By October 1984 I still hadn’t been given a decision by IPC so I wrote to John Sanders with an ultimatum. They could either accept the dummy or give us our artwork back. On 22 November he replied:
Dear Chris
I am sorry I have not been in touch. This is not waywardness; I have been giving a great deal of thought to Viz and discussing it here with many people.
Very sadly, and somewhat against my own judgement, I have to tell you that we cannot publish Viz. It is thought that when it is toned-down sufficiently to satisfy IPC, what’s left would not be successful enough for the kind of profit-making that we need. This is because we are a big company in the mass circulation market and, put basically, Viz is not sufficiently mass circulation.
I still think it has possibilities and I hope you make a go of it yourselves. I believe it has great potential and you should not regard this letter as the end of the road. Bob Paynter feels he has called upon your services to a greater degree than the value of the cheque we have already sent you, and he will therefore be sending you an additional cheque for £500.
I am sorry about this decision, and I wish you lots of luck in the future.
Kind regards
John R. Sanders
Managing Director
IPC Youth Group
In one sense he was perfectly right. When Viz was toned down to suit suit Sanders’s superiors on the IPC board it wasn’t funny. But in another sense he was spectacularly wrong. Viz could be mass circulation. It was just a question of finding a publisher with the bottle to take it on.
Four-Letter Comic on Public Cash
After the IPC rejection Bob Paynter called me up to say goodbye and good luck. ‘I hear Virgin are in the market for a comedy magazine,’ he said. ‘Why not send a copy to Richard Branson?’ After the trials and disappointments of the last six months I wasn’t in any hurry to contact another publisher. In any case, my first year of self-employment was now up and I was doing very nicely on my own. My accountant announced that I’d made a net profit of £4,448 for the year ending 31 November 1984. He didn’t seem impressed at all but I was positively delighted.
Issue 12 finally emerged just in time for Christmas 1984. Inside was a new strip called Johnny Fartpants that had originally been intended for IPC. There was also a début for Felix and his Amazing Underpants, and another newcomer called Victor and his Boa Constrictor. This brand-new cartoon was the work of a brand-new contributor, Graham Dury.
Graham hailed from Nottingham but was working as a postgraduate botanical research scientist at Leicester University. As far as I could gather his work involved messing about with the genetics of potted plants to make them look more attractive on shop shelves. He’d found out about Viz via his girlfriend Karen, a student at Newcastle Polytechnic. As well as a scientist meddling with things I didn’t understand, Graham was a keen cartoonist, and he rang me, offering to come up to Newcastle and show me some of his drawings. Terrified at the prospect of having to pass judgement on someone else’s work I made sure Simon was in the bedroom to give me moral support when Graham called. Graham arrived wearing a South American poncho, a large sombrero hat and cowboy boots. His clothes, together with waist-length brown hair and an overly generous moustache, made him look a bit like a young Gerry Garcia. The portfolio he brought with him displayed his considerable talents as a cartoonist – and also a fondness for drawing cowboy boots – but contained no cartoon strips. Just doodles. We suggested he go away and try drawing some finished strips and as he left we gave him one valuable piece of advice. If at all possible the names of the cartoon characters should rhyme. We were both impressed with Graham. Not by his drawings, or his Mexican attire, but by his personality. He seemed a really nice bloke and we’d got on with him easily. A short while later, sticking rigidly to our advice, Graham came up with Victor and his Boa Constrictor. I was a little concerned about the size of Victor’s nose and the appearance of cowboy boots in the strip, but I used it anyway. But as I was gaining one contributor I was gradually losing another. By now I was seeing very little of Jim. He was moving in different social circles and had started working for a friend as a builder. His contributions had always been a bit sporadic but now the supply had virtually dried up. Issue 12 was the first comic not to feature any of Jim’s material.
The print run was now up to 5000 and sales in Newcastle were going berserk thanks partly to a useful piece of publicity in the local press. I’d recently designed a poster for a Red Cross charity event and mentioned to the customer, a John Dougray, that I’d been on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. ‘Really? How’s business?’ he asked enthusiastically. It turned out Mr Dougray worked for the Central Office of Information, the Government’s PR agency, and his eyes lit up when he heard that my business was still solvent at the end of the year. He asked if I’d mind doing a few press interviews to give the scheme a bit of positive publicity. ‘We’re always on the lookout for success stories,’ he said. Alas, this wasn’t going to be quite the success story he’d envisaged. I agreed to the interviews and all the local papers sent reporters round to talk to me. It wasn’t long till one of the hacks got a whiff of a bigger bone than the one he’d been thrown. He twigged that I’d been publishing Viz, a scandalous magazine, while on the Government scheme. The following day the Newcastle Evening Chronicle exposed this shocking state of affairs under the banner headline ‘FOUR-LETTER COMIC ON PUBLIC CASH’. The story snowballed from there, with an avalanche of press enquiries the following day and stories on the local TV news. All this bad publicity did me no harm whatsoever. In fact I received orders for 960 comics the day after the story broke. Unfortunately the outcome wasn’t so cheery for Mr Dougray. Not only did the COI end up with egg on their faces, but his Red Cross fund-raising event was cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales.
By now the distribution side of the magazine was becoming too much for me to handle on my own. The Kard Bar were ordering 1000 copies of every issue, and selling them. Virgin Records sold over 1000 copies of issue 11. HMV were selling over 500 copies, and a tiny little comic collectors’ shop in Newcastle called Timeslip was selling 200. Pubs where I knew the landlords had started stocking it too: the Trent House, the Strawberry, the Egypt Cottage and the Barley Mow. Simon occasionally helped out with deliveries but he’d moved out of Lily Crescent by now and wasn’t around most of the time. Around Christmas 1985 I went into Virgin Records in Eldon Square to collect money from comic sales, and left with a bag containing £400 in cash. I remember thinking to myself, if one Virgin shop can sell this many comics, imagine what it would be like if every Virgin shop stocked it! There must be thirty or forty of them around the country. So on 7 January 1985 I took Bob Paynter’s advice and wrote a letter to Richard Branson.
I knew that Branson must get shedloads of letters every day, each one of them trying to flog him some half-baked business idea or another. I’d be lucky if he got to the end of my first paragraph without throwing it in the bin. So I gave the letter my very best shot, and started by getting the date wrong:
4th January 1984
Dear Mr Branson
I am 24 and I make a living publishing a magazine called Viz. The magazine has been around since 1979 and the circulation is at present 7,100 copies. Most copies sell in Newcastle as I have not been able to devote much time to getting distribution elsewhere. However several hundred copies go to London, Edinburgh and other cities where the comic is becoming popular, slowly but surely. Part of the reason I am writing to you is that Virgin Records store in Eldon Square, Newcastle, regularly sells over 1000 copies of each