Talking Haiti triumphantly

A test for you. Viz, the comic now an improbable quarter of a century old, once ran a strip called ‘Harold and Fred’. It was the sort of thing you will remember from the days of Dandy and Beano, little characters running around and falling over, all with the three expressions of thoughtfulness, joy and shock. Except these faces were already familiar, not from films or television, but from the front pages of the tabloids. The strip had a subtitle, ‘They Make Ladies Dead’, and Harold and Fred, living next door to each other, were Dr Harold Shipman and Fred West.

In the first of the four frames reproduced in 25 Years of Viz, Fred, looking thoughtful, sees a woman moving into the empty house across the street. In the second he springs into action, roaring with laughter, Black & Decker in hand (‘I’ll just nip across and murder her with me drill’). Only he slips on some pills spilled on the ground (‘Corks!’), and is overtaken by his bearded neighbour (‘I’ll murder the new lady over the road, ta very much’). Now how does that leave you ? Amused, baffled or simply stunned?

Viz, with its two clubbing Fat Tarts capable of copulating and eating chips at the same time, and its foul-mouthed, self-important celeb Roger Mellie (‘The Man on the Tele’), could skewer the odd contemporary horror. But the main appeal to its millions of readers (at one point its circulation rivalled that of Radio Times) was the way its young creators, clinging to childhood, had raised two fingers to the whole adult world. Set against the certainties of comics and train-spotting (the latter being the passion of its creator, Chris Donald), the adult world was seen as grubby, unreal and absurd. Sex was grubby, unreal and absurd, as was celebrity, and, in its turn, mass murder.