List of Viz comic strips

Following is a list of recurring or notable one-off strips from the British adult spoof comic magazine Viz:

A - E

• Acker Bilk – (See Jimmy Hill).
• Afternoon tea with Mr Kiplin – a strip about Mr Kiplin (a parody of cake manufacturer Mr Kipling) inviting someone over for tea but because he eats so much cake, he eventually vomits for the whole night.
• Alcan Foil Wrapped Pork Stock Warrior – a young boy who becomes a "superhero" (in reality, completely useless) with the aid of tinfoil and pork stock.
• Aldridge Prior – a pathological liar whose lies are ludicrous, such as The Nolan Sisters living in his fridge. Prior is instantly recognizable for his retro dress sense, usually a tartan jacket with a sheepskin collar and a pair of uncomfortable-looking platform shoes.
• Alexander Graham Bell-End – a crazy inventor who continually rubs his penis on things and then tricks his assistant into touching them with his hands or mouth, at which point Alexander laughs uproariously whilst exclaiming "I TOTALLY rubbed my bell end on that!"
• Anna Reksik – a model who repeatedly vomits in order to keep her thin shape. In most strips Anna unwittingly eats something that causes her to instantly put on an unrealistically huge amount of weight. She also has a friend named Belle Emia, a fellow model who encourages her to starve herself in order to lose weight. She has attracted press controversy because of the strip's portrayal of eating disorders and cocaine addiction.
• Arse Farm – A strip about a farmer who cultivates human buttocks on his land.
• Arsehole Kate – One-off parody of Keyhole Kate in which Kate instead likes to look up people's bottoms.
• Auntie Cockwise – An old lady who can tell the size of a man's penis just by looking at him; much to the amusement of her little nephew.
• Badly Drawn Man – a poorly drawn character.
• Badly Overdrawn Boy – a parody of the pop singer Badly Drawn Boy, who is seen busking outside his local bank because he's broke.
• Balsa Boy – a take on Pinocchio, in which a lonely old pensioner makes a "son" from balsa wood. The strip ends with the old man being sent to a mental institution after burning down the house while trying to dry off Balsa Boy in front of the fire, but by the last frame he is busy working on making another "boy" out of scones.
• Barbara Cartland's ... – a strip in which Barbara Cartland pays a visit somewhere (such as a farmyard or barber salon) and ends up inadvertently foiling criminals.
• Barney Brimstone's Biscuit Tin Circus – a boy who owns a miniature circus inside a biscuit tin.
• Barry the Cat – a one-off parody of The Beano's acrobatic crimefighter Billy the Cat. Unlike his Beano equivalent, Barry is incompetent, hopelessly uncoordinated, and is immediately recognised despite his "cat-suit" disguise. The final panel shows him in hospital, suffering from multiple injuries, being told that he has acted "very foolishly".
• Bart Conrad – a store detective who takes his job far too seriously.
• Baxter Basics – an extremely amoral and sexually deviant Conservative (and later Labour) MP who first appeared at around the same time as John Major's Back to Basics campaign, and a transparent statement on the hypocrisy of politicians. Drawn by Simon Thorp.^[1]
• Becky Thump – a girl from the North of England who hates southerners so much she even assaults a supermarket delivery man for bringing her southern fried chicken.
• Ben and the SpaceWalrus a one-off strip centred on a fat kid named Ben who finds a SpaceWalrus and eats his Dog Bunny.
• Bertie Blunt (His Parrot's A Cunt) – a boy who owns an extremely violent, foul mouthed parrot that insults everyone and encourages him to commit suicide. When the parrot kills Bertie's grandmother, who leaves them all her money, Bertie fights back by spending his inheritance on a microwave oven which he then uses to cook the parrot alive. Chris Donald, creator of Viz, has said that in the early days of the magazine he would not permit the "c word" to be used, until an outside artist (Sean Agnew) sent him this strip which he found to be so good he decided to use it anyway.
• Biffa Bacon – Biffa (shortened from Bifferidge) and his family—Mutha and Fatha (real names Vermintrude (née Haystacks) and Billy or Basha Bacon) —hail from the Tyneside region of North East England and speak in the Geordie dialect. Biffa is constantly subjected to abuse by his parents - even being kicked in the groin by both of them. Biffa appears to be a visual parody of the character Bully Beef from The Dandy. His mother, who is rough-looking and masculine bears a striking resemblance to Desperate Dan. The characters were allegedly inspired by a real family observed by Viz editor Chris Donald in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne city centre, where the son began an unprovoked assault on another boy; the parents, rather than intervening, began shouting encouragement to their child. As soon as it appeared the victim of the assault was able to defend himself the father joined in the attack that only ceased when police officers intervened. Some characters who have extended the Bacon family include Biffa's new baby brother Basha, a dog called Knacka (a pun of Dennis The Menace's dog Gnasher and the slang word knacker). Biffa's uncle Dekka, Biffa's grandfather (on his fathers side) who is bald and, also Biffa's grandma.
• Big Fuckin' Dave – a rather burly and mentally unstable man who beats people up for being 'queeahs' because he believes they're only drinking half a pint of beer or smoking less than full strength cigarettes. Usually egged on by his much smaller, troublemaking friend.
• Big Vern – a man who believes he's an East End gangster. Almost every strip follows the same story, in which Vern and his friend Ernie will begin an ordinary activity but with Vern convinced they're actually committing a criminal 'job', believing Ernie's protests that they aren't is just a cover story. At some point, a person will make an innocent remark which makes Vern shoot the person in the head believing he's the police (while shouting something along the lines of "No bastard copper's gonna take me alive!" or "Get dahn, Ernie, he's going for his piece!") before then shooting Ernie (sometimes believing Ernie 'grassed' him up, while other times doing it to save him from prison) and finally himself. The shootings are always shown in an extremely graphic fashion, but despite this both are always resurrected for the next issue. Vern's second name is Dakin, a reference to the notably violent 1971 British crime thriller Villain, whose anti-hero (played by Richard Burton) is named Vic Dakin.
• Bicycle Bellend – a man berating drivers for 'showing him disrespect' even though he is actually the dangerous road user (often not looking and causing accidents, and at one point he rides the wrong way up a one-way street), getting his comeuppance when he tells off a burly driver who subsequently beats him up.
• Billy Bottom – a literal toilet humour strip, based around a man and his attempts to defecate whilst various factors and circumstances conspire to prevent him from doing so. The first strip carried a spoof certificate of the type given to films by the BBFC, classifying the strip as "puerile". Conceived by Tom Bambridge.
• Billy Britain – a right-wing ultra-nationalist resembling Enoch Powell who appeared in two very early strips. Chris Donald considers him an early prototype of Major Misunderstanding. He also made a one-off reappearance in the September 2002 issue satirising the issue of asylum seekers, where after he spends the strip making several futile attempts to round up illegal immigrants the local authorities turn his home into a detention centre for refugees.
• Billy the Fish – half man, half fish, he is a star footballer despite being drawn with no legs (he does apparently own a pair of football boots, but it is not clear why). He is a satire on, or homage to, the popular football comics of the 1960s and 1970s such as Roy of the Rovers, and also satirises topical football incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Harry Enfield. According to Viz cartoonist Graham Drury, "half the readers thought [the strip] was shit, and the other half thought it was really shit." Undaunted, Viz cheerfully called one instalment "Billy the Shit".
• Billy No-Mates – a miserable, asocial teenage boy who spends most of his time alone in his dark room playing video games. If anyone disturbs him he becomes extremely irritated. He also has an obsession with masturbating, collecting large amounts of pornographic magazines and calling sex hotlines.
• Billy Quiz – a man who constantly acts like a game show host in everyday situations.
• Bipolar Bear – a polar bear who suffers from severe bipolar disorder.
• Biscuits Alive! – some biscuits that mysteriously come to life to help their boy owner out of some trivial problem.
• Black Bag – "The faithful border bin liner". A black bin liner which lives the exciting life of a sheepdog; a parody of The Dandy's Black Bob and the anthropomorphism of animals. Black Bag was drawn by Graham Murdoch, under the pen name of Snoddy (his cat). Black Bag rescued Brotherhood of Man from a well.
• Bo and Luke Brummell – A parody of The Dukes of Hazzard in which the two main characters are Regency-era dandies.
• Bodley Basin – "He's On The Square". The adventures of a "strict Freemason". This one-off strip ended with the apparent murder of the cartoonist.
• The Bottom Inspectors – based on the ticket inspectors of the Newcastle Metro system (Chris Donald in a Picture of Tyneside, BBC 4, June 2005). The Bottom Inspectors were also influenced by a single editorial comment made by John Brown, the original publisher of Viz Comic: "The only editorial comment I ever made", explains Brown, "was in the early days, when I told Chris that I thought one issue was particularly 'bottomy'. He didn't say much at the time, but The Bottom Inspectors appeared for the first time in the next issue." The Guardian The OBI is in that sense a light-hearted sardonic embodiment of editorial interference with independent creativity.
• Boy Scouse – gang of delinquent schoolboys from Liverpool who earn Boy Scout badges for mugging pensioners, spraying graffiti and other such antisocial activities. MP Louise Ellman complained that it set a bad example and petitioned to have it banned.^[2][3]
• Brown Bottle – a reporter (sometimes a bank clerk) who thinks he becomes a superhero when he is drunk on Newcastle Brown Ale. In reality, all that happens is that he becomes viciously drunk and passes out, but the twist in the story is that he manages to save the day anyway, by sheer accident. The character is based on Davey Graham, a musician friend of Chris Donald's, who made a similar transformation under the influence.^[4] Brown Bottle's enemy Ciderwoman (a "supervillain" who gets her powers from drinking cider) appeared in this strip and her own occasional strips in the magazine.
• Busted – who, until they disbanded in 2005, occasionally appeared in strips (as well as spoof interviews and other features in the magazine) portraying them as pyromaniacs/arsonists who would set anything on fire "for a laugh". James Bourne would always be referred to by the wrong name, making fun of his status as the "least famous" of the group.
• Rat Boy is a fictional character in the British adult comic Viz. He is sometimes referred to as "Doll".
• Rat Boy is an extreme caricature of the juvenile delinquent and criminal underclass, who lives by theft, has a strong drug habit and defies the law as openly as his youth allows. Originally introduced as the younger half-brother of Tasha Slappa, Rat Boy's age is variable from under twelve to mid teens. He always wears a track suit and goes barefoot in all weathers; his appearance is deliberately rat-like, with huge ears, a long nose, protruding front teeth and a scampering gait. He displays his irreverence by defecating everywhere, especially in the properties which he burgles, and is drawn with a permanent turd protruding from his behind, like the tail of his animal namesake. It is, in fact, a point of pride for Rat Boy to always befoul his crime scenes.^[5] The sheer volume of excrement he generates is absurdly unrealistic, which sends up an urban myth.
• The inspiration of his character is from that of the real life career criminal, Tommy Laws, who is nicknamed Spiderboy by the police and the media due to his habitual climbing onto roofs and high places in order to evade capture.
