Myself, Jim and Simon all went along, although Simon was only fifteen and risked being fed to the landlord’s dogs if he was caught on the premises. I decided to take thirty copies of the magazine as I couldn’t imagine selling any more than that in one night. Early in the evening we positioned ourselves on the landing outside the function room door and started offering them to passers-by. None of us were natural salesmen and a typical pitch would be, ‘Funny magazine. Very wacky. Twenty pence.’ People weren’t interested. 20p was a bit steep for a twelve-page black-and-white comic. The Beano was twice as thick, colour, and half the price in those days. There were no takers. One passing Gosforth High girl called Ruth snarled and called me a capitalist. That hurt. I’d paid the print bill out of my own pocket with no prospect of getting my money back. Even if I sold out I was losing 8 pence on every copy. It was hardly capitalism at that stage, love. Things weren’t looking too good until a little man with a gingerish beard and a scarf, more of a social worker than a student or punk, came skipping up the stairs. He looked a bit right-on, the kind of guy who’d give some kids doing their own thing a break. ‘What’s this?’ he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. He had a quick look, smiled, bought one and disappeared into the function room. Not long afterwards people started coming out and buying copies. Once they’d seen someone else reading it and laughing, suddenly they all wanted one. It was the first sales phenomenon I’d ever witnessed, and it was a phenomenal one. Soon we were running out of comics and a friend called Paul, who had a car, offered Simon a lift back home to pick up some more copies.
Skinheed Poster
As well as the Gosforth I also sold copies at a Dickies gig at the Mayfair later that week, and the following weekend at a Damned gig in Middlesbrough. There was only one shop that stocked the first comic, Listen Ear on the corner of Ridley Place and John Dobson Street in Newcastle. The little man behind the counter, who was short and far too old for his comical punk attire, seemed rather non-plussed at the idea of stocking yet another fanzine, but reluctantly agreed to take ten copies on sale or return. He placed them inside the glass counter and under the till, where nobody could see or reach them. ‘If I leave them on the counter they’ll be nicked,’ he said. As well as hawking the comic around pubs and student discos in Newcastle I made a couple of futile efforts to reach a wider audience. In February 1980 I invested £3.25 in a classified ad in Private Eye:
Viz Comics. Very hilarious indeed.
20p plus SAE to 16 Lily Cres, Newcastle/Tyne.
At about the same time I wrote a hopelessly optimistic letter to a magazine distribution company called Surridge Dawson Ltd. and received my first rejection letter:
Dear Mr Donald
Thank you for your letter of 1st February in connection with the distribution of your comics. Firstly, as you are most probably aware, the comic market in the United Kingdom is very competitive indeed, and would be difficult to break into without reasonable financial backing.
From our point of view as national distributors, we would require a regular publishing date and also need to be selling about 10,000 copies per issue to make it a viable operation. To be quite frank, at present I do not think you are in a position to consider distribution on a national scale, but nevertheless we will give the matter further thought on sight of a complete copy of your magazine.
Yours sincerely
T. H. Marshall
General Manager Publishing Department
I hadn’t dared send them a complete copy, just a few selected highlights, because I knew full well that if I’d sent the whole comic it would have gone straight in the bin.
With the benefit of hindsight it was probably a wee bit early to be thinking of a commercial deal, but I was getting some grassroots distribution thanks to a few enthusiastic individuals each taking a handful of copies here and there. A Newcastle University student called Jane Hodgson took twenty copies to sell to her mates and my pen friend Tim Harrison also took ten copies. Then at the end of February I got my first big break. Derek Gritten, a bookseller in Bournemouth, had spotted my ad in Private Eye and wanted to see a sample of the comic. If he liked it he said he would order twenty-five copies, my biggest order so far! My £3.25 investment looked to be paying off, and I rushed Mr Gritten a copy of the comic by return . . . but he didn’t reply.
Never mind. The first comic had been surprisingly well received by the public and I knew that the next one could be much better. By now a second issue was underway on the card table, but this time I was taking care to plan it better, make it look neater and more attractive. Jim had drawn a couple of new cartoons, Simon had done another cartoon with vomiting in it, and Martin Stevens had come up with a brilliant new character called Tubby Round. For music content I’d interviewed a fellow DHSS employee called Dave Maughan about his very serious prog rock band Low Profile – and then written an entirely different story in which they became a disco band. And Jim had written about a new Anti-Pop artist who was rapidly becoming a legend.
Anti-Pop’s first record release, a double A-sided single by the Noise Toys and Arthur 2 Stroke (‘Pocket Money’/‘The Wundersea World of Jacques Cousteau’) had been getting air play on John Peel’s show, but a new Anti-Pop album called Anna Ford’s Bum by Wavis O’Shave was causing a bigger stir both on radio and in the music press. Wavis O’Shave wasn’t a comedian and he wasn’t a singer. He definitely wasn’t a musician either. He was a sort of cross between Howard Hughes, Tiny Tim and David Icke. He was never seen at the Gosforth Hotel and I’d only ever caught a glimpse of him once in the Anti-Pop office, when he didn’t speak at all. To promote the album he only played one gig – at the Music Machine, Camden, in March 1980 – and he didn’t even turn up for that. A heavily disguised Arthur 2 Stroke went on in his place. None of his fans knew what Wavis looked like, so there were no complaints. (Wavis would become better known in later years as The Hard, a bizarre character who made brief appearances on The Tube, hitting his hand with a hammer and saying ‘I felt nowt’.)
Viz comic No. 2 went on sale in April 1980. This time I really pushed the boat out and printed 500, and gave away a free balloon with every copy . . . stapled to the inside back cover. The print bill was £66.67, plus another £4.91 for balloons purchased from fancy goods specialists John B. Bowes Limited, late of Low Friar Street, just round the corner from the Free Press. In those days you never had to walk more than 100 yards to buy a bag of 500 balloons. Viz wasn’t going down too well in Surrey. Having struggled to shift ten copies of issue 1 in Kingston-upon-Thames, Tim Harrison cut his order down to six. But sales were up elsewhere. The Listen Ear record shop took an astounding seventy-five copies, Jane Hodgson took thirty, and Jim’s dad Jack Brownlow, a progressive school teacher and a thoroughly nice bloke, bought twenty-five. My dad didn’t buy any though, largely because he didn’t know Viz existed. By now he was out of work and spending all his time looking after my mum. Both of my parents were blissfully unaware of the comic’s existence, and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could.
Issue 2 was clearly a big improvement on issue 1 so I sent an unsolicited copy to Derek Gritten, the bookseller in Bournemouth