List of Viz comic strips

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Following is a list of recurring or notable one-off strips from the British adult spoof comic magazine Viz:

  • Acker Bilk – (See Jimmy Hill).
  • Aldridge Pryor – a pathological liar whose lies are ludicrous, such as The Nolan Sisters living in his fridge.
  • Alexander Graham Bell-End – A crazy inventor who continually rubs his penis on things and then tricks his assistant into touching them with his hands or mouth, at which point Alexander laughs uproariously whilst exclaiming "I TOTALLY rubbed my bell end on that!"
  • Anna Reksik – A model who repeatedly vomits in order to keep her thin shape. She has attracted controversy because some people have seen her as ridiculing eating disorders, cocaine addiction and media pressure on women to be thin.
  • Badly Drawn Man – the singer Badly Drawn Boy is named after a one-off Viz cartoon character, who on the whole was very badly drawn.
  • Badly Overdrawn Boy – a parody of Badly Drawn Boy, who is seen busking outside his local bank because he's broke.
  • "Balsa Boy" – a take on Disney's Pinocchio, in which a lonely old pensioner makes a 'son' from balsa wood. The strip ends with the old man being sent to a mental institution after burning down the house while trying to dry off Balsa Boy in front of the fire, but by the last frame he is busy working on making another "boy" out of currant buns.
  • Barry the Cat - a one-off parody of The Beano's acrobatic crimefighter Billy the Cat. Unlike his Beano equivalent, Barry is incompetent, hopelessly uncoordinated, and is immediately recognised despite his "cat-suit" disguise. The final panel shows him in hospital, suffering from multiple injuries, being told that he has acted "very foolishly".
  • Bart Conrad – A store detective who takes his job far too seriously.
  • Baxter Basics – an extremely amoral and sexually deviant Conservative MP who first appeared at around the same time as John Major's Back to Basics campaign, and a transparent statement on the hypocrisy of politicians.
  • "Bertie Blunt (His Parrot's A Cunt)" – a boy who owns an extremely violent, foul mouthed parrot that insults everyone and encourages him to commit suicide. When the parrot kills Bertie's grandmother, who leaves them all her money, Bertie fights back by spending his inheritance on a microwave oven which he then uses to cook the parrot alive. Chris Donald, creator of Viz, has said that in the early days of the magazine he would not permit the "c word" to be used, until an outside artist sent him this strip which he found to be so good he decided to use it anyway.
  • Biffa Bacon – (initially The Bacons); a boy and his Geordie family, all of whom are violent psychopaths. This was very much a parody of The Dandy`s Bully Beef and Chips cartoon strip.
  • Big Vern – a stereotypical London gangland career criminal, who is convinced the most ordinary everyday activity (a trip to the supermarket, say) is in fact a major criminal "job". Nearly every episode ends with him taking his own life for the most trivial of reasons – "no bastard copper's gonna take me alive!" usually with a graphic depiction of him shooting himself in the head with a shotgun.
  • Billy Bottom - a literal toilet humour strip, usually based around the title character's attempts to defecate.
  • Billy Britain - a proto-Hitler ultra-nationalist who appeared in two very early strips. Chris Donald considers him an early prototype of Major Misunderstanding.
  • Billy the Fish – half man, half fish, he is a star footballer despite being drawn with no legs (he does apparently own a pair of football boots, but it is not clear why). He is a satire on, or homage to, the popular football comics of the 1960s and 1970s – Roy of the Rovers and also satirises current football incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Harry Enfield.
  • Billy No-Mates – a miserable, antisocial teenage boy who spends most of his time alone in his dark room playing video games. If anyone disturbs him he becomes extremely irritated. He also has an obsession with masturbating, collecting large amounts of pornographic magazines and calling sex hotlines.
  • Black Bag – a black bin liner which lives the exciting life of a sheepdog; a parody of The Dandy's Black Bob and the anthropomorphism of animals.
  • The Bottom Inspectors – a parody of Hitler's SS, or perhaps the Stasi. A fascist organisation who knock on people's doors in the middle of the night and inspect their bottoms. Any transgression is dealt with arbitrarily and cruelly. It has been revealed that the bottom inspectors are actually based on the ticket inspectors of the Newcastle Metro system (Chris Donald in a 'Picture of Tyneside', BBC 4, June 2005).