• His dialogue normally consists of northern English slang and constant profanity, with long offensive tirades often shouted at his victims or the police; sometimes, however, he shows himself to be highly intelligent and articulate, such as when making confessions and implicating others.
• Most of his adventures involve breaking and entering, vandalising a place and taking anything of value, then usually either evading the law, or getting off very lightly because he is a child. When arrested at one house which he ransacked he is sent on a "self-esteem building for young offenders" programme, which turns out to be a holiday in Spain.^[5] After another crime spree, he is put on trial by remote TV link to a detention cell (intended to be less traumatic than a courtroom trial); the kindly judge allows him to go free, whilst Rat Boy has already escaped through a sewer, somehow taking the TV with him, and is busy selling it as a stolen good. He was once subject to house arrest, enforced by electronic tagging on his ankle - unable to remove the tag, he gnaws his own leg off and hops outside to quickly rob several more houses.^[6] (Needless to say, his loss of limb is forgotten in subsequent comics). He even once managed to steal the Crown Jewels.^[7]
• The primary motive for Rat Boy's constant burglary and thieving is to acquire money for buying drugs, such as cannabis, crack and even heroin, or strong drink. On one occasion, he resorted to carol-singing to feed his habit;^[8] another issue has him grassed up for attempting to buy cocaine, then framed, beaten and imprisoned by the police when they found him without any - in his prison cell, he injects the heroin used to frame him and seems content.^[9] In yet another issue, burning and inhaling a huge lump of cannabis fails to affect him at all, since he had become immune to the drug after years of abuse. He proceeds to steal an old cruise ship used as a floating nightclub off the Newcastle coast and abandon it (burnt-out and balanced on bricks, like a stolen car) in Amsterdam, where he gets arrested for seeking drugs and underage sex. His punishment, ironically, is to be used as a lab rat in a drugs testing clinic, which he finds delightful....^[10]
• The supporting cast in the Rat Boy comic strip often includes other young criminals who look like him, his mother 'Mam', plus his sister Tasha, her violent boyfriend Bobba, and various drug dealers. Exceptionally, he was once seen to have a permanent girlfriend and a brood of children, even more rodent-like than himself.
• Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles – a boy who somehow manages to always solve people's problems with his ridiculously large testicles.
• Camberwick Greggs – a very bleak parody of Camberwick Green, where Mickey Murphy the baker is driven out of business after a branch of Greggs opens across the road.
• Captain Morgan and his Hammond Organ – a pirate who sails round the Caribbean inviting people to sing along with him as he plays a Hammond organ. His character was cut when legal action was threatened over the copyright of some of the songs; according to creator Chris Donald in his book, he did not think that making the character sing royalty-free hymns or nursery rhymes would have quite the same comedic effect.
• Captain Captured – the man who's constantly caught. At the start of each strip, Captain Captured would get captured in a mysterious Bond-villain like fashion. He would then escape only to get captured again, and again, and again...
• Captain Oats – a one-off strip lampooning the real Antarctic explorer Captain Lawrence Oates. An explorer obsessed with pornography and masturbation, he is depicted skiing across the icy wastes, dragging a wardrobe upon which is hidden his stash of pornographic magazines. However, his efforts to masturbate are continually frustrated by the presence of his companions.
• Colin the Amiable crocodile strips centred on a small crocodile named Colin. In one strip he was shot by a birdwatcher because he said "hello" to the man. The character also appeared later on front covers of other issues, such as with a skinhead who tells people to buy the comic or he shoots the croc.
• Christ on a Bender – a strip which depicts Jesus as a family man who keeps trying to escape the house to get "crucified" with his friends but is thwarted at every turn by his wife forcing him to stay home with her and look after their children.
• Christ on a Bike – a strip which depicts Jesus's life riding a magical bicycle. Pontius Pilate has him crucified due to jealousy since Pilate only has a girl's bike.
• The Critics – pretentious and shallow high-culture critics who lampoon the perceived elitism of the "chattering classes". They work for The Sunday Chronicle, though they have done freelance work with the BBC and Channel 4, writing elitist and sometimes sycophantic articles on contemporary art. The artists they admire are all fictional, but are clearly inspired by real-life artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. A frequent plot device involves Natasha and Crispin mistaking some everyday object - like a fire extinguisher, puddle of vomit or even some public toilets - as a piece of modern art. In other episodes, they don't grasp the concept of art at all. They once received a booby-prize at the Critics Awards for bringing the reputation of critics into disrepute for writing a review that was not only positive but actually made sense.
• Cockney Wanker – a swaggering, bigoted Londoner who speaks in rhyming slang. The character is based on actor Mike Reid. He wears lots of cheap gold jewellery or Argos bling and East End gangster dark glasses, and is often seen smoking a cigar. Wanker's speciality is the buying and selling of cars, often buying one, selling it back to the same person at the same price and then waving his wad of cash declaring the transaction to have been "a nice little earner". His name, as it contains an obscenity, is "spoonerised" whenever featured on the front page of an issue of Viz, as it would be easily read by children who are otherwise not entitled to buy the magazine. Hence he becomes "Wockney Canker".
• Cop Her Knickers – an elderly woman's dealings with the gang of policemen who are constantly, and inexplicably, trying to steal her underwear.
• Copper Kettle - quoted as "The PC who loves his PG" (PG meaning tea brand PG Tips), the strip follows the life of the policeman and his futile attempts to obtain some tea—his favourite beverage—while on his beat.
• Crap Jokes – a diverse range of verbal and visual puns or one-liners, usually deliberately corny or old-fashioned. The best known of the Crap Jokes are seemingly endless "Doctor, Doctor" gags, with the reader's sympathy drawn to the endlessly hapless straightman Doctor.
• Daley Starr – a schoolboy aspiring to be a journalist, who turns his family's and classmates' misfortunes into exaggerated "scoops"
• Danny's District Council – a one-off story parodying General Jumbo of The Beano, in which a young boy commands his own electronic radio-controlled district council. The tiny robotic council workers are all lazy, corrupt and incompetent and eventually switch their allegiance to the villains. The comic occasionally features other parodies of General Jumbo, including "Jimbo Jumbo's Robo Jobos", "Oliver's Army" and "Drill-Sergeant Jumbo".
• Darren Dice - a young man who is obsessed with gambling. Sadly, he often chooses to gamble with the wrong crowd. The character is allegedly based on, and bears a remarkable resemblance to, retired Scottish footballer Darren Jackson. Jackson spent a couple of seasons at Newcastle United in the late 1980s and became a familiar face in bookmakers' shops in the city.
• D.C. Thompson The Humourless Scottish Git – created in retaliation after D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd threatened legal action over a variety of Viz spoofs based on characters from The Beano and The Dandy, including Biffa Bacon, Black Bag, "Roger the Lodger", "Wanker Watson", "Arsehole Kate" and many more. The title character was portrayed as a miserly Scotsman who goes about looking for breaches of copyright he can report, such as threatening to sue a woman who calls her son Dennis a "menace" in his earshot, and demanding that a pet shop owner removes an advertisement for "Three Bears for the Price of One" from the shop window. Not to be outdone, The Dandy responded by resurrecting an old strip The Jocks and the Geordies—representing the Scottish-based DC Thomson and Newcastle upon Tyne-based Viz. In the strip, the rival gangs of schoolboys are asked to produce a comic. The Jocks comic is the best, of course, but the underhand Geordies decide to copy them. Viz responded in kind by parodying Korky the Cat as "Corky the Twat" in the next issue.
• Desert Island Desk – a dialogue-free strip about an office desk which has been marooned on a desert island; title refers to Desert Island Discs and the Topper comic story Desert Island Dick.
• Desert Island Teacher – a teacher stranded on a windswept rock. He has decided that "once a teacher, always a teacher", and inflicts monotonous lectures on the seagulls and molluscs. A major feature of the strip is that he never actually says anything of any academic value, but instead spends all his time saying things like "Face the front" and "I will not start until I have absolute quiet". He is rescued by a navy search and rescue team, only to admonish them as if a delinquent pupil, saying: "You think you're so clever, being able to fly a helicopter, but it's not going to help you in the real world." The rescue crew throw him off the helicopter for insulting them.
• Desperately Unfunny Dan – parody of barrel-chested Desperate Dan who tries too hard to amuse people with his superhuman feats of strength.
• Dickie Beasley' – a schoolboy who wants to be an ad executive. His attempts to advertise or improve something menial (e.g. a church jumble sale) fails because he puts too much thought and planning into it (treating as something more complex).
• Doctor Poo – a spoof of Doctor Who depicting the title character, utterly desperate to move his bowels, unable to find a toilet in the whole of space-time.
• Doctor Sex – "He has the power of all sex."
• Drill-Sergeant Jumbo – one of several parodies of "General Jumbo" of The Beano. Young Jumbo Williams commands his own miniature platoon of electronic soldiers, but is so busy verbally abusing them that he ignores all requests for help from the emergency services.
• Driving Mr Beckham – a spoof of Beezer and (later) Beano comic strip "The Numskulls" in which we see the inner thought processes - or lack thereof - of David Beckham.
• Drunken Bakers – two alcoholic bakers, who, because of their affliction, hardly ever manage to bake anything.
• Eight Ace – an alcoholic who drinks "Ace" beer (eight cans for £1.49) and struggles to stay on the right side of his wife and many children as a consequence. Many of the strips involve Ace being entrusted with or somehow managing to acquire exactly £1.49 which he inevitably uses to buy "Eight Ace". His real name has been mentioned as "Octavius Federidge Tinsworthy Ace", the "Federidge" in his name being derived from the now-defunct Federation Brewery which brewed "Ace" lager.
• Elton John's... – a series of strips have the pop star portrayed as a petty scamster. The strips typically open with John engaged in a stereotypical celebrity activity like launching a new album, being interviewed for a celebrity magazine, or partying with fellow A-listers. But they soon descend into the surreal when, despite his enormous wealth and fame, John embarks on a small-scale con to make trivial amounts of cash. Scams include Baccy Run, Dole Fiddle, Hooky Videos, Electrical Goods Scam, Bandit Beater, Lottery Syndicate Diddle (consisting of himself, Bono, Phil Collins and Paul McCartney), Roofing Racket, Marked Note Con, Window Cleaning Scam and Compen Con. At the end of each strip John, having been rumbled through bad luck or incompetence, is normally shown to have been beaten at his own game by other celebrities, mostly his "enemies", i.e. David Bowie, The Bee Gees, Rod Stewart or "the surviving members of Queen", who are shown launching more successful small-scale scams of their own.
• Eminemis The Menace – starred in a one-off strip, a cross between Eminem and Dennis the Menace.
• Eric Daft – (His IQ is less than 2) – An early Terry Fuckwitt prototype.

