Tommy "Banana" Johnson
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Tommy "Banana" Johnson is a character in the adult comic Viz, who initially appeared in its first issue.
[edit] Overview
Tommy is a boy who, for some reason, has a four foot long banana. Other than being rather large, this banana has no special qualities. In the strip, during a walk in the local park, he first encounters a painter who is worried that approaching rainclouds will wash the paint off the fence he's been working on. Tommy suggests using his banana as a hair-dryer, but this only serves to annoy the painter. He then runs into a man who's lost his dog (who actually isn't that far away), and suggests that he uses the banana as a telescope. This gets the same reaction that he got off the painter. At the end of the strip, a police officer eventually finds a use for his banana by shoving it all the way up Tommy's bottom.
[edit] Influence
The strip is a clear prototype of the many popular strips that were to follow it in the comic; lampooning the often silly nature of UK children's comics, with added vulgarity and swearing. It proved so popular, it has also been re-used throughout the comic's history, including:
- Tommy "Banana" Johnson Extended Remix – the original strip multiply photocopied on top of itself to produce a stammering, almost unreadable effect, satirising the sampling craze in music at the time
- Tommy "Banana" Johnson - On Ice! – the strip redrawn but with everyone wearing ice-skating gear, and set on an ice rink
- At the time when the special edition of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was released (which was basically the original film with digitally enhanced), Viz decided to parody this with doing a digitally enhanced version of Tommy "Banana" Johnson in which the drawn banana was replaced with a scanned image of a banana.
The strip was also redrawn in lavish format, again with exactly the same series of events, for VIZ's silver anniversary.
