Extract #6 From Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’

Him Off The Viz

Extract from ‘Mags To Riches.’

The progress of Viz was steady both in terms of our production and sales. Sales were particularly of interest due to the fact that they almost always seemed to go somewhere beyond our expectations. The initial print run of issue 1 famously sold out in a couple of hours. Chris informs me that this was never really true, and there were actually quite a few left in the house, but these kinds of claims do tend to work in your favour. It wasn’t a million miles from the truth, anyway.

Issue 2 was a limited edition of 500, although we weren’t aware at the time that when you print a limited edition nobody’s really counting. Unless everyone’s in one room at the same time, nobody will ever know how many came off the press. As a result issue 2 has become the rarest of all collectable Viz comics. Issue 1 was reprinted twice, selling around 750 or 1,000 in total, and issue 3 had a print run of about 1,000, so 2 will always be the most desirable.

In these early days the comic continued to be a loss-making venture. Issue 1 lost 10½p per copy, 2 worked out a little better due to the increased print run, but we were far from earning a living from our work.

Listen Ear was an independent record shop on Ridley Place in Newcastle, and it became the first shop ever to sell Viz. However, when Viz went on sale at legendary teenage hangout the Handyside Arcade things changed dramatically.

Brian Sandals was an eccentric, bespectacled, suit-wearing man looking rather more like a civil servant than someone who sold second-hand records, patches, badges, posters and general hippie and drug-related paraphernalia to teenagers. His shop, Kard Bar, had been at the centre of Newcastle’s swinging scene in the 1960s, when the Club A’Gogo was in the same building: this saw the likes of The Rolling Stones, John Mayall and most famously Jimi Hendrix play on a tiny stage to a crowded room full of Geordie teens. The arcade itself, a beautiful horseshoe-shaped two-tiered Victorian building, always filled with natural light by its cast iron and glass roof, remained the place to be seen on a Saturday afternoon until its shameful destruction in the mid-1980s to make way for a soulless extension to Eldon Square shopping centre. Perhaps there is some poetic justice in the fact that the shops there appear to find it very difficult to attract customers into this remote outpost of the shopping centre that destroyed so much of Newcastle’s centre in the 1970s.

Brian was always good at keeping the teenagers supplied with whatever bits and bobs each generation had a particular interest in. During the early rise of Viz we used some of his old stock of posters to give away as an insert in issue 10½. It was amazing to discover that Brian never threw stock out. The arcade was a low-rent facility due to the development of Eldon Square, so he had whole shop spaces dedicated simply to storing things he’d never sold. We took advantage of this by giving away Bay City Rollers posters in the mid-1980s. Not only were these posters ten or more years out of date, but they were twice or four times the size of the centrespread of the comic, so we guillotined them to fit. Lucky readers buying the comic that carried the legend ‘FREE FULL-COLOUR POP POSTER INSIDE’ got half of the Rollers’ legs or a quarter of David Cassidys’ face.

Brian’s policy was to pay great dividends in the late 1980s and early 1990s when his early-1970s stock of smiley face badges, patches, posters and so on sold by the barrowload. He once asked me in a very calm and matter-of-fact way why was it that this stock he had carried for twenty years was suddenly so much in demand. I told him it was all down to acid house. He looked at me and smiled, and said, ‘Oh. That.’

He clearly had no idea what I was talking about. But that’s Brian – never knowing what he’s selling, or why, but always doing a very good job of it.

Brian was to suggest something that would really change Viz’s fortunes. He asked why we didn’t carry any advertising in the comic. We said we didn’t want to be involved with anything that didn’t fit with what we were doing. It was alright to promote the bands we went to see, but beyond that it didn’t seem feasible to whore the comic. It might pay the bills, but what would the comic become?

The answer to this quandary was simple. We would take adverts, but there would be a set of rules. If you didn’t follow our rules your product would not be advertised in Viz. The rules, although never written down, went something like this:

1) We design your advert. You have no say over its contents.

2) Your product or service will be openly scorned in the advert.

3) If you don’t approve of your advert and refuse to pay we’ll print it anyway.

It was a policy that proved remarkably successful. Businesses wanted to be seen in the comic. They wanted to be seen to be with the in-crowd. Viz was seen in the hands of teenagers, a group of people who are notoriously difficult to advertise to. The minute you try and be cool or try to impress teenagers, they will shoot you down in flames or run a mile. The person who tries to be cool when advertising to a teenager is the least cool person. This is one of life’s constants. So, for instance, if you try and put across in your advert that your shop is cool or trendy, teenagers will automatically never come.