F - J

• Farmer Palmer – a paranoid, money-grabbing farmer with an inbred son whose catch phrase is "Get orf moi laaaand!". He frequently berates and physically threatens (usually with a double-barrelled shotgun) innocent members of the public for encroaching on his property, yet he hypocritically treats the countryside with complete disdain. He has a habit of shooting every dog he sees with a shotgun, claiming "'Ee wuz worrying moi sheep." In one extreme example, the dog's owner claimed his dog was on public property and thus well within its right to be there. Farmer Palmer then had his son Jethro transport the dog to his own farm with a tractor, to get an excuse to shoot it.
• Farting Dilemmas with Archie McBlarter – a man who, as the title suggests, suffers from extreme flatulence that causes those around him to become sick or unconscious.
• Father McFiddly – "He Loves Diddling Kiddies" about the wacky antics of a priest trying to peek up the altar-boys' cassocks, etc. A skit on the Catholic sex abuse cases scandal.
• The Fat Slags – two enormous and tarty women living in Mansfield, San (Sandra Burke) and Tray (Tracey Tunstall), with huge appetites for both sex and food. Starred in a spinoff cartoon and a live-action movie.
• Fat Sod – a one-off greedy character who steals a large pie from the windowsill of one Farmer Palmer (possibly the same character described above, despite physical dissimilarity), only to be ruthlessly shot dead and baked in a pie by Palmer, who hides inside the false pie initially stolen to do so.
• Father Christmas – a man so obsessed with Christmas he believes that it is the festive season in the middle of August.
• Fatty and Skinny, Susannah and Trinny – A strip portraying Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall as school bullies who ridicule classmates for their unfashionable clothes, only to end each cartoon forced to wear a horrendously uncomfortable outfit for detention or gym class. This strip prompted legal action from Woodall and Constantine themselves.
• Felix and his Amazing Underpants – a boy with underpants which he believes have amazing powers. They are in fact completely ordinary, albeit being a bizarrely large size. Occasionally, he manages to do good deeds with his underwear in order to help out someone in need, for example, using his underpants as a container for a French salesman's onions. The comic strip was created by editor Chris Donald, but is now drawn by Lew Stringer.
• Ferdinand the Foodie – self-proclaimed culinary expert and restaurant critic.
• Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres – a boy with a good ear for homophones. The strip almost always revolves around his liaisons with his neighbour, Mr Gimlet, whose manner of speech is always interpreted by Finbarr as graphically sexual in nature (in fact, it is deliberately scripted this way), usually when Gimlet is reminiscing about everyday situations with Saunder's mother. However, at the end of each strip, Mr Gimlet and Finbarr's mother invariably do end up having sex and make blatantly obvious verbal references to their doing so, but Finbarr interprets these as being nothing untoward. Finbarr's creator, Simon Thorp, described the character as a cross between a small boy and Sid Boggle (Sid James) from Carry On Camping. He is sometimes visited by his mother's Russian friend, Sergei whose English pronunciation is very bad, which results in his sentences being corrupted in often lewd ways (for instance, "Your mother wants me to fetch her aerosol" becomes "Your mother wants me to felch her arsehole").
• Friar Fuck – a monk with Tourette syndrome.
• Frankenstein's Cock – a parody of Frankenstein in which the scientist has created a giant, sentient penis which comes to life and is hunted through the town by a torch-wielding mob. Prompted follow-ups and sequels in the comic including "Frankenstein's Turd" and "Frankenstein's Cock Must Be Destroyed".
• Fru T. Bunn – a "Master Baker" who makes his own sex dolls out of gingerbread and then attempts to have sex with them.
• Garry and Barry the Identical Twins – a boy convinced that a tree in his garden is actually his identical twin brother.
• George Best is a Cinema Pest – a one-off strip featuring [George Best prematurely disclosing the final twists of notable movies such as The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects to incensed cinema goers.
• George Bestial – a George Best lookalike who, as his name implies, enjoys committing bestiality. After the death of the real Best, the strip was redesigned so that it became longer (full-page), the title character looks less like Best, and his zoophilia is merely the most obvious symptom of his clearly very disturbed mind.
• Gilbert Ratchet – a boy who can invent anything, usually to solve people's bizarre "problems" as he comes across them. However, his inventions invariably cause far more problems of their own. Usually the entire premise of the strip turns out to be a highly contrived misunderstanding. Gilbert's creator, Davey Jones, describes the character as "like (the Dandy's) Screwy Driver—only with more genital mutilation of vicars".
• Goldfish Boy – a schoolboy who lives in a goldfish bowl.
• Grassy Knollington – schoolboy conspiracy theorist who would spend every strip putting together and explaining complicated and outlandish theories behind certain events (such as 9/11 and the death of Diana) often to the exasperation of his friends. Typically at the end of every strip Grassy would be killed by the secret service, hinting that he was actually correct.
• Harold and Fred - they make ladies dead! – A one-off strip in which serial killers Harold Shipman and Fred West compete to be the first to murder a new female neighbour; only to discover that she is actually Ed Gein wearing the skin of one of his victims. This strip created controversy in the media, including complaints from the families of some of Shipman's victims.
• Helpful Herbert – A boy whose good deeds always land him in big trouble.
• Hector the collector and his metal detector – strips about a boy named Hector who finds big and small things with his metal detector. In one strip he found a key that according to a passing rich man opened up a key to a chest with gold inside and gave him £500. The character later returned in the 30th edition comic.
• Hen Cabin – A takeaway run by two scruffy, dishonest men.
• Hugh Phemism – is unable to communicate in anything other than circumlocutory language, leading to predictable misunderstandings.
• Ivan Jelical – an evangelistic fundamentalist Christian, whose proselytising is spectacularly unsuccessful.
• Ivor the Skiver – his dad's a bad driver. One-off strip in which a boy begs his father for a lift as he is too lazy to walk to school. Due to Ivor's dad having poor road sense, they are involved in a crash and end up seriously injured in the hospital, where they are reminded that it was Saturday and Ivor didn't have to go to school anyway.
• Jack Black and his dog Silver – a young amateur detective staying with his Aunt Meg on an eternal school holiday. Often gets well-meaning people, who have done nothing wrong, arrested (or worse) on a minor technicality or obscure law for his own benefit. The first strip was apparently "traced by Chris Donald", according to fellow Viz cartoonist Davey Jones, "out of an old copy of Whizzer and Chips". As the strip has progressed, Jack has been increasingly portrayed as a racist and a xenophobe among other major faults. Jack's adventures are regularly drawn in the style of other comics (such as Tintin or Asterix), taking place in other countries (such as a manga-style strip relocating the action to Tokyo) and even in different time periods (including the Victorian era, the Future Space Era and the Stone Age.)
• Jasper the Gasper – A homeless man who is desperate for a cigarette.
• Jellyhead – The girl with no brain. A one off superhero parody about a girl born with lime jelly instead of a brain. Jellyhead spends her entire time in this story in a catatonic state, yet still manages to foil an armed robbery. The one-off strip was the work of Charlie Higson.
• The Adventures of Jeremy Clarkson, the Petrolhead Motormouth – One-off strip featuring Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson talking extensively about cars to an uninterested Big Issue salesman.
• Jimmy Hill – The bespectacled and bearded television presenter.
• Joe Robinson Crusoe - a thinly disguised parody of flamboyant Newcastle pub and nightclub operator Joe Robertson.
• Johnny Fartpants – a boy afflicted with extreme flatulence. Tagline: There's always a commotion in his trousers. He suffers from extreme, excessive flatulence which is not only offensive to the nose and ears, but destructive to those around him. His gaseous emissions have been known to destroy houses and other hard-surfaced articles, as well as injure people. He is always apologetic, and constantly reminds people that his colonic expulsions are beyond his control - despite his insistence on "keeping to a strict pump diet", which often includes beans and "cabbage water". In Viz 166 (June/July 2007), Johnny was forced by his father to attend a lecture on global warming, presented by none other than Al Gore, so that he would learn about the impact his farting was having on the environment. When Johnny intentionally farted during the applause for Gore (so that nobody would hear it), the former Vice President became violently ill, causing Johnny to observe that Gore was now "greener" than his environmental message.
• Jump Jet Fanny and her Hawker-Siddeley Twat – A woman who can perform VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) with her vagina. Other strips using the same premise included "Hawker Siddeley Harriet" and "Colin Concorde Cock".

