Pathetic Sharks
By now Jim Brownlow had got himself a girlfriend. Fenella was a petite and pretty brunette whom I’d known at school, but since we’d left school Jim had got to know her considerably better than me and they now shared a flat. Fenella was a revelation when it came to selling comics. She worked in a clothes boutique by day and by night she’d accompany us on our rounds of pubs and Students’ Union bars. With her looks, patter and personality, Fenella could sell a dozen or more comics where I would have struggled to sell two or three, blokes literally queuing up to hand her their money. Armed with this new sales weapon, in July of 1980 I ordered an ambitious 1000 copies of the third issue. The bill came to £126.57. I hadn’t minded losing money on the first two comics but now I was living on £14 a week state benefit and if Viz was going to continue it would have to start paying for itself. Editorially one of the highlights of the new comic was the début of the Pathetic Sharks. This was a fairly crude half-page strip which had started out as a Jaws spoof before I abandoned it halfway through. Shortly afterwards Jim had picked it up and added a speech balloon, something to the effect that my sharks looked crap. And thus the Pathetic Sharks were born.
During the summer of 1980 I got a message that Brian Sandells wanted to see me. Brian owned the near-legendary Kard Bar tat emporium in what was then the Handyside’s Arcade. This run-down Victorian shopping arcade stood in Percy Street, on the site of what is now ‘Eldon Garden’, a notably plant-free, glass and tiles shopping mall. Today the place buzzes with footballers’ wives spending their husbands’ cash on fancy knickers and designer jewellery, but in the early 1980s it was at the opposite end of the commercial property scale. In the sixties the Handyside had been home to the famous Club A-Go-Go where The Animals had been the resident band. Twenty years on the club was now a grotty carpet warehouse, better known for the historic hole in the ceiling where Jimi Hendrix had once carelessly thrust his guitar, than for its carpets. Most of the low-rent shops in the arcade below sold second-hand kaftans, incense or punk clobber. The Kard Bar was the biggest of these and sold every shade of shit imaginable, from pop posters to dope pipes, via Japanese death stars. The shop was compact and packed, a maze of shelves and racks displaying any manner of tasteless tat. Marilyn Monroe pillow cases, Steve McQueen cigarette lighters, Jim Morrison bath salts. You name it. Brian, the owner, was a smartly dressed, grey-haired man in his late forties who would have looked more at home working in an old-fashioned bank. Standing behind his unusually high counter he looked a bit like a glove puppet operator without a puppet. Brian told me he’d seen copies of Viz and been impressed. A lot of it was rubbish, he added quickly to counteract the praise, but he thought it was well produced. He ordered a modest ten copies of issue 3 to begin with, but paid me £1.50, cash up front, and immediately put them on sale right next to his till.
By now my nationwide distribution network included top retailers like the Moonraker science-fiction bookshop in Brighton and the Freewheel Community Bookshop in Norwich. I got in touch with these unlikely places by scouring the national Yellow Pages archive in the Central Library and sending off unsolicited samples by post. Meanwhile the south coast retirement resort of Bournemouth was becoming an unlikely sales hot spot thanks to the efforts of Derek Gritten. He had even approached the local branch of WHSmith with issue 2. They’d told him where to go, of course, but Derek was still confident enough to order a staggering eighty copies of No. 3. I had distribution north of the border too, a Stirling student called Bill Gordon having forked out £15 for 100 copies to sell among his friends. But selling 1000 copies was proving to be difficult, and after five months I still had a couple of hundred left and not enough money to pay the next print bill. Brian Sandells got me out of a scrape, buying the lot off me and paying cash up front.
Sales hadn’t been helped by our second press review, this time in the local morning paper. I’d sent offbeat columnist Tony Jones at the Newcastle Journal copies of the first three comics and he invited myself and Jim in to meet him and to pose for our first ever press picture on the roof of the local newspaper offices. His review was a bit more objective than the Evening Chronicle’s. Under the headline ‘Comic is a five letter word’ he said that most of the magazine was ‘cheap, nasty and misdirected’. But he wasn’t entirely negative. His concluding words were, ‘If they clean up their act, this enterprising duo could yet find Viz has a future.’