In our policy shops appeared to say something along the lines of ‘If you come to our shop to spend your money we’ll think you’re a cunt.’ Or ‘Everything we sell is crap.’ The making of claims that were not impressive and the honesty and humour in the messages really got across. Teenagers don’t like to be told anything, so they liked Viz’s ‘non-adverts’. They admired the honesty of unimpressive claims. The advertisers became cool for being brave enough to be seen being mocked.

Rule three only came into force once that I remember. Chris and I used to work doing illustration for various people as a sideline, and one ran a clothing distribution warehouse and shop called Phaze. Martin Keegan was a quiet and slightly eccentric reclusive businessman and was most taken aback when Chris presented him with the artwork for his advertisement in Viz. Martin’s shop was a post-punk fashion boutique that took itself rather seriously. The advert was a photograph of me dressed in the worst 1970s fashion disasters I could find and Chris laid it out as badly as possible. Martin was not happy. Chris said he would go away and come back with something different, but instead simply published the ad. After a stream of customers came into Phaze to say how much they had enjoyed his advert, Martin decided the piss-taking ad was a good idea after all.

The adverts sat amongst the rest of the comic’s contents perfectly and made a statement about what Viz was. Its anarchic and irreverent attitude wasn’t contrasted by having serious adverts. The fact that local businesses were so happy to come on board and be part of the madness, the silliness, did both our and their reputations no harm at all. It created a little niche market for businesses to be seen as part of a local phenomenon. Students and local kids could all see which businesses and services were cool.

As the early 1980s moved on all the local record shops began not only to stock the comic but also advertise in it. Listen Ear, the first shop to sell Viz, became Volume Records and a regular advertiser. Virgin in Eldon Square at the time was run almost like an independent shop and the manager was allowed to advertise wherever he chose. HMV’s manager was not unaware of what he was missing out on, but the store’s stock and advertising was controlled by a remote head office. Keith Armstrong, however, was a bright, entrepreneurial young man and did not miss the opportunity to sell and appear in Viz, against the wishes of his bosses. He placed the comics directly next to each till, giving his staff the opportunity to hide them under the counter should any HMV management personnel appear. Keith also took adverts out that very definitely went against HMV’s corporate advertising style and standards, and to make matters worse and even more entertaining he even used their branding and logos and took the piss out of the company’s campaigns.

My favourite ad was a half page that Chris designed for him in the style of HMV’s ads at the time. The ads had black backgrounds with a white square graph pattern and very simple words appearing in random, diagonal strips. The corporate HMV ads would all have smarmy, pretentious, clever words. Keith’s ad read simply ‘THE HMV SHOP. ONLY PUFFS SHOP ELSEWHERE.’ Chris also added a little extra to HMV’s famous logo, in which the mystified pup stares into the speaker of the gramophone. Just behind the dog’s tail sat a Viz trademark steaming turd. Quite how Keith managed to get away with this and the rest of his behaviour is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps a blind eye was turned because of his entrepreneurial skills. He went on to found Kitchenware Records, the most successful independent label to ever come out of the north east, famous for acts like of Martin Stephenson and the Daintees, Prefab Sprout and more recently Editors.

I loved the way these ads sat amongst non-genuine ads – ones that were just jokes, part of the editorial. Viz in those early days was entertaining and mysterious in almost equal measures. A genuine advert could appear right next to one reading ‘Balding on top? It’s a scientific problem. If it affects you … fuck off, you baldly bastard.’

The adverts were an integral part of Viz in those early years. Nobody else did anything like we did; nobody seemed brave enough or imaginative enough to fly in the face of accepted methods of doing things. Going against the grain seemed to be completely natural to us as a family.

Simon Donald’s autobiography ‘Him Off The Viz’ will be released tomorrow and is available from Amazon, Tonto Books and all good book stores. Simon will be promoting his book this evening at a talk-in at Waterstones in Newcastle (7pm start). Tickets are available from the branch and are priced at £3.

Editor’s note: This was our last extract from Simon Donald’s ‘Him Off The Viz’ – I really hope you enjoyed reading them. Now go and buy the book!