K - O

• Kewl Chix – shallow, vacuous and materialistic teenage girls who only care about their social life. Initially presented as bimbo/dumb blonde caricatures but in recent years the strip has primarily served as a satire of social networking sites and text messaging.
• Kid Politician – a child who speaks and behaves like a politician (for example, producing dubious statistics to "prove" that he wasn't late for school.)
• The Lager Lads – somewhat like the Real Ale Twats, these are a group of clean cut, upstanding beer aficionados who like lager more than anything. Inevitably, barmen tell them to "piss off" or urinate in their beer. The Lads never seem to notice there's anything wrong with their drinks after this happens, both highlighting the weak flavour of lager compared to other beer and showing the Lads up to be idiots. The strips were inspired by a series of advertisements for McEwan's lager, in which - Chris Donald noted - a group of smiling, happy young men drink copious amounts of lager but never "got pissed or glassed anybody".
• Large Breasted Wet T-Shirt Pneumatic Drill Girl – A masked superheroine, dressed for a wet T-shirt contest, who works at the roadside with a pneumatic drill and fights crime.
• Laurie Driver – the schizophrenic long-distance driver of an articulated lorry, who murders female hitchhikers and dumps their bodies by the roadside.
• Lazy Disinterested 16 Year-Old Photo Shop Girl – a teenage girl who works in a local photo supply shop. She has a very unenthusiastic attitude, and is unhelpful to her customers; preferring to chew lots of bubblegum and text on her mobile phone for hours on end. Similar strips have the "Lazy Disinterested 16-Year-Old" working in a shoe shop and a chip shop - the latter seeing her rather talk to a friend (possibly her boyfriend) than serve anyone, and being extremely slow and deliberately uninterested when she does serve someone. Her equally unhelpful counterparts are sometimes featured, including "Ugly Miserable Butch Bus Driver Lady" and "35-Year-Old Obsessive War Workshop Assistant" (An older man so obsessed with role-playing games that when a boy tries to buy two sets of figures from different sets, he will only sell one or the other, but not both as they "are from different scenarios").
• Lenny Left – a one-off strip featuring a "radical" left-wing alternative comedian whose hackneyed "street theatre" routines about Thatcherism arouse complete disinterest from the public. Lenny eventually sells out, and the last frame of the strip shows him doing a racist and homophobic stand-up routine in a Conservative club.
• Little Big Daddy – Schoolboy who seems to think he is 1970s wrestler Big Daddy.
• Little Old Man – A young boy who acts like a stereotypical elderly man and at the end of the strip ends up being taken to a retirement home. He was introduced as the counterpart of Playtime Fontayne but unlike Playtime has so far only been a one-off strip.
• Little Plumber – Spoof of Beano comic strip Little Plum, in which the American Indian is a jobbing plumber.
• Lord Shite and Nanny No-Dumps – a one-off strip which draws upon the urban myth that the aristocracy don't crap. It's about an aristocrat who wishes to defecate "like common people" and his former nanny who is determined to stop him.
• Lucky Frank – A young boy who seems to seems to have bad luck turned into good luck - an earlier (and later revived) version of Spawny Get.
• Luvvie Darling – a melodramatic and self-important thespian who is always out of work, principally because he is completely talentless. Presents himself as an A-list actor but is only offered very minor (and ultimately humiliating) roles.
• Major Misunderstanding – As his name suggests, he often misunderstands situations, and is seemingly unable to interpret incidences in their own context, instead viewing them through the prism of his own prejudices, typically centered on inter-war upper-class values. For example, he once believed that a blood donor van was a chip van, and berated the nurse operating the van for trying to bring "unwanted custom" (i.e. proles) to his "close-knit community". The Major has mistaken hooded monks for Asbos and vendors at a church fete for asylum seekers. He is apparently a retired major who dresses in the regimental blazer, cravat, slacks and has a bushy walrus moustache and proudly wears his medals on his chest for all to see; characteristics which suggest a very pompous individual. He walks with a stiff upper back, and displays signs of senility in his disregard of others opinions and actions. This satire of an old school gentleman soldier set in his ways emphasises his ranting against anything that he believes goes against his dearly held traditionalist right wing moral values. He reads the Daily Mail and is always drawn by the cartoonists with his fists tightly clenched at his waist. The major's personality and manner is similar to that of earlier Viz characters, including the early Billy Britain and Victorian Dad. He has never been shown with family, and like Victorian Dad, is often presented as dogmatic, but ultimately as a hypocrite with no self-awareness or idea of his own position as a social relic.
• The Male Online – A middle-aged man who spends most his time in his study looking at and posting on the Daily Mail website and ranting about health and safety, foreigners coming to Britain and other right-wing paranoia.
• Max Power – a breakdown mechanic who, instead of repairing cars, rebuilds them into hot-rods. His name is a parody Of Max Power Magazine, which is aimed at people who are into "pimping" up cars.
• Maxwell Straker – Record Breaker. Maxwell spends most strips making increasingly futile attempts to appear in the Guinness World Records, only to end up in a bad situation where he inadvertently gets his wish: such as falling into the world's longest coma, getting the longest ever prison sentence, or breaking the record for "the world's daftest cunt".
• Meddlesome Ratbag – a series of strips featuring a pinch-faced, headscarf-wearing middle-aged woman (Mrs Ratbag). She takes great delight in delivering nagging lectures to complete strangers about minor breaches of social etiquette, and will go to extreme lengths to engineer a situation where she can make such a complaint. One strip began with her seeing a TV news item about the Rio de Janeiro carnival, whereupon she immediately flew to that city and booked a hotel room overlooking the carnival procession, purely in order to complain about the noise. Another strip was set during a minute's silence for a "some terrible tragedy or other" and saw her desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to find someone who was breaking the silence, in order to remonstrate with them. She finally achieved her aim by breaking into a maternity ward and rebuking an exhausted birthing mother for the "disrespect" of failing to silence her newborn baby's cries. The best of all though was where she heard that the SETI people had intercepted a call/message from a distant planet. She bought a huge amount of extensions, put them onto her broom, and pushed them up through space to bash on the aliens' plaent, followed by a yell, "Keep the noise down! There's people trying to sleep!"
• Mickey's Miniature Grandpa – a senile old man, convinced that he's four inches tall. This causes trouble for his grandson Mickey, whose mother refuses to acknowledge Grandpa's obvious insanity. Grandpa's delusion usually leads to him getting beaten up, involved in a fatal accident, injuring Mickey, or (in some cases) managing to convince others that he really is four inches tall. The strip is ostensibly a parody of Peter's Pocket Grandpa.
• Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped – a motorised scooter which uses simian semen as fuel. In the character's first appearance, his moped runs out of simian love fuel a few panels into the story, and much hilarity ensues as he attempts to avail himself of fresh supplies so he can continue on his journey. In a final dramatic twist, Mickey eventually realises his monkey spunk moped is probably not the most practical means of transport, and so he exchanges it for a car which runs on leopard's fanny batter, which is obviously not much easier to obtain. In a slight non-sequitur to the original storyline, Mickey and the Monkey Spunk Moped are reunited for the character's second appearance in the 197th August 2010 issue of Viz, as the last cartoon in that issue. In this second story, Mickey decides to modify the moped to run on renewable energy, as he fears additional running costs of a government increase in fuel tax.
• Millie Tant – A caricature of the militant feminist, Millie thinks of herself as a champion of "Wimmin's" rights but is often self-centred and dismissive of the feelings of others. She rants, raises her fist in the air and foams at the mouth. She often refers to men as "phallocrats" and "potential rapists" or just "rapists", referring to other women as "fellow lesbians" regardless of their actual orientation. Most of the storylines seem to indicate sexual frustration. She often complains that various phenomena are actually metaphors for the suppression of women: fireworks are actually "big explosive penises" that "skewer and rape the virgin female sky". She refuses to make a snowman, instead offering to make a snow-black-lesbian-rape-victim-in-a-wheelchair: she plays cards with an old woman and ends the game by calling her a homophobe because she said "straight flush". In the end she often forgets her feminist stance and is shown asking a man to get rid of a mouse while she is standing on a chair, or knitting baby clothes with a simper.
• The Modern Parents – and their long-suffering children, Tarquin and Guinevere. The two, Malcolm and Cressida, are extremely pompous and self-absorbed believing themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to other people, often waxing lyrical about issues such as environmentalism. Their two sons, Tarquin and Guinevere (who was given a girls name as his parents didn't want to conform to gender stereotypes) are more down-to-earth, with Tarquin often, usually unsuccessfully, trying to reason with his parents way of living.
• Morris Day: Sexual Pervert. A moustachioed, jumper-wearing middle-aged man who is obsessed with pornography, ignoring his attractive wife who waits for him in their bedroom. Kentish Town estate agents Morris Day changed their name to Day Morris around the time of the first appearance of this character.
• Mr Logic – ("such is my name, therefore one may infer that this strip is in some way about me") a serious and humourless young man with no real empathy for other people. He uses highly technical and over-elaborate language rather than straightforward speech and takes everything people say to him literally. The strip usually ends with Logic becoming the victim of his misunderstandings with others. Mr. Logic was inspired by Chris Donald's own brother, Steve, who was much later diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Early versions of the character used the monikers "doodle duck dandy" and Hello World before arriving on Mr Logic.
• Mr Rudewords – a one-off strip about a man with coprolalia, who shouts "rude" words such as "toilet seats!" at socially inappropriate times.
• Mrs Brady the Old Lady – an old woman who spends all her time exaggerating her age and complaining about young people of today and how things were different in her time. Mrs Brady constantly talks about her ailments; she is forgetful, unattentive, bigoted while always referring to her youth and how life was so much simpler and clear back then. She could also be seen as an object of pathos, she typically misunderstands what other people are telling her and so appears as rude, spiteful and self-absorbed - when a friend of hers is dying she seems unable to notice and only talk about her own ailments. In one episode she completely fails to realize that the friend she is talking to has been dead for over a year, and the corpse is decomposing horribly in front of the heater. Mrs Brady's full name is Ada Florence Agnes Pankhurst Brady. She is widowed and often fondly refers to her late husband, Sidney (however, according to a game on the Viz website that featured Mrs Brady shoplifting (something she did very often in the early strips) Sidney isn't dead - he just left her because he "couldn't stand the old cow" and moved to Carlisle). She is often portrayed as being a hypocrite as in most episodes complains about how immoral the modern world is and how values have gone down, while also talking of happy memories of doing the same sort of things herself in her youth because "you had to in them days". She is a hypochondriac, and particularly obsessed with her bowel movements. During a "convention" strip where multiple characters met each other in an anniversay issue Postman Plod was surprised by Mrs Brady who revealed herself to be an intelligent and witty lady, who was "just playing a part".
• Mrs Clean – a woman obsessed with having a clean house. In most strips she ends up killing or mutilating her children to keep them from making a mess in the house (e.g. stuffing and mounting them; or flaying them alive after hearing that dust mites live in skin particles.) This strip appeared in several other comics around the same time.
• Mrs Maybe and her crazy baby strips about a fat lady called Mrs Maybe, who makes suggestions to her baby on such matters as to where to go out to: the baby's usual response is "Let's fuck a coppa!"
• Nobby's Piles – a man with incredibly bad hemorrhoids.
• Norbert Colon – an old miser. In one strip, Colon shared top billing with hopeless ventriloquist Boswell Boyce ("he throws his voice") and wound up in a lunatic asylum; in another strip he went on a blind date only to find the dating agency had fixed him up with his own mother ("Oh turds! It's that tightwad son of mine!"), a dead ringer for Norbert only wearing a (clearly labelled) NHS wig.
• Norman the doorman a strip about a violent doorman named Norman who works at the cinema, and then can be found in the most inopportune places such as a funeral, challenging everyone who attempts to enter. He even appears as a 'Santa's Elf' at one point, refusing entrance to a little boy and his father, before turning on Santa himself, fists flying as he shouts "Who let you in here with a hat on, sunshine?"
• Norman's Knob– puerile tale of Norman who thinks if he rubs his brass doorknob that he keep in his pocket that magic things will happen to him. Norman rubs his doorknob a lot at inappropriate moments and indeed things do happen for him... in the form of arrests from irate policemen.
• Nude Motorcycle Girl – a heroic female biker who solves crimes - naked except for a crash helmet, bikini pants and motorcycle boots.
• On Das Buses – A parody of sitcom On the Buses where both the driver and conductor are Nazis who tend to kill passengers who do not agree with them.
• One Cut Wally – a gents barber who gives all his customers exactly the same haircut even when they asked for something else.
• Only Fools and Norses – a Viking version of the BBC comedy Only Fools and Horses.
• Out Comes Stanley – a man who slashes people with a Stanley knife at the most trivial of provocation.
• Outcast of the Pony Ballet School – a parody of the comic strips in the 1970s/1980s style of teenage girl's magazine such as Pony School and Bunty, in which Steve McFadden, for no apparent reason, attends a private school for girls where all his classmates are eleven or twelve years old. The wealthy students bully him for being poor and having a shabby-looking pony, until it is discovered at the end of the story that he is really a princess. The title may be based on "Outcast of the Pony School", a real comic strip which ran in Bunty.

