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’).