The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I was relaxing on Sunday.   I was sort of grazing, picking up the newspaper, looking through a magazine, reading a comic, and I found myself dipping in and out of Dez Skinn’s book Comix, The Underground Revolution (2004, Chrysalis Book Group), again.  I do this a lot with this sort of book.  I read it first from cover to cover, but because this sort of book is kind of like the Guinness Book of Records, but for comics, you can keep going back to it to refresh your memory about an event (literally a gift that keeps on giving).

I have to admit, I found it tough going wading through the smallish section on the UK Underground revolution.  It struck me, reading it, that the history of Britain’s most significant independent comics is becoming more difficult to analyse from our present position.  This is because the work that someone is creating today makes each tiny step they took along the way look significant, so publications that really didn’t, appear to have played a more significant role in the history and development of comics than they really did.  It also means that the narrative becomes more complex as chronological leaps appear between publication dates as artist X, or writer Y, appears in this publication and later, in that one.  For instance, is Electric Soup really a significant publication because Frank (Vincent Deighan) Quitely drew The Best of the West… for it, on his way to create his stellar works for Marvel and DC comics?  Frank’s work apart, arguably, Electric Soup would never even have existed without Viz Comic leading the way.

The tendency is, of course, to regard publications like Viz, and like 2000AD, and even the highly influential Near Myths and Warrior, which Dez Skinn himself edited, as ‘ground-level’ publications, a sort of bridge between the underground and the mainstream, rather than underground, and so therefore, less than ‘revolutionary’.  In this way these comics fall somewhere between the history of British underground comics, and the history of Britain’s mainstream comics, and yet anyone who grew up reading Whizzer and Chips and then happened one day to get a hold of Viz Comic or 2000AD or Warrior, certainly knew that Whizzer and Chips was mainstream, and what they were reading was not – regardless of whether or not the work was published or distributed by a mainstream publisher.  I mean, is Zippy the Clown no longer underground because it is distributed by a major US syndicate, and is Ghost World an indy publication in Eightball and an indy publication as a Fantagraphics anthology, but a mainstream graphic novel as a Jonathan Cape book?  Given that Viz was, initially at least, put together in a bedroom, photocopied, and distributed by hand, it’s hard to see how it could be described as anything other than an underground comic.  The problem seems to be that it became too successful, and in many people’s minds that means mainstream, even though very, very, few mainstream comics, in fact none, ever sold the 1.2 million copies that a single issue of Viz did.

So anyway, there I was working myself into a lather over this, and I kid you not, within minutes, I found myself on The Times online reading Tim Harrison’s article on Viz, from The Times, July 15, 2008;  Viz:  My Part in the Rise of a Canny Comic.  In the article, Tim Harrison talks about his first-edition copy of Viz #1, which is expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £1,000, at Sotheby’s, any day now.  In the piece, Harrison, who once went by the very grand title of ‘Viz’s Southern Regional Chief Editorial Representative Reporter (Articles)’, looks back on the early days of the Newcastle magazine and he mentions something that sounds very familiar to me:

“I’d never answered a small ad in Private Eye before, and I’ve never answered one since. But there was something beguiling about the one that I spotted in May 1979. It read: Bogus correspondant [sic] seeks similar. C. Donald, 2 Lily Crescent, Jesmond, Newcastle 2.”

You see, that’s also the reason why I have the copy of Viz # 12 that you see above.  I also got in touch with the Donald brothers when they were advertising, in Private Eye again, for cartoonists, in 1984.  And I have to tell you, when I opened my little A4 envelope, removed the cover letter from The House of Viz, and read the first Viz Comic I had ever seen, I was helpless with laughter.  I had never read anything so funny.  In fact it made such an impact on me I phoned the creators immediately to congratulate them, and the wear and tear on the comic above happened within weeks of its arrival as I showed it to every one I knew.

Of course Viz worked a little like the London gig by Iggy Pop that inspired everyone who saw it to form a band, and over the next 10 to 15 years the Viz-like publications, including Electric Soup, started to appear.   What didn’t appear though was the comic that Viz almost inspired, Squelch.  In 1985, years before the IPC-friendly version of Viz, Oink, saw the light of day, then IPC comic artist Tom Paterson and I got as far as creating a mock-up copy of our own publication, but the cost of web-offset production was prohibitive.  There was, I’m afraid, no POD and no digital machines and no short print-runs back then, so our comic never quite got off the drawing board.  Years later, one of the characters Tom created for Squelch, The Wet Blanket, had an outing in Oink – the tamest attempt at an underground hybrid ever published.

Of course if Viz #1 goes for more than expected then my comic will also be worth more than it presently is – not that I’m ever going to sell it, you understand.

Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.