Jack Black (Viz)

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Jack Black is a character appearing in the Adult Viz comic. The cartoons in which he appears are currently drawn by Simon Ecob. Jack is effectively a young amateur detective who along with his dog Silver seems to spend an eternal school holiday staying with his Aunt Meg in an ever changing idyllic middle England location. The time period ranges from anywhere between the early 1920s/30s to the present day.

Both the drawn style of the strip as well as the character are a parody of the Boys' Own-style character who is wholesome but ultimately fascistic in beliefs and actions. There is more than a hint of Enid Blyton in the Jack Black character and the strip parodies the alleged middle class snobbery and 'outraged' and sometimes hypocritical content of right wing British media such as the the Daily Mail and Express. However, the strip also has occasional parodies of Asterix and The Adventures of Tintin in both name ('Jack Blacksterix' and 'Jacjac and his Dog Silvery'), plot, and drawing style. A recent Viz edition featured a Jack Black story in a hentai-style, where Silver was renamed 'Silvachu' (a parody of Pikachu) and the action was moved to Tokyo.

Jack usually ends up finding out that what the suspect has done is technically not illegal, but still succeeds in getting the miscreants involved arrested on trivial charges and severely punished, often at the savage hands of the community. For instance, when someone tried to sell a tactical nuclear missile to the IRA the village policeman pointed out that the man was a licensed arms dealer. Jack then had the arms dealer arrested for having an out-of-date tax disc on the car he was carrying the missile in.

Other examples of Jack's adventures include:

  • Uncovering a milk hoarding scam involving asylum seekers.
  • Exhuming a deceased man's corpse so that he can prove that his child was born out of wedlock.
  • Teaming up with a paedophile priest to expose a teacher who is teaching safe sex to teenagers (the teacher is then lynched by a mob), then assisting his Aunt in performing illegal abortions.
  • Getting a charity worker arrested for holding a charity sale on a Sunday and having his guide dog destroyed.
  • Capturing a downed German fighter pilot and, disappointed at his Aunt's refusal to let him kick the German pilot "In the guts till his arse bleeds", defecting to become a Nazi supporter.
  • Getting his own aunt arrested for letting himself and his dog sing while she was playing piano without holding an entertainment licence.
  • Having a professor stripped naked, tarred and covered with old hair clippings before being paraded around in a cart for an hour while Jack and the community burn down the local museum because the professor believed in evolution and not creationism.
  • Discovering a working-class council estate in his aunt's idyllic village, and inducing its inhabitants to "move on" by closing down the local Co-Op store (thus removing their supply of cheap lager and cigarettes). Jack achieved this by tricking the store's owner into selling lottery tickets to underage minors.
  • Having an impoverished war hero (who has been forced to sell his all medals to pay the VAT on his heating bills) arrested for copyright fraud (to wit, making photocopies of newspaper articles for his scrapbook).
  • Discovering that the "chocolate cake" donated by an elderly lady to a church fayre contains less than the minimum chocolate content specified by European law, and should therefore have been called a "chocolate flavoured cake". The old lady is put in a pillory and pelted with cake, while onlookers shout "Take that, you cheating bitch!"
  • Uncovering an elaborate plot to steal books from the public library (by means of a tunnel drilled through several hundred feet of cliff) and sell them at a bookstall on the beach.
  • Discovering that a "dancing bear" exhibited in a travelling carnival is really Adolf Hitler in disguise.
  • Discovering that a carol singer, who has used his earnings to buy Christmas presents for a local orphanage, has violated Sunday-trading laws. (Both he and the orphans are arrested at gunpoint on Christmas morning, while Jack gets to keep all the presents himself.)
  • Befriending an elderly lady whose only companion is a goldfish, then having her thrown out of her retirement flat for keeping a pet without written permission.
  • On finding out Meg (who is a member of the local Council) will have to return a brand-new car and a large amount of money that she received as a backhander to allow a toxic waste dump to be built next to a school as the vote will not be unanimous, Jack breaks into the car of the only councillor who has voted against the proposed dump. He then promptly has the man arrested and thrown in prison for not declaring an interest in the issue (his daughter was a pupil at the school). Jack is too young to vote for the proposal, so Silver (who is three years old and therefore 21 in dog years) is appointed as a replacement council member instead to vote on Jack's behalf.
  • Exposing a Japanese Sumo-Wrestler of selling Geisha's to England for their skill in performing the tea ceremony.
  • In an attempt to earn money to fund his new Animal snaring hobby, Jack attempts to get work as a fruit picker with the local farmer, but upon learning that the wage is only 30p an hour, gets suspicious of a group of gentlemen who are more than happy with the measly wage. Convinced they are foreign, Jack arranges for a cricket match between the fruit pickers and the local police noting that if they attempt to cheat they cannot possibly be British. During the game, one of the fruit pickers correctly questions a play with the umpire and Jack calls for the men to be arrested, to which the fruit pickers attempt to flee (for they are actually members of an East European acting troupe who recently vanished). As the East Europeans are taken away, the farmer points out that with no-one to pick it, his fruit with rot. Jack happily responds that he would rather it rot than be picked by a foreigner. This story was purportedly "sponsored" by the Daily Express
  • Getting a butcher's store closed down because the butcher is having sex with his meat products. This is supposedly done by all butchers, but the one in question was risking cross contamination by having sex with raw meat and then cooked meat afterwards.

Jack's nazism has been referred to more than once. He has been seen in one episode to be working on a school homework project entitled 'The Myth of the Holocaust'; whilst in another he is seen leading a sing-song round a piano of the nazism anthem 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me'.

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