Viz expert needed

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NickM

Veteran
The funniest thing I ever saw in Viz was about a boy who believed himself to be the Son of God, to the considerable annoyance of his father.

After telling him off for this silliness, Dad sends him to the corner shop to get some fags. The kid sets off, with a peculiar trembling sort of walk, and Dad shouts down the garden path after him "And stop moving in a mysterious way!!".

I still giggle at this donkey's years later... but what was the character's name, and was he a regular or a one-off?
 
Must have been a one off. Not one that I remember. Sounds funny though!
My favourite Viz strip ever was "Deathbed Chortles with Bob Hope". All about Bob Hope trying to sort out some amusing last words and failing dismally.:wacko:
 

rich p

ridiculous old lush
Location
Brighton
NickM said:
The funniest thing I ever saw in Viz was about a boy who believed himself to be the Son of God, to the considerable annoyance of his father.

After telling him off for this silliness, Dad sends him to the corner shop to get some fags. The kid sets off, with a peculiar trembling sort of walk, and Dad shouts down the garden path after him "And stop moving in a mysterious way!!".

I still giggle at this donkey's years later... but what was the character's name, and was he a regular or a one-off?

Don't remember it but your description is enough to make me laugh!:wacko::biggrin:

Kind of reminds me of an old school friend of mine who used to mumble the word "Nothing" under his breath, much to his Dad's annoyance. When he was grumpily asked 'What did you say, Graham?' he'd answer," Nothing" which made his old man even grumpier.
 
It’s not a regular strip, but there are occasional one-offs with various religious figures in. The last Viz that I saw had Mary, Joseph and young Jesus at home on Christmas day when Uncle God turns up with presents for the lad. Joseph turns to Mary and mutters, ‘Your bloody ex today?’ It’s very funny….:wacko:
 

zimzum42

Legendary Member
Wait until Fnaar looks through his back catalogue......

I am the proud owner of a viz annual signed by all the regular artists with pics and everything, including persoanlized greetings from Sid the Sexist and the fat slags!!!!!!!

Pays to have a relative working in the comedy industry!
 

Flying_Monkey

Recyclist
Location
Odawa
zimzum42 said:
Wait until Fnaar looks through his back catalogue......

I am the proud owner of a viz annual signed by all the regular artists with pics and everything, including persoanlized greetings from Sid the Sexist and the fat slags!!!!!!!

Pays to have a relative working in the comedy industry!

I used to know one of the artists on Viz, not one of the originals, but the guy who did what was originally called Kappa Slapper, until Kappa sued them...

My favourite strips were the surreal ones with utterly implausible back-stories that used to take the piss out of old children's strips from the 50s - the best one of these was the Vibrating Bum-faced Goats. Oh, and Billy the Fish, of course...

I don't remember the one Nick mentions, but it does sound class...
 

Flying_Monkey

Recyclist
Location
Odawa
bonj said:
Ah, so that's how you know Al gore!

You still don't believe me do you...?
 

zimzum42

Legendary Member
FM,

those are indeed great strips, I particularly like the ones with the boy Jack who stays with his aunt Meg, where everyone in the village is staunchly racist/homophobic/etc but not an eye is blinked!

legendary stuff


and the pisstake adverts are great too
the one where tramps could borrow ten pence for a cup of tea and then pay it back in installments over 50 years!
 

LLB

Guest
I think mine is the 'Modern Parents'. I work with an old hippie who is a dead ringer for Malcolm.

Funny thing is the kids turned out OK even though they have weird parents

modernparents.jpg


The Modern Parents is a comic strip from the British comic Viz.

The creator is John Fardell, who both writes and illustrates the strip. It is one of the most enduring and frequent strips in Viz, having appeared regularly since the early 1990s to the present. It is a parody of 'left-wing' middle-class parents.