  • Boy Scouse – gang of delinquent schoolboys from Liverpool who earn Boy Scout badges for mugging pensioners, spraying graffiti and other such antisocial activities. MP Louise Ellman complained that it set a bad example and petitioned to have it banned.
  • Brown Bottle – a superhero who gets blotto on Newcastle Brown Ale to induce his super powers. He is of course totally useless.
  • Busted – who, until they disbanded in 2005, occasionally appeared in strips (as well as spoof interviews and other features in the magazine) portraying them as pyromaniacs/arsonists who would set anything on fire "for a laugh".
  • Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles – a good-hearted and otherwise normal lad who could solve some ordinary person's problems with his ridiculously large testicles.
  • Captain Morgan and his Hammond Organ – a pirate who sails round the Caribbean inviting people to sing along with him as he plays a Hammond organ. His character was cut when legal action was threatened over the copyright of some of the songs; according to creator Chris Donald in his book, he did not think that making the character sing royalty - free hymns or nursery rhymes would have quite the same comedic effect.
  • Captain Oats "The polar explorer who's always exploring his own pole!" A one-off strip lampooning the Captain Oates of Scott of Antarctic fame. An explorer, obsessed with pornography and masturbation, he is depicted skiing across the icy wastes, dragging a wardrobe upon which are hidden his stash of porn mags. Highlight of the strip is when he and his fellow explorers come across an abandoned camp belonging to Roald Amudsen, in which Captain Oats discovers Amudsen's stash of "scan-mags" which "make my stash look a bit tame". Captain Oats' efforts to have a wank are continually frustrated until he finds himself alone having fallen into a crevasse. Unfortunately his penis is frost-bitten and falls off.
  • Christ on a Bender – a strip which depicts Jesus as a family man who keeps trying to escape the house to get "crucified" with his mates but is thwarted at every turn by his wife forcing him to stay home with her and look after the kids.
  • The Critics –pretentious and shallow high-culture critics who lampoon the perceived elitism of the "chattering classes".
  • Cockney Wanker – a swaggering, bigoted Londoner who speaks in rhyming slang. The character is loosely based on actor Mike Reid and broadcaster Danny Baker.
  • Copper Kettle - Quoted as 'The PC who loves his PG' (PG meaning tea brand PG Tips), the strip follows the life of the policeman and his futile attempts to obtain some tea while on his beat. One adventure had his trying to get some tea whilst working on Christmas day - including a tanker which spilled tea, which he missed due to his failure to get a cup in time to catch it in. Ironically, when he finally gets a drink of tea, it's a cup used from a murder case which is laced with poison, resulting in his death. He isn't even allowed tea in heaven, as St Peter and company claim to be Mormons.
  • "Crap Jokes" – a diverse range of verbal and visual puns or one-liners, usually deliberately corny or old. The best known of the Crap Jokes are seemingly endless "Doctor, Doctor" gags, with the reader's sympathy drawn to the endlessly hapless straightman Doctor.
  • Darren Dice - A young man who is obsessed with gambling. Sadly, he often chooses to gamble with the wrong crowd. The character is allegedly based on, and bears a remarkable resemblance to retired Scottish footballer Darren Jackson. Jackson spent a couple of seasons at Newcastle United in the late 1980s and became a familiar face in bookmakers' shops in the city.
  • "D.C. Thomson The Humourless Scottish Git" – created in retaliatiation after D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd threatened legal action over a variety of Viz spoofs based on characters from The Beano and The Dandy, including Biffa Bacon, Black Bag, "Roger the Lodger", "Wanker Watson", "Arsehole Kate" and many more. The title character was portrayed as a miserly Scotsman who goes about looking for breaches of copyright he can report, such as threatening to sue a woman who calls her son Dennis a "menace" in his earshot, and demanding that a pet shop owner removes an advertisement for "Three Bears for the Price of One" from the shop window. Not to be outdone, the Dandy responded by resurrecting an old strip The Jocks and the Geordies - representing the two companies on either side of the border. In the strip, the rival gangs of schoolboys are asked to produce a comic. The Jocks comic is the best, of course, but the underhand Geordies decide to copy them. Viz responded in kind by parodying Korky the Cat as "Korky the Twat" in the next issue.
