fraudster, and that the strip's only well-behaved character (Thelma) was a woman.

In 2004, a feature film version of (titled Fat Slags) was released. It received extremely poor reviews, and the strip's artist, Graham Dury was so demoralised by the treatment of his creations that he announced that he was dropping them from the comic altogether. This did not actually happen, instead Dury ceased drawing them, and for a short while the strip was drawn by Alex Collier instead. Dury started drawing them again a few months later.

[edit] Trivia

Their real names are Tracey Tunstall and Sandra Burke. This is how they were addressed by a priest whilst attending the baptism of Baz's daughter (Viz, March 2006). This was also noted in the Fat Slags video.

[edit] External links

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