It has a similar theme to Fardell's other creations, like The Critics, in satirizing the snobbish attitude some liberals have towards everyone else. On at least one occasion, the Modern Parents and the Critics appeared in the same strip, each pair mistakenly attending the event intended for the other.
Malcolm and Cressida Wright-Pratt (a pun on 'right prat', prat being British slang for an idiot) are the modern parents in question, adults whose obsession with equality, political correctness, liberalisation, and environmental awareness often works against their basic role as parents to despairing eldest son Tarquin and backgrounded younger child Guinevere. Despite his female name, Guinevere is a boy. For misguided reasons of Political Correctness, Malcolm and Cressida occasionally try to make one or both of their sons wear girls' clothes or take "female" roles in some psychobabble ceremony.

The Modern Parents do not believe in gender stereotyping or traditional childhood activities such as visiting fairgrounds, frequenting fast food restaurants, taking part in games or competitions, playing sports or with toys, enjoying foreign holidays, or even going to school.

They take the moral high-ground because of their apparent ideologies. Both of them have large upturned noses, perhaps indicating how they turn their noses up at what they believe to be the ignorant bigotted masses of unenlightened people. Cressida has her hair pulled back in a tight pony-tail and Malcolm has a scruffy beard and incredibly large teeth. Both have a tendency to talk with their eyes closed and noses stuck in the air, as if they were preaching.

Malcolm and Cressida were not originally married as they believed it to be an outmoded and sexist institution that enslaved women. However, they did eventually marry simply in order to get their hands on wedding gifts. They had their own pagan ceremony and had their own politically correct vows written ("Do you, Cressida, take Malcolm to be your husband so long as you find acceptable and convenient?")

They both seem to think victimhood is some sort of achievement, with Cressida delighting in pointing out that, as a woman, she is apparently an oppressed minority. Malcolm, in turn, frequently claims he has "Sensitive Persons Syndrome" which, as well as being completely made up, happens to get him out of various things. For example, as a committed environmentalist, he insists he supports public transport, but cannot use it himself because of his Sensitive Persons Syndrome preventing him from getting on a bus or train. However, he does point out that his Volvo "is Scandinavian, so it must be eco-friendly." Additionally, the pair are white British, yet often identify themselves very vaguely and dubiously with all sorts of ethnic minorities — such as claiming to have some Celtic heritage, or that they were Native Americans in a previous life.

Malcolm and Cressida also believe that all humans are equal even to the extent that there is no such thing as immaturity. As a result, their eldest son Tarquin is often greeted by the sight of his parents openly having sexual intercourse (having also previously announced this intention to their kids) and has to shield Guinevere from such activity. Each story of the Modern Parents finds the parents forcing the kids into participation in some new wide-eyed, hare-brained post-modern activity which ostensibly encourages a policy of togetherness but ironically ends up with Tarquin and Guinevere often escaping to their much more realist Uncle Eddie (Cressida's brother) who supplies them with the ice creams and trips to theme parks their parents refuse to allow. While the children are enjoying themselves with Uncle Eddie, their parents are likely to be suffering or arguing due to their latest idea/scheme going horribly wrong.

Malcolm's family visited for Christmas one year; Malcolm appears to have inherited his father's nose and his mother's teeth. He has a brother, Oswald, married to Lana (real name Linda), and a neurotic spinster sister, Joy. Oswald and Lana have a son, Hector James (an extremely snobbish spoilt brat). The family are Conservative and rich, damning the British worker and the foreigner with equal vigour. Malcolm too used to be a keen party member before meeting Cressida, while canvassing, and being lured into a new world of progressive ideological debate and sex - he abandoned a possibly promising political carear, and grew a beard.