  • Danny's District Council – a one-off story parodying General Jumbo of The Beano, in which a young boy commands his own electronic radio-controlled district council. The tiny robotic council workers are all lazy, corrupt and incompetent and eventually switch their allegiance to the villains.
  • Desert Island Desk – a dialogue-free strip about an office desk which has been marooned on a desert island; title refers to Desert Island Discs.
  • Desperately Unfunny Dan – parody of barrel-chested Desperate Dan who tries to hard too impress people with his superhuman feats of strength.
  • Doctor Poo – a spoof of Doctor Who depicting the title character unable to find a toilet in the whole of space-time.
  • Drunken Bakers – two alcoholic bakers, who, because of their affliction, hardly ever manage to bake anything.
  • Eminemis The Menace – starred in a one-off strip, a cross between Eminem and Dennis the Menace.
  • Eight Ace – an alcoholic who drinks "Ace" beer (eight cans for £1.49) and struggles to stay on the right side of his wife and many children as a consequence. Many of the strips involve Ace being entrusted with or somehow managing to acquire exactly £1.49 which he inevitably uses to buy "Eight Ace". Real name 'Octavius Tinsworth Ace'.
  • Elton John's... – a series of strips have the pop star portrayed as a petty scamster despite his enormous wealth, including Baccy Run, Dole Fiddle, Hooky Videos, Electrical Goods Scam, Bandit Beater, Lottery Syndicate Diddle and Roofing Racket. He is normally foiled by other celebrities, mostly his "enemies", i.e. David Bowie or "the surviving members of Queen".
  • Farmer Palmer – a paranoid farmer whose catch phrase is "Get orf moi laaaand!"
  • The Fat Slags – two enormous women (San and Tray) with huge appetites for sex and chips - starred in a spinoff cartoon and a live-action movie.
  • Felix and his Amazing Underpants – a boy with underpants which he believes have amazing powers. They are in fact simply bizarrely large underpants.
  • Ferdinand the Foodie – self-proclaimed culinary expert and restaurant critic.
  • Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres – a boy with a good ear for homophones (he's homophonic – Fnarr fnarr).
  • Fru T. Bunn – a "Master Baker" who makes his own sex dolls out of gingerbread.
  • Gilbert Ratchet – a boy who can invent anything, usually to solve people's bizarre "problems" as he comes across them. However, his inventions invariably cause far more problems of their own. Usually the entire premise of the strip turns out to be a highly contrived misunderstanding.
  • Goldfish Boy – a schoolboy who lives in a goldfish bowl.
  • Grassy Knollington – schoolboy conspiracy theorist.
  • "The Thieving Gypsy Bastards" – an infamous strip seemingly aimed to solely offend the Roma, about the "Mc O'Dougles", a group of Gypsies who descend on a middle-class front garden and steal and vandalise everything in sight, with the approval of the local council. Anticipating, no doubt, the inevitable flood of complaints about the strip, the publishers included a "compensatory" story entitled "The Good Honest Gypsies" in the same issue. Nevertheless, the complaints did come, and the next issue contained a 'cut-out-and-keep' apology, subtitled "what every gypsy's been waiting for!"
  • Ivan Jelical – an evangelistic fundamentalist Christian, whose proselytising is spectacularly unsuccessful. In one story he wastes hours attempting to convert the vicar, who already agrees with him. In another strip, he "comforts" a grieving widow with lurid descriptions of the "eternal punishment" her husband is supposedly now suffering.
  • Jack Black – a young amateur detective who gets people arrested for minor technical transgressions. Over time Jack has been increasingly portrayed as a racist and a xenophobe among other major faults.
  • Jellyhead – The girl with no brain. A one off superhero parody about a girl born with lime jelly instead of a brain. Jellyhead spends her entire time in this story in a catatonic state, yet still manages to foil an armed robbery.
  • Jimmy Hill – The bespectacled and bearded television sports presenter.
  • Joe Robinson Crusoe - a thinly disguised parody of flamboyant Newcastle pub and nightclub operater Joe Robertson.
  • Johnny Fartpants – a boy afflicted with extreme flatulence. Tagline: There's always a commotion in his trousers.