P - S

• The Parkie – An extremely angry park keeper who abuses people that seem like they are breaking park rules, when in fact they are not - he even creates his own rules just so that he can abuse them. Early strips carried satirical introductions like "Totally Dodgy Cartoons Present..." and "A social comment (why not?)".
• Pathetic Sharks – (sometimes called the Crap Sharks). An occasional strip featuring a group of sharks, much feared, not for their ferocity, but their mind-numbingly boring and pathetic behaviour and conversational style. Instead of hunting for prey, they ask people on the beach for crisps, ice cream and toffee, except for one shark who claims to be "lactose intolerant". Generally the strip consists of some sort of shipwreck or holiday-by-the-seaside theme; the initial apprehension at the sighting of shark fins turns into abject horror: "Oh no! Crap sharks!". In one strip a group of WWII shipwreck survivors blow themselves up with a hand grenade rather than face the Crap Sharks.
• PC Hopper, bent copper – a corrupt police officer who often takes bribes and is frequently shown beating a confession out of a suspect.
• Paul Whicker, the tall vicar – A deliberately crudely drawn cartoon of a misanthropic vicar. In one strip, he commits insurance fraud to maintain them by gambling (which he appropriates for his own use). He is often challenged by his superior, Bishop Bloggs, who tries to thwart Whicker's schemes. At one point, he is about to be arrested by police only to tell the bishop and the arresting officer that he won a bet on the horses and the parish funds are five thousand pounds up as a result. Although amoral, Whicker has ironically been known to expose the hypocrisy of his superiors. Especially as Whicker uses "missionary work" as an excuse for drug trafficking after being shunted from parish to parish, covering up his misdeeds (sleeping with the bishop's wife and daughter). He has even been known to have connections to corrupt officials, such as a customs officer. One early strip has a frame with a skinhead and media studies lecturer sitting on the bench where Whicker plans on getting drunk. The media studies lecturer gives his thoughts on the strip as an indictment of pious hypocrisy, whereas the skinhead thinks he's "A fuckin' magic violent Vikka (sic)". Indeed, the whole strip can be seen as a satire on pious and institutional hypocrisy.At some point, Whicker is made a bishop as he is seen drinking with Roger Mellie following Roger's rather dreadful attempt to present a religious programme having subsequently got drunk on communion wine and relieved himself in the church font.
• Peter the Slow Eater – a man who, as the title suggests, takes his time eating meals much to the frustration of his family, especially his kids whom he will not allow to leave the table "until everyone has finished eating". Another scenario has him with two mates in the pub (as a slow drinker) insisting on buying a round when his pint is untouched, and letting everyone else get served before him, much to the frustration of his drinking buddies (who discreetly drink his pint and order two pints for themselves without looking and by the time he gets back to the table they have gone).
• Phil's Spectre – A strip about a young boy who believes he can see a "ghost", in reality an escaped convict hiding underneath a white sheet. The strip is very similar in premise to Zip O'Lightning (see below.) The title appears to be a pun on Phil Spector's name.
• The Pirates Of Ben's Pants – A one-off strip featuring a young boy named Benjamin whose underpants are home to a crew of miniature pirates (the name being an obvious play on The Pirates of Penzance).
• Playtime Fontayne – a middle-aged bank manager who behaves like a primary school aged child. He made his first appearance in the comic along with his opposite "Little Old Man", a more short-lived character of a young boy who acts like the stereotype of an elderly man.
• Pop Shot – Real name: Gerald. A man, who is almost always naked; sporting a stereotypical 1970s pornstar moustache, afro and chest hair, who always finds himself accidentally slipping into the language of a porn film while performing everyday activities, much to the annoyance of his wife. The strip always ends with his wife spontaneously having sex with a complete stranger, with Gerald left out of the proceedings.
• Posh Street Kids – A parody of The Bash Street Kids from The Beano. In this one off strip, these schoolkids annoy their teacher by leaving their butlers lying about in the playground, smoking high-priced Cuban cigars behind the bike shed and having food fights in the canteen with caviar, strawberries and champagne. In the end, they do get dealt with, but they craftily prevent painful canings on their backsides by slipping thick literary works of art "worth thysands of pynds" down the backs of their trousers, though the teacher seems not to notice the extra padding as he administers their punishment.
• Postman Plod "The Miserable Bastard" – a mean-spirited postman with a serious attitude problem and a highly questionable work ethic. Plod is bone idle and lethargic and frequently takes extended periods off work with questionable excuses that only hold water because they are supported with notes from his doctor who is just lazy as he is. The pair of them often concoct some excuse for time off work so that they can go and play golf. Whenever he turns up for work at all Plod is completely lacking in any work ethics, and often enjoys opening and reading the post he is meant to be delivering. He is not even bothered about hiding this activity, and after reading someone's bank statement, either mocking or embarrassing that person for their poor financial situation (another example is when he exposes a resident's arrival of brown-enveloped "jazz mags" to the whole street). The other post office staff are also shown to be lazy and dissatisfied with their jobs and spend most of the time sat playing cards (with the exception of the post office manager who tries desperately in vain to run a tight ship). In the lead up to Christmas once, Plod and all his fellow postmen opened up all the parcels at the sorting office and stole whatever they wanted to save having to buy their own presents. On one occasion he even just threw all the post he was meant to deliver in a hedge and went home early.
• The Princess Who Would be King – a strip portraying Mervyn King as a fairytale princess who secretly wants to be the Governor of the Bank of England.
• Professor Fuck – The weekly professor who answers awful questions submitted by readers.
• Professor Piehead – an inventor of amazing inventions which always go wrong and normally kill the Professor or his lab assistant, Tim (whom the Professor always addresses as Joe, for unknown reasons of his own).
• Quentin Tarranteeny – a parody portraying Quentin Tarantino as an extremely foul-mouthed baby who speaks as if delivering a monologue in one of Tarantino's films.
• Raffles, Gentleman Thug – a late 19th-century aristocrat who behaves like a stereotypical 21st-century thug.
• Randall and Diana (Deceased) – a controversial one - off parody of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) with Diana, Princess of Wales taking the place of Hopkirk to become "the people's ghost private detective". She and Randall investigate the claims of a man who believes his wife is having an affair, only to discover that the woman is in fact selling land mines to Africa; at which Diana promises "Dead or alive, I'm determined to put a stop to it." The strip attracted press controversy because of the real Princess Diana's then-recent death.
• Rat Boy – a pre-teen repeat offender and drug addict, characterised by a permanent "tail" of excrement protruding from his backside - his every strip involves burglary, vandalism, assault and/or substance abuse, with minimal reprisals by the police. He is the brother of Tasha Slappa. The inspiration of his character is from that of the real life career criminal, Tommy Laws, who was nicknamed Spiderboy by the police and the media due to his habitual climbing onto roofs and high places in order to evade capture. Most of his adventures involve breaking and entering, vandalising a place and taking anything of value, then usually either evading the law, or getting off very lightly because he is a child. When arrested at one house which he ransacked he is sent on a "self-esteem building for young offenders" programme, which turns out to be a holiday in Spain.^[5] After another crime spree, he is put on trial by remote TV link to a detention cell (intended to be less traumatic than a courtroom trial); the kindly judge allows him to go free, whilst Rat Boy has already escaped through a sewer, somehow taking the TV with him, and is busy selling it as a stolen good. He was once subject to house arrest, enforced by electronic tagging on his ankle - unable to remove the tag, he gnaws his own leg off and hops outside to quickly rob several more houses.^[6] (Needless to say, his loss of limb is forgotten in subsequent comics). He even once managed to steal the Crown Jewels.^[7] He proceeds to steal an old cruise ship used as a floating nightclub off the Newcastle coast and abandon it (burnt-out and balanced on bricks, like a stolen car) in Amsterdam, where he gets arrested for seeking drugs and underage sex. His punishment, ironically, is to be used as a lab rat in a drugs testing clinic, which he finds delightful ...^[10]
• Ravy Davey Gravy – a young man into rave culture, who breaks out into strange dances whenever he hears any kind of repetitive everyday noises, including car alarms and road drills. His name probably derives from Wavy Gravy.
• Raymond Porter and his Bucket of Water – a boy who carries around a bucket of water which he uses to solve all sorts of problems. It appeared only in early episodes of the comic, and may have been shelved to make way for the similarly-themed "Felix and his Amazing Underpants."
• Real Ale Twats – three rather pompous men who speak in an affected style and only drink real ale, even going so far as to keep extensive "reviews" of all the real ales that they have supped. Also known to criticise lager drinkers. A parody of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
• Reverend Milo's Lino Rhino – a vicar who travels around on a rhinoceros distributing rolls of linoleum and "converting" carpet users.
• Roswell Stiles and his Intriguing X-Files – a one-off strip centred on a character named Roswell who wears glasses and carries a cabinet of "X-Files" and attempts to search for phenomena such as falling fish, spontaneous human combustion, crop circles, UFOs, big cats etc. but has no success; such as mistaking a kitten standing next to a Bonsai tree for a big cat winding up in the seals enclosure at the zoo and many others. When he attempts to fake a UFO sighting by throwing an old car wheel trim into the air, it smashes another man's green house, who shoves the filing cabinet up Roswell Stiles's arse.
• Reverend Ramsden's Ringpiece Cathedral – a vicar with a life-sized church up his bottom.
• Robot Nun (She's Got Tommy-Gun Tits!) - Bursts into a service being held in a church in outer space, and massacres the congregation with automatic weapons firing through her nipples.
• Rod Hull and Emo - A one-off strip parodying Rod Hull and Emu, in which Emu becomes Emo, a stereotypically maudlin emo fan.