Despite struggling to shift issue 3, I printed another 1000 copies of issue 4 in October 1980. This comic featured the first ever letters page, a combination of genuine letters I’d received (such as the stock letter from the dole office that accompanied my weekly giro) and letters that I’d made up to mimic the vacuous style of the tabloid letters pages. As more and more of my time got taken up by selling – posting off parcels and chasing up payments – the interval between comics was increasing. The next comic didn’t appear until March 1981, but No. 5 was worth waiting for as it marked a watershed. We had our first full-page cartoons, with Jim’s brilliant Paul Whicker the Tall Vicar instantly becoming our most popular character to date. There was also Simon’s SWANT, parodying the American TV series SWAT, and for my money a strip called Ciggies and Beer was Martin Stevens’s best ever contribution. I’d also made my first crude attempt to mimic the teenage photo-romance stories I’d read in girls’ comics like Jackie, taking the pictures at home on my dad’s old camera and using our neighbours as actors. Issue 5 also included the first genuine commercial advert. Brian Sandells asked if he could advertise the Kard Bar and I agreed, on condition that the advert was in keeping with the editorial style of the magazine. This set a famous trend of amusing adverts that was to last for several years. I charged Brian £11 for his half-page advert, and he gave me £15. Brian could be very generous – a little too generous at times when it came to offering advice. On every visit to his shop I’d receive a lengthy lecture on business or graphic design and I’d be stuck there for up to an hour smiling and nodding my head. He was also a real stickler when it came to proofreading his adverts. He always insisted I got the spelling right, for example. He was a real nit-picker, Brian.
When issue 5 was printed the Free Press invited us to come in and do some ‘self work’ finishing which meant that they printed the pages and we put the comics together ourselves. This cut the production costs considerably and was also an important gesture of compliance with the Free Press’s socialist principles. They were, after all, a bunch of commies, not a commercial printer, and for them the object of the exercise was to give us a share in the means of production. Jim, Simon and myself spent many a happy day at Charlotte Square collating, folding and then stapling comics together on a Dickensian saddle-stitching machine. Eventually they let us use the guillotine too, and finally the ‘Hobson’, a fully automated and highly temperamental page collating, folding and shredding machine.
The Free Press was a fascinating environment to work in, with a wonderful mix of characters present. For me that place encapsulated the comical conflict between trendy, right-on socialists and down-to-earth, working-class people that was central to some of my favourite cartoons at the time. Cartoons like Woolly Wilfy Wichardson who orders weal ale in a working-class boozer, and Community Shop where a bloke in a vest goes into a community wholefood collective and tries to buy twenty Embassy Regal. The Free Press was a co-operative where all the workers were equal, but there was an obvious divide between the middle-class political ideologists whose idea it had been to set it up, and the working-class printers who’d been drafted in to work there. Printers like Jimmy, a fat Geordie bloke from Scotswood. He may not have had the intellect of colleagues like Howard, the idealistic hippy, and Andy, the hardcore socialist Scouser, but Jimmy could debunk the lot of them with his blunt wit and choice turn of phrase.
Despite having been fobbed off by Malcolm Gerrie I kept on bombarding Check It Out with copies of Viz and eventually a researcher called Alfie Fox got in touch and invited myself and Simon to a meeting. It turned out Fox was new to the show and didn’t realize Viz was off limits. But our meeting wasn’t a complete waste of time. Alfie Fox took us to the canteen at Tyne-Tees Television for a chat, but I spent the entire meeting listening to someone talking on an adjoining table. A local TV newsreader and continuity announcer by the name of Rod Griffiths was holding court with a group of colleagues, and he was swearing