Cressida's family have made scant appearances; her mother and father seem to be separated, and her mother appears to drink. When Malcolm left her and Tarquin, Cressida wondered what she was going to do for money until Tarquin pointed out that is was always her father who sent her monthly cheques. However, her father had taken a new mistress, Since this mean he had no money to give to his daughter, Cressida experimented with prostitution.
Tarquin is the elder child, aged about twelve. As he knows how to be a con artist, Tarquin is a very effective foil to Malcolm & Cressida. Even if it only stems from his desire for normality or a desire to make money. His almost Machiavellian ability to play the political game is not only a means of resistance to the parental authority, but also diametrically opposed to Malcolm & Cressida's half-baked, wide-eyed schemes. Tarquin is very calculating and methodical in his manipulation of Malcolm & Cressida. In fact, because of his conservative (pro-establishment) outlook (at least in comparison to his parents), he could be a parody of the rebellious teenager, only he does it with style. He also has a more rational, realistic worldview that rejects vague ideas about spirituality and seems grounded in evidence and deductive reasoning.
An example of his Machiavellian streak is when Malcolm & Cressida take him to a "Whole Self Centre", claiming that Tarquin suffers from an "erotic shame complex". Tarquin tells them that he's picked up a few ideas and talks of a workshop, which ostensibly is about discovering the inner child. He gets the attendees to undress and get into the foetal position, where they think it's moving that they can learn from young people. He then gets them to touch each other, dance, and feel each others bodies. The scene changes to reveal that there are several smartly dressed businessmen queueing to get up a ladder and paying to see through the windows. This workshop is just a front for a sleazy peep show. A good example of how down-to-earth Tarquin is, is demonstrated by another episode. The parents have run out of cash, and decide to list their various abilities. Amongst them are juggling, vegan cookery and making earrings from twigs! Tarquin looks at them, then states, "You might have enough talent to work for McBurger's! (a blatant reference to another certain very famous burger-joint) And after several dreadful failures, this is indeed exactly what they wind up doing!!
His younger brother is Guinevere (which is actually a female name, but Malcolm and Cressida liked the name Guinevere and, when they found out their second child was a boy, decided to give him that name anyway, as they do not believe in gender-specific names.) He was born during the course of the comic strip and, interestingly, has grown from a baby through a toddler to his current age of about six. This is despite the fact that characters in cartoons and comics do not normally age. Tarquin did appear to get older in the early years of Modern Parents but he seems to have stopped at twelve, while Guinevere is now slowly catching him up! Guinevere, whose name is usually just shortened to "Guin" by his brother, is still largely a passive character, often easily upset by his parents' whacky schemes, his big brother Tarquin often coming to his rescue. Guinevere's first word was football although Malcolm and Cressida were keen for his first word to have been dolphin.
Malcom and Cressida have many friends, notably Ashley and Cordelia, in the Ethically Aware Parents Support Group who, like them, are all middle-class, extremely politically correct and often into various causes such as freeing Tibet or combatting (or, more commonly, expressing paranoia about) global warming. These all turn out, rain or shine, to the amateur dramatic group, the story-telling circle, the Celtic music evening, or whatever other trendy obsession is rife among the avenues of Fulchester this month. Most of them have children who, without exception, have the same despairing and uncooperative attitude towards their parents as Tarquin and Guinevere have towards theirs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_Parents

Fcuk me, it could be lifted from someones bio on here - Hands up :wacko:
 

betty swollocks

large member
I had my pic in Viz once.
I was Mountainbiking in the Chilterns with some friends and came across a sign: "Bellingham End Farm'. I stood in front of the sign obscuring the 'ingham', while another of the party took my photo.
I considered the result to be commensurate with the gutter-level, puerile type of humour that Viz specialised in ;) and duly sent the pic in. They published it and it sparked off a competition for similarly-named places around the world.
I got sent a couple of Viz mugs for my troubles, which I still have!
 

Fnaar

Smutmaster General
Location
Thumberland
Despite my moniker, avatar and love for smutty humour, I honestly haven't read it since about 1993! Used to read it regularly though, Billy the Fish, Modern Parents, Sid the Sexist, and occasional one-offs like Jelly Head:
 

goo_mason

Champion barbed-wire hurdler
Location
Leith, Edinburgh
zimzum42 said:
FM,

those are indeed great strips, I particularly like the ones with the boy Jack who stays with his aunt Meg, where everyone in the village is staunchly racist/homophobic/etc but not an eye is blinked!

Jack Black and his dog, Silver.

I used to love "Black Bag, The Faithful Border Binliner". I remember being unable to control myself once in Manchester Airport when I read the Viz story "Dr Poo - Travelling Through Time and Space to find somewhere to do a sh1t" - utterly, utterly hilarious.

Got the latest Viz annual for Christmas - a real treat, and then bought 'Roger's Profanisaurus - The Magna Farta Edition' in the sales. Amazed to find what 'Edinburgh' is the slang for.... ;)
 
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