  • Kewl Chix – teenage girls who only care about their social life.
  • Lazy Disinterested 16 Year-Old Photo Shop Girl – a teenage girl who works in a local photo supply shop. She has a very unenthuiastic attitude, and is ignorant and unhelpful to her customers; preferring to file her nails, chew lots of bubblegum and text on her mobile phone for hours on end.
  • Laurie Driver – the schizophrenic long - distance driver of an articulated lorry, who murders female hitchhikers and dumps their bodies by the roadside.
  • Little Big Daddy – Schoolboy who seems to think he's 1970's wrestler Big Daddy.
  • Luvvie Darling – a melodramatic self-important actor who is always out of work.
  • Major Misunderstanding – an elderly, immaculately dressed reactionary who misunderstands everybody he meets, and consequently bewilders them with his right-wing rants.
  • Mickey's Miniature Grandpa – a senile old man, convinced that he's four inches tall.
  • Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped – a motorised scooter which uses simian semen as fuel.
  • Millie Tant – angry feminist.
  • The Modern Parents – and their long-suffering children.
  • Morris Day, Sexual Pervert. A bespectacled, jumper-wearing middle-aged man who is obsessed with pornography while his pretty wife waits for him in the bedroom.
  • Mr Logic – ("such is my name, therefore one may infer that this strip is in some way about me") a serious young man with no sympathy for other humans. Mr. Logic was inspired by Chris Donald's own brother, Steve, who was much later diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.
  • Mrs Brady the Old Lady – spends all her time exaggerating her age and complaining about the young people of today and how things were different in her day.
  • Nobby's Piles – about a character with incredibly bad haemorrhoids.
  • Norbert Colon – an old miser.
  • Outcast of the Pony Ballet School – a parody of the comic strips in the 1970s/1980s style of teenage girl's magazine such as Bunty and Jackie, in which Steve McFadden, for no apparent reason, attends a private school for girls where all his classmates are eleven or twelve years old
  • The Parkie – An extremely angry park keeper who abuses people that seem like they are breaking park rules, when in fact they are not - he even creates his own rules just so that he can abuse them.
  • The Pathetic Sharks– (sometimes called the Crap Sharks). An occasional strip featuring a group of sharks, much feared, not for their ferocity, but their mind-numbingly boring and pathetic behaviour and conversational style. Instead of hunting for prey, they ask people on the beach for crisps, ice cream and toffee, except for one shark who claims to be "lactose intolerant". Generally the strip consists of some sort of shipwreck or holiday-by-the-seaside theme; the initial apprehension at the sighting of shark fins turns into abject horror: "Oh no! Crap sharks!". In one strip a group of WWII shipwreck survivors blow themselves up with a hand grenade rather than face the Crap Sharks. "Crap Sharks" is a pun on the slang expression for a professional gambler specializing in the game of craps.
  • Paul Whicker, the tall vicar – A deliberately crudely-drawn cartoon of a misanthropic vicar
  • Playtime Fontayne – a middle aged bank manager who behaves like a primary school aged child. He made his first appearance in the comic along with his opposite "Little Old Man", a more short - lived character of a young boy who acts like the stereotype of an elderly man
  • Postman Plod "The Miserable Bastard" – a bad-tempered postman with a serious attitude problem
  • Raffles, Gentleman Thug – a late 19th century aristocrat who behaves like a stereotypical 21st century thug
  • "Randall and Diana (Deceased)" – a controversial one - off parody of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) with the late Diana, Princess of Wales taking the place of Hopkirk to become "the people's ghost private detective." She and Randall investigate into the claims of a man who believes his wife is having an affair, only to discover that the woman is in fact selling land mines to Africa; at which Diana promises "Dead or alive, I'm determined to put a stop to it." Naturally, the strip attracted a huge number of complaints.