• Roger Irrelevant ("He's Completely Hatstand") – a young man with a very strange mental problem where he continually produces irrelevant and surreal streams of language and behaviour. In one strip, Roger throws a lamp from the roof of a house after a long, impassioned (and obviously unsuccessful) plea for the lamp not to commit suicide. On another occasion he decides to elope with an armchair, declaring it is pregnant with his children. Another time sees him disrupting the funeral of a relative by dragging the corpse out of the coffin and - employing a Brooklyn accent and emulating a character from a Mickey Spillane novel - aggressively questioning the deceased about some stolen goods. His parents seem to be very understanding and merely politely request that he stops his behaviour. These are the only times that Roger manages to show any sign of interaction with real people, although usually it is only in the form of saying things like "wibble wibble". (dictionary.com attributes this nonsense-word to Roger; see External Links below.) "Frisnit" and "z'goft" are two of Roger's other favourite words.
• Roger Mellie ("The Man on the Telly") – a foul-mouthed, perverted, corrupt and violent TV presenter, whose activities satirise real TV shows and incidents. Starred in a spinoff cartoon, voiced by Peter Cook. He has in recent years lent his character to Roger's Profanisaurus which lists all the obscenities of the English-speaking world and is constantly updated in every VIZ version, and reprinted in book form under various hilarious and wicked titles.
• Roger the Lodger – a parody of the Beano character Roger the Dodger.
• The adventures of Rolf Harris the cat – A one-off strip which features a Scottish Rolf Harris in feline form attempting to deliver a package and avoid water based hazards only to find the package was a diver's watch.
• Rotating Chin Men – A gang of flying villains with jetpacks whose intention is to spoil Queen Elizabeth II's coronation by squirting spunk onto her via a pump squeeze mechanism linked to their revolving chins. Paraphrased quote by the Archbishop of Canterbury: "I can't crown a queen with all jizz matted in her hair, it would be most unconstitutional". The villains are foiled by the two child heroes who hook one of the villain's rotating chin with the archbishop's crook, causing the mechanism to overheat and "dribble jissolm all down his chin".
• Roy Schneider - Joy Rider – A 14-year-old perpetual truant yob whose attempts to cause trouble in his community usually end up with him looking somewhat ridiculous. For example, he twocs a car, looks in the rear view mirror, and expresses delight that the police are chasing him already; in the next frame it is revealed that both Roy's car and the "pursuing" police car are models on a fairground ride, from which Roy is summarily ejected by the operator.
• Rude Kid – one frame strip where a young boy answers the most polite request with a rude word or phrase. This comic actually predates Viz, featuring in some of the proto-Viz fanzines created by Donald in the 1970s.
• Sam, Son of Man – a young boy who believes himself to be the second (or third) coming and moves in a mysterious way.
• The Scaffolders Were Bastards– group of construction workers who solicit an old lady for a contract to renovate the front of her beautiful thatched cottage; but when they get the job are extremely rude, aggressive and deliberately careless in their work, further adding to the cost. The strip ends with the house collapsing because of their negligence.
• Schools – One-off strips featuring a school where the students have the same thing in common, e.g. Page 3 School pupils are all well-known Page 3 girls.
• Scooter Dolphin Boy – A young boy who travels around on a kick scooter, solving crime with the help of his dolphin friend. The strip ends with him failing to catch the crooks, ending up in hospital, and being arrested for cruelty to the dolphin.
• Scottie Trotter and his Tottie Allotment – A boy with a portable miniature garden with several scantily clad women on it.
• Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em? – Occasional strip created by Barney Farmer and Lee Healey (also responsible for the Drunken Bakers, George Bestial, Hen Cabin and We ...), in which a young middle-class couple are continually embarrassed by the husband's drunken, foul-mouthed mother and her various thuggish boyfriends. The title appears to be a play on Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.
• Sheridan Poorly – A man convinced that he is terminally ill, even though he is constantly being told by doctors that there is nothing wrong with him.
• Sherlock Homeless – A homeless parody of Sherlock Holmes. who solves crimes for the reward money - which is inevitably spent on Tennents Super.
• Sherlock Homo – an outrageously gay version of Sherlock Holmes. Despite evidence to the contrary evidence, he has well-built men stopped and searched using a ruse to investigate their backsides sighing "some day my prince will come".
• Shirker Bee – A worker bee within a hive who is unusually lazy, feigning illness and quoting bizarre contractual regulations to get out of doing his job.
• Shitty Dick – a man with a difficult medical condition, wherein he expels impossibly large turds whenever he interacts with a vicar. The humour of the strip usually revolves around him explaining away the turds, often disguising them as something else (a snowman, a large easter egg, etc.)
• Sid the Sexist – a young man with no sexual experience who boasts of his success with women. His distinct lack of tact or any social graces do not help him in his quest to "pull" women. Starred in a spinoff cartoon.
• Simon Lotion, Time and Motion man – a hopeless male parent who insists his family reorganise every mundane household and leisure activity to fit his "professional", pedantic view of how the world should be run more efficiently. This always results in the complete failure of the proposed activity to meet any kind of performance or time constraint, with pathetic yet humorous consequences.
• Simon Salad-Cream – A pastiche of TV and radio presenter Simon Mayo. The strip shows him presenting a radio show in a very mundane way. Not an overtly funny strip, but the humour arising from how boring and mundane Simon Mayo's show was at the time. The strip depicted him having a lumpy face.
• Simon's Snowman – Occasional strip which featured in some Christmas issues during the 1990s. A parody of The Snowman, in which a violent, foul-mouthed snowman takes a young boy on a drinking and gambling spree.
• Sir Edmund Hilarity – a mountaineer who continually endangers the lives of his team by playing inappropriate practical jokes on them during an expedition to climb Mount Everest. The team die when a sherpa unwittingly lights up one of Hilarity's joke exploding cigars, causing a fatal avalanche. Hilarity's camera is discovered fifty years later by modern day climbers, who develop the film to discover that Hilarity did not take any pictures of the trip, and instead used the entire roll of film to take pictures of himself at Base Camp with his teammates' toothbrushes inserted in his bottom.
• Sir Fred Goodwin the Fat Cat – the former governor of the Royal Bank of Scotland Fred Goodwin parodied as an overweight feline forced to catch mice in order to earn his pension.
• Skinheed – An early comic strip showing a young man with social problems turning into an inhuman monster.
• Skippy the Bush Kangaroo – A kangaroo that lives in a woman's pubic hair.
• Spawny Get – a boy whose initial apparent bad luck always turns into incredible fortune.
• Specky Twat – a boy who suffers bad vision, and wears thick glasses. He often mistakes things for something else.
• Spoilt Bastard – a fat, ungrateful and vicious-tongued boy who manipulates his weak-willed mother into satisfying his hollow and selfish desires, usually with serious health-threatening consequences for her. The character is similar to a comic strip which appeared in Monster Fun and later Buster called Mummy's Boy.
• Stag Knight – a one-off strip of a buck's night/stag night in the time of King Arthur/Camelot. Strip shows, late night kebab shops and a barroom brawl is presented in Ye Olde English.
• Stalin on the Corner Watching the Girls Go By – a strip about Josef Stalin attempting to pick up women with a series of increasingly ridiculous lines. Most of the women are horrified, but when he finally meets one who is attracted to Communist dictators, she instead goes home with Chairman Mao.
• Stan the Statistician – a nerd who tells everybody the probability of every event.
• Straw, Berry and Cream – surreal strip where the British Government assigns Jack Straw, Mary Berry and the band Cream to stop an alien threat in sixty minutes or the world will be destroyed with nuclear weapons. After many mishaps, the aliens turn out not to be hostile, and everyone enjoys a picnic at 10 Downing Street with food provided by Mary Berry.
• Student Grant – an upper middle-class student at Fulchester (or sometimes Spunkbridge) University, who is determined to be fashionably "right on" and a left-wing radical, though when things go wrong, it's always his "bourgeois" rich parents that bail him out. Grant does little or no work for his degree. One strip had him visiting his department (he had to be directed by a friend) to see his personal tutor, who pointed out that he had not handed in a single essay in three years. The terms seem ridiculously short (4 weeks in one case, the Christmas vacation lasting from mid-November to late March). When UK students received a maintenance grant and free tuition Student Grant appeared in most issues. In late 2010/early 2011, Grant reappeared again following the student riots against tuition fees, ending up in a "taxi" that turns out to be a limousine carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. He has a number of friends just like him, eager to express their individuality by wearing the same clothes, fashions, invariably ridiculous, like huge hats, bright yellow dungarees and T-shirts with slogans on them like Thunderbirds Are Go! and, in the late 1990s especially, Teletubbies Say 'Eh Oh'!. They are opinionated and talk loudly and ignorantly about various subjects, tagging "...actually!" at the end of their sentences, "proving" their intelligence by listing the grades they got in their A-levels. Several of Grant's collegiate friends have bizarre speech impediments, dental deformities or both.
• Suicidal Syd – a manically depressed young man who makes various unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. Each strip involves Syd becoming depressed over some issue and deciding to commit suicide and will typically make three attempts only for each of them to fail somehow (for instance, in one strip he draws what he thinks is a cartoon of Muhammad and shows it to a group of fanatical Islamists, hoping they will murder him, but he then realises he has actually drawn a picture of Muhammad Ali). After his failed attempts to kill himself, Syd's faith in humanity will be restored only for him to die in random circumstances soon afterwards. Much like Kenny McCormick in South Park, he is regularly resurrected for a future strip.
• S.W.A.N.T – a crack paramilitary police team with "Special Weapons and No Tactics" which parodies American SWAT teams.
• Sweary Mary – a character who bears more than a passing physical resemblance to The Beano's Minnie the Minx. Her sole purpose in life was to say as many rude words as possible; and the comic's story revolved around her attempts to evade censorship. When she was finally granted her wish to swear on the front cover, she lost her voice and was ridiculed by the other regular characters. Since then she has not reappeared as the comic's creators felt that the character had been taken as far as she can go; although other characters still use the word "fitbin" (which Mary claimed was incredibly rude) as an expletive. The first appearance of what would be known as "Roger's Profanisaurus" was a special "Sweary Mary's Dictionary" that came bundled with a regular issue of the magazine.

