The Simple Things

About The Simple Things

Viz is a British adult humour comic magazine founded in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1979 by Chris Donald. Conceived as a parody of the post-war British children's comics The Beano and The Dandy, it combines satire, toilet humour and black comedy in strips that lampoon British life, celebrity culture and the pieties of the establishment. Published continuously since December 1979, with more than 350 issues to its name, it grew from a photocopied fanzine sold in Newcastle pubs into one of the best-selling magazines in Britain at its peak. Still published from Newcastle, it remains an active and much-loved fixture of British publishing.

Founding in Newcastle

Viz was created in 1979 by Chris Donald, then a young clerk working in Newcastle upon Tyne, together with his brother Simon Donald and friends including Jim Brownlow. The first issue was produced in Donald's bedroom, photocopied and stapled by hand, and sold for a few pence in local pubs. The name was chosen to suggest something visual, in the tradition of punchy British comic titles. From the start the comic aped the visual language of D.C. Thomson's children's comics, the panel layouts, the speech balloons, the cheerful mastheads, while filling them with gloriously inappropriate adult content. Early issues were crude in every sense, but they already displayed the comic's defining insight: that the innocent format of the British humour comic was the perfect vehicle for rude, anarchic satire.

Parodying The Beano and The Dandy

The genius of Viz lay in its choice of target. The Beano and The Dandy, published in Dundee by D.C. Thomson, had defined British childhood humour for generations with their mischievous schoolboys, hapless adults and moral comeuppances. Viz took that world and corrupted it. Where The Beano had Dennis the Menace, Viz had Biffa Bacon, a violent Geordie thug. Where children's comics offered wholesome adventure, Viz offered Billy the Fish, a half-man, half-fish goalkeeper, and Johnny Fartpants, a boy with uncontrollable flatulence. The parody worked on two levels: it was funny in its own right, and it was a knowing joke for adults who had grown up on the originals. The comic's lettering, its "top tips", its spoof advertisements and its profane versions of familiar comic tropes all reinforced the sense of a beloved institution turned gloriously upside down.

The classic characters

Over the decades Viz has created a cast of characters who have entered the British cultural lexicon. Sid the Sexist, a lecherous loser in a perpetual state of sexual frustration, became one of the comic's most famous creations. The Fat Slags, the coarse and sexually voracious Tracey and Sandra, co-created by Graham Dury, became household names. Roger Mellie, "the Man on the Telly", is a foul-mouthed, lecherous television presenter. Finbarr Saunders, with his double entendres, offers a masterclass in innuendo. Buster Gonad, possessor of comically enormous testicles, and the Drunken Bakers, two alcoholics forever seeking their next drink, exemplify the comic's commitment to taking a single joke to its absolute limit. Other favourites include the Parkie, a violent park keeper; 8 Ace, a war comic hero transported to the modern world; Spoilt Bastard, a grotesquely indulged child; and the Critics, who review culture from a position of magnificent ignorance.

The Chris Donald era

Chris Donald was the driving force behind Viz for its first two decades, serving as editor until 1999 and writing virtually all of the magazine's non-strip content himself for more than twenty years. Under his editorship, Viz grew from a local curiosity into a national phenomenon. Donald's memoir, Rude Kids: The Unfeasible Story of Viz, published in 2004, tells the story of the magazine's rise from the tatty rag produced in his Newcastle bedroom to one of the best-selling magazines in the UK, complete with encounters with celebrities, scrapes with the law and the surreal experience of mainstream success. His editorial voice, a kind of erudite Geordie misanthropy, shaped the comic's tone: the top tips, the "Lame to Fame" letters page and the viciously funny spoof news items were all Donald creations.

Commercial peak

At its commercial peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Viz was one of the biggest-selling magazines in Britain. According to the University of Bath, which in 2025 staged an exhibition drawing on the Graham Dury collection of original Viz artwork, the comic was selling more than 1.2 million copies a month at its height. National distribution through newsagents brought it to readers far beyond its North East heartland, and its annuals and spin-off books sold in huge numbers. The comic's success spawned imitators and briefly made adult humour comics a significant sector of the British magazine market. Few independent publications have ever achieved such commercial scale while retaining such complete editorial independence.

The Graham Dury era

After Chris Donald stepped down as editor in 1999, the magazine continued under new editorial leadership, and it is now edited by Graham Dury. Dury's association with Viz stretches back to his student days: he began contributing while studying for a doctorate in botany at Leicester, became the magazine's first full-time cartoonist in 1988, and later joined its editorial team. As well as co-creating The Fat Slags, he has drawn Roger Mellie, Biffa Bacon and Spoilt Bastard. His long tenure has provided continuity with the comic's founding spirit while keeping it responsive to contemporary targets. The editorial team remains based in Newcastle upon Tyne, preserving the comic's fierce regional identity.

Style and targets

Viz's humour is a deliberate assault on good taste, but it is also a precise instrument of satire. Its targets have always included the powerful and the pompous: politicians, celebrities, the media, the church, the police and the myriad petty tyrannies of British institutions. The comic's genius is to attack these targets not with righteous anger but with gleeful, surreal absurdity. Its parodies of newspaper formats, the "Viz" versions of broadsheet comment pages, reality television and social media trends, are often sharper than the journalism they mock. Beneath the toilet humour lies a consistent worldview: a suspicion of authority, a love of the underdog and a belief that pomposity deserves puncturing. The comic has always been an equal-opportunities offender, and its willingness to offend remains central to its appeal.

Publishing and continuity

Viz has been published continuously since December 1979, a remarkable run of more than 350 issues spanning over four and a half decades. In an era when countless magazines have folded or migrated online, Viz has remained resolutely a print product, sold through newsagents and by subscription. Its annuals, collecting the year's strips, remain popular Christmas sellers. The comic's website at viz.co.uk supports the print edition with subscriptions and merchandise. The longevity of the title is a testament both to the durability of its formula and to the loyalty of its readership, which spans generations of Britons who grew up reading it and have passed it on.

Cultural impact

Viz's influence on British culture extends well beyond its sales figures. Its characters and catchphrases have entered everyday language. Its house style, the deadpan spoof, the absurd top tip, the mock-serious parody, has been imitated across comedy and journalism. The comic provided an early platform for writers and artists who went on to wider careers, and it demonstrated that independent publishing could challenge the might of the established press. In 2025 the University of Bath's exhibition of Graham Dury's original artwork, including layout sheets, sketches and scripts alongside finished drawings, treated Viz as a subject worthy of serious academic attention, a recognition of its place in the history of British satire alongside the Georgian caricaturists with whom it was exhibited.

Legacy

More than 45 years after its first photocopied issue, Viz endures as a singular achievement in British publishing: a fiercely independent, regionally rooted comic that conquered the national market without compromising its vision. It remains what it has always been, a rude, funny, brilliantly executed parody of Britain itself, produced in Newcastle and read everywhere. In a media landscape increasingly dominated by global platforms, Viz's continued existence as a print comic, edited in the North East and devoted to the fine art of taking the mickey, is both an anachronism and a triumph. Long may it continue to offend.