  • Ravy Davey Gravy – a young man who breaks out into strange dances whenever he hears any kind of repetitive beat, including car alarms and road drills
  • Real Ale Twats – three rather pompous men who speak in an affected style and only drink real ale, even going so far as to keep extensive "reviews" of all the real ales that they have supped. A parody of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
  • Reverend Ramsden's Ringpiece Cathedral – a vicar with a church up his bottom
  • Roger Irrelevant ("He's Completely Hatstand") – a young man with a very strange mental problem where he continually produces irrelevant and surreal streams of language and behaviour
  • Roger Mellie ("The Man on the Telly") – a foul-mouthed and violent TV presenter, whose activities satirise real TV shows and incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Peter Cook
  • Rotating Chin Men A gang of flying villains with jetpacks whose intention is to spoil Queen Elizabeth II's coronation by spurting semen onto her via a pump squeeze mechanism linked to their revolving chins. Paraprhased quote by the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'I can't crown a queen with all jizz matted in her hair, it would be most unconsitutional'. The villains are foiled by the two child heros who hook one of the villain's rotating chin with the archbishop's crook, causing the mechanism to overheat and 'dribble jissolm all down his chin'.
  • Rude Kid - one frame strip where a young boy answers the most polite request with a rude word or phrase. This comic actually predates Viz, featuring in some of the proto-Viz fanzines created by Donald in the 1970s
  • Sherlock Homeless – A homeless parody of Sherlock Holmes. who solves crimes for the reward money - which is inevitably spent on Tennents Super.
  • Sherlock Homo – an outrageously gay version of Sherlock Holmes
  • Sid the Sexist – a young man with no sexual experience who boasts of his success with women. Starred in a spinoff cartoon
  • Simon Lotion, Time and Motion man – a hopeless male parent who insists his family reorganise every mundane household and leisure activity to fit his "professional", pedantic view of how the world should be run more efficiently. This always results in the complete failure of the proposed activity to meet any kind of performance or time constraint, with pathetic yet humorous consequences.
  • Skinheed;An early comic strip showing a young man with social problems turning into an unhuman monster. Was killed at the end of Skinheed Five but was turned into the unhuman monster.
  • Spawny Get – a boy whose initial apparent bad luck turns into incredible fortune
  • Spoilt Bastard – a fat, ungrateful boy who manipulates his weak-willed mother into satisfying his hollow and selfish desires, usually with serious health-threatening consequences for her.
  • Stan the Statistician – a nerd who tells everybody the probability of every event
  • Student Grant – a student at Fulchester University who is determined to be fashionably "right on" and a left-wing radical, though when things go wrong, it's always his "bourgeois" rich parents that bail him out. Very popular with students
  • Suicidal Syd – a manic depressive. He makes various unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. He usually cheers up, only to die in an accident immediately afterwards
  • S.W.A.N.T – a crack paramilitary police team with "Special Weapons and No Tactics" which parodies American SWAT teams
  • Tasha Slappa – originally Kappa Slappa, after the sportswear brand, but changed on "legal advice", a teenage girl who follows a stereotypical "chav" lifestyle, and lives at home with her irresponsible mother and drug-dealing older brother
  • Terry Fuckwitt – the stupidest boy ever
  • The Human League (In Outer Space) – 1980s pop band coming to the rescue in outer space...
  • Things, The – Bizarre aliens that were contrived into situations whereby the human participants could say things like "These things... (situation)..."
  • The Mcbrowntrouts – Scottish Family often getting up to toilet related humour. Comical twist on the twee strip the Broons.
  • Tina's Tits – A schoolgirl with unreasonably large bosoms. She is convinced that they possess magical powers, when they clearly do not
  • Tinribs – a badly constructed "robot"
  • Tommy "Banana" Johnson – an influential early strip since reprinted in different formats such as a 12" remix and an 'on ice' version
  • Tranny Magnet – a short, balding middle-aged bachelor who is irresistibly attractive to transsexuals and cross-dressers, although he desperately wants to find a non gender-variant woman
  • Victorian Dad – a father who applies strict Victorian values to himself and his family, even though they are living in the present. This also appeared during the Back to Basics campaign, and could be seen as a satirical commentary on it
  • Wanker Watson—a parody of the Winker Watson strip from The Dandy, set in a boys boarding school, following the antics of Watson and his pals, and their hapless nemesis, Mr Creep. This strip prompted litigation by Dandy owners, D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.
  • William's Pissed Wellingtons – a young boy and his alcoholic wellington boots. The name is a pun on the UK children's TV cartoon series William's Wish Wellingtons.
  • Yankee Dougal – an English kid who thinks he is American.
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