T - Z

• Tarquin Hoylett - he has to go to the toilet – finds himself saving a desperate situation - e.g. landing a jumbo jet after the flight crew fall unconscious - only to abandon the effort at the last moment in order to visit the lavatory. "Excuse me, I must go to the toilet".
• Tasha Slappa – originally Kappa Slappa, after the sportswear brand, but changed on "legal advice", a teenage girl who follows a stereotypical "chav" lifestyle, and lives at home with her irresponsible mother and countless offspring, all from different (and unknown) fathers. Her main pursuits involve maximising her income from the state benefits system (for her own use) and shoplifting. Tasha is a moody, belligerent and foul mouthed teenage girl. She is arrogant, aggressive and frequently dismisses things with "I divvint give a fuck" (divvint is Geordie dialect for don't). Her home is in Newcastle with her lazy mother and countless siblings. She also has a boyfriend called Bobba - who it is hinted may also be her father and grandfather - who is fiercely defensive of her and has a violent temper, so that she can persuade him to beat up just about anyone for the most arbitrary of reasons. He is not very intelligent and is susceptible to anything she tells him, enabling her to get the better of him if he upsets her or tries to order her about. She is unbelievably lazy, constantly truants and will go to any lengths to avoid any other work. She is an avid fan of The Jeremy Kyle Show (a British television chat show aimed at a lower class audience) and many of her schemes centre on procuring a way for her to sit at home all day and watch it non stop. Her other hobbies include having sexual intercourse with strangers, (when Bobba isn't around), binge drinking, smoking and gossiping with her equally delinquent friends. As well as her being Rat Boy's sister, Tasha's mother ("Mam") and numerous children have had their own strips in the comic.
• The Teacher from the Black Lagoon - a parody of "The Creature from the Black Lagoon". A monstrous teacher drags victims to his underwater classroom where he bores them to death with lessons.
• Teevee Twins – Two young boys who attempt to make their own TV programmes (using a cardboard box as a pretend camera), pestering people for interviews and even deliberately causing accidents so they have something exciting to film. The strip would usually end with them trying to "film" some kind of violent criminal and being beaten up.
• Telly Evangelist – A Roman Catholic priest, Father O'Brien, who is addicted to television. Whenever he isn't watching television he is talking about it (often doing both at the same time).
• Terry Fuckwitt – "The unintelligent cartoon character"; an extremely dim-witted boy. Fuckwitt continuously mistakes situations, objects and people for each other. In appearance, he is cross-eyed and has wild black hair sticking up in a style resembling dreadlocks, and wears absurd platform shoes. Due to the swearword in his name, the comic never prints it in its entirety on the front page, often obscuring it with another graphic element, or else spoonerising it to "Wuckfitt". In one strip he appears to be getting married, but it is revealed that he is not in a church, but in a nuclear power plant, and that his bride is a rod of uranium. Fuckwitt's surreal misunderstandings are sometimes extended in multiple directions, or even circularly. Fuckwitt may be chastised by another character for being in the wrong place, and that character may later themselves be revealed to be someone completely different based on a misunderstanding of the first character, making it apparent that in fact Fuckwitt's initial impression was correct. These "facts" then may be completely reversed in a surprise reveal in the next frame, and so forth.
• Tex Wade – "Frontier Accountant"; cowboy desperado and financial auditor who shoots dead anyone who crosses his path (and fails to balance their books properly).
• The Human League (In Outer Space) – a strip featuring the 1980s pop band and their adventures in outer space.
• The Things – Bizarre aliens that were contrived into situations whereby the human participants could say things like "These things... (situation)..."
• Thermos O'Flask – A man who dresses as a Thermos flask and can't keep away from prostitutes. Each strip revolves around Thermos's attempts to avoid encountering a prostitute, but he always gives in by the end.
• Thieving Gypsy Bastards – Infamous one-off strip about Irish travellers, "Mc O'Dougles", who descend on a middle-class front garden, steal and vandalise everything in sight, with the approval of the local council (even taking a pet dog's testicles!) before moving on. On the next page there was a three-panel "compensatory" strip entitled The Nice, Honest Gypsies. It involved an old Romany woman giving change back to a home owner who had been overcharged for some clothes pegs. An end note adding that in next month's strip The Good Honest Gypsies would be renewing the car tax on their big American car. Both strips caused uproar from race relation groups in the UK. The publishers were accused of promoting prejudice and hatred against an ethnic minority. Following involvement by the UK's Commission for Racial Equality, the British Romany Council and even receiving a reprimand from the United Nations,^[11] the next issue of Viz contained a 'cut-out-and-keep' apology; subtitled "what every gypsy's been waiting for!"
• Thoughtful Bully – A high school student who can present a good case to his teacher why he should be allowed to bully his classmates.
• The Mcbrowntrouts – strip centred on a Scottish family and their toilet humour antics. A parody of the real comic strip The Broons.
• The Vibrating Bum-faced Goats – an influential one-off strip where two schoolchildren from the city go to stay with their grandfather in the countryside. The grandfather owns a herd of petrol-driven mechanical goats with buttocks in place of faces - referred to in the strip as robotic rump-resembling ruminants.
• Timothy Potter - Trainspotter – Went round taking video of trains with his camcorder, in particular British Rail Class 37 locomotives, then had "one off the wrist" whilst playing back the videos on the telly. Often portrayed as being very short sighted (for example he mistook a set of golf clubs for his brother).
• Tina's Tits – A schoolgirl with unreasonably large bosoms. She is convinced that they possess magical powers, when they clearly do not.
• Tinribs – recalls the adventures of schoolboy Tommy Taylor and his 'incredible robot' Tinribs. Despite the fact that Tinribs is supposedly a highly advanced robot, it is obvious that he is made up very basic parts including a skateboard, a box, two tins and a voicebox that constantly repeats "Hi. I'm Barbie. I love you very much.". Regardless, everyone around Tommy believes Tinribs to be a miracle of technology with the exception of teacher Mr Snodworthy who always ends up suffering graphic and very painful injuries during the course of each strip. Based on the D. C. Thompson character Brassneck.
• Toast Kid – a child who attempts to solve problems using toast.
• Tom and Gerry a one off strip that's a parody of Tom & Jerry, the only real difference being that Jerry's name is spelt with a G instead of a J. The strip is centred on Tom finally catching Jerry and commenting, "Got the bastard!"
• Tommy and his Trifle – "Young Tommy Thompson was the luckiest boy in Barndale, for he had an enormous trifle." Tommy and his trifle get involved in snack-related hijinks at his school.
• Tommy "Banana" Johnson – an influential early strip since reprinted in different formats such as a "12" remix" and an "on ice" version.
• Tommy Salter - Chemical Capers – A young boy obsessed with performing bizarre experiments (such as forcing his sister to smoke asbestos cigarettes) with a total disregard for safety. His name comes from the Thomas Salter range of chemistry sets popular during the 1970s and 1980s.
• Topless Jan Fox and her Cornflakes Box – A dimwitted young woman who wanders around wearing nothing above the waist (hence the "topless" part) who believes a box of cornflakes she is holding has magical powers.
• Topless Skateboarding Nun – A companion piece to Nude Motorcycle Girl, this strip features a well-endowed young nun who fights crime and saves orphans while riding on a skateboard - naked except for a wimple, a sensible skirt and big clumpy shoes.
• Tranny Magnet – a short, balding middle-aged bachelor who is irresistibly attractive to transsexuals and cross-dressers, although he desperately wants to find a real woman. (The title is pun on the expression "Fanny Magnet" meaning variously something which will supposedly make a man highly attractive to women, or, a man who imagines himself to be so).
• Tubby Johnson – an impossibly fat boy.
• Victorian Dad – a father who applies strict Victorian values to himself and his family, even though they are living in the present. This also appeared during the Back to Basics campaign, and could be seen as a satirical commentary on it.
• Victor Pratt, the Stupid Twat – A top hat wearing twat, who makes poor puns to his friend on a motorcycle.
• Wacky Racists – a parody of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon television series Wacky Races, featuring a number of far right personalities including Adolf Hitler, Eugène Terre'Blanche, Unity Mitford (akin to Penelope Pitstop), the Ku Klux Klan and David Irving with his companion mutt Mosley (akin to Dick Dastardly and Muttley). Vehicles included the "Mein Kampfervan".^[12]
• Wanker Watson – a parody of the Winker Watson strip from The Dandy, set in a boys boarding school, following the antics of Watson and his friends, and their hapless nemesis, Mr Creep. This strip prompted litigation by Dandy owners, D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.
• We ... – A very bleak strip in which a man is seen working in different businesses, providing some kind of service to people in financial hardship (such as a bank, private loans company, pawn shop, car hire, or running a guesthouse.) He is completely unsympathetic to customers' personal circumstances, insists they pay the maximum of charges and fees, refuses to negotiate, and constantly mocks and demeans them for their unfortunate situation. However, some of his customers are shown to be equally unscrupulous; e.g. in one strip where the man's business is buying hair for use in wigs, he deals with a family who have forced all their children to sell their hair in order to raise enough funds for an Xbox. The title of the strip comes from its description of the business involved, e.g. "We Buy Gold" or "We Give Money"; and the main character's habit of saying "We ..." in order to justify his actions as company policy.
• We Three Kays – A one-off strip featuring Peter Kay, Vernon Kay and Gordon Kaye in the roles of the three wise men visiting the newborn Jesus during the Nativity. Despite Gordon's worries that he's not as famous as Peter and Vernon, he is gratified when Jesus asks him to recall his car accident from 1990.
• Wee Radge Joe – A short man who tends to make too much of an accident, misunderstanding or taunting from youngsters, ending in him getting beaten up as he won't 'Let it go' or walk away when the other person involved (who is usually larger than him) is happy to do so.
• William's Pissed Wellingtons – a young boy and his alcoholic wellington boots. The name is a pun on the UK children's TV cartoon series William's Wish Wellingtons.
• Whinging Pom – a stuffy, homesick English expatriate who unfavourably compares everything he experiences in Australia, including a beating meted out to him.
• Wolf Halls – A middle aged couple obsessed with wolves who appear to dislike another couple of similar age (who appear to have an obsession with tigers. The two couples are oblivious that the daughter of the wolf couple and the son of the tiger couple are in a relationship (i.e. a modern take on Romeo and Juliet),
• Wooly Wilfy Wichardson – a man with left-wing leaning (e.g. he tries to tell two other men to stop fighting in a pub) and a speech impediment (as suggested in the title) who had his own strip in an early issue of Viz, but has more recently appeared in other strips - for example, as a counsellor who tries to curb Spoilt Bastard's bad behaviour, but actually ends up spanking the obnoxious boy.
• Yankee Dougal – an English kid who thinks he is American.
• Young Bailey – A one-off strip featuring a schoolboy who looks and behaves like Rumpole of the Bailey. He argues constantly with his parents and teachers over trivial points and shouts "Objection!" while being caned by the headmaster.
• Young Stan, Son of Man – A young boy who blesses his family, says "verily" a lot, blesses the bread at breakfast, and moves (i.e., walks) in a mysterious way. An irritation to his mother.
• Zip o' Lightning – a strip about a young boy who believes he has an alien friend, who is actually a robber with a bucket on his head.

References

1. "Who farted? British comic art". Tate Modern, 1 May 2010. Retrieved 15 March 2014
2. "Viz angers Scousers". The Metro. Retrieved 29 April 2015.
3. "'Lad-father' tackles Viz sales slide". BBC News. Retrieved 29 April 2015.
4. Rude Kids: The Inside Story Of Viz
5. Viz #100
6. Viz #109
7. Viz #158
8. Viz #121
9. Viz #135
10. Viz summer special 2000
11. New Statesman - Fnarr! Fnarr!
12. http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/782/wr2c.jpg

External links

• Flash scan of strip from Viz website: Roger Irrelevant (archived from the original on June 15, 2008)