Quote: ARS @ 6th April 2024, 5:32 PM

Is the following from a Viz comic?

A duo of stereotypically racist depictions of Asian men, one roundly fat and the other thinly tall. They wear pinstriped suits and bowler hats with umbrellas. They experience mishaps. Their names are something racist like Yin and Yang.

Ring any bells? (What do you think we are, monks?)

View original

Not one I recognise and I don't remember much racist material in Viz. Everything else is fair game but race seems to be something they have wisely steered clear of. The only stereotypical recurring character I can think of is the shopkeeper from 8 Ace.

Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 6th April 2024, 9:31 PM

Everything else is fair game but race seems to be something they have wisely steered clear of.

View original

Cor! Talk about an advanced driving manoeuvre. Still seems a bit short sighted of the big Veeh Eye Zeeh, especially wot wiv the growing demand for authentically packaged and mediated socio-catharsis, due to the perennially intensifying strains of multiculturalism in the 21st Century.

That problem can be addressed by introducing two characters to the mag, currently at the prototype stage (ie in my head).

Ray Scard and Anne Throp-O'scene, the multi-ethnic sensitivity apparatchiks.

Do you mean THE Ray Scard?
Yes, definitively, the very self same. I'm playing him at table tennis this afternoon. The game will require sensitivity. If I beat him, he might take offence as he is part Persian and obviously people "beat" Persian rugs. Then again if I lose, he might take offence because he is part French and obviously "lose" almost sounds a bit like the Battle of Waterloo, which he's still sore about. Then again if we somehow draw, he might take offence as he is part Egyptian and obviously the ancient Egyptian system of hieroglyphics consisted of a lot of "draw"-ings, the legacy of which has been marred by colonialism...

And as for Anne?
You can't miss her. She's here, there and everywhere these days - so urbane.
Ms, Miss or Mrs?
Leave it out, you sorry excuse for a human being.
Sorry, but, you can't say that these days, coz it doesn't take the hyper-non-binary nature of trans-humanism into account (under breath: also you sound like a sad, small-minded, little Englishman). What about Mx?
Well, yeah, she is part Mexican actually, but she doesn't tend to blow her own (mariachi band) trumpet.

Chortle.

Please let me know if I'm breaking the forum guidelines with such tangents.

The beauty of Viz is (or was) how it can be grossly and hilariously offensive towards public figures while avoiding upsetting minority groups. Probably because the editing team knew it could affect readership numbers if they went down that route even though they themselves happily admit they court controversy and if they received a complaint about something it would encourage them to do it more often.

Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 7th April 2024, 4:51 PM

The beauty of Viz is (or was) how it can be grossly and hilariously offensive towards public figures while avoiding upsetting minority groups. Probably because the editing team knew it could affect readership numbers if they went down that route even though they themselves happily admit they court controversy and if they received a complaint about something it would encourage them to do it more often.

View original

Well, Viz did have a story called 'The Thieving Gypsy Bastards', for which they issued a 'cut out and keep apology' for in a later issue!

Funnily enough when I just googled it to refresh my memory, one of the first things that came up was page 2 of this very forum thread, where it'd been mentioned (in 2009!) https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/15484/2/

Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 7th April 2024, 4:51 PM

The beauty of Viz is (or was) how it can be grossly and hilariously offensive towards public figures while avoiding upsetting minority groups.

View original

Well said.

They well and truly, once and for all, skewered that Hitler feller (Godwin's Law results from recurrently convergent semantic schemas. In this case I think Viz started it) in the Meinkampfervan, in the comic that half-rhymes with Tacky Face-zits, having the initials W.R. (The Comic Strip That Must Not Be Named? Ooh-err... (I'm such a softly-softly, tready-lightly, sensitive ponce that I can't even bring myself to write "Wacky Racists", unless it's double bagged by parentheses)) All the Adolf clones will be turning in their Amazonian bunkered cryo-chambers (Who puts a dictionary in the freezer?). Or did Viz's association with fast vehicles only serve to glamourise fascist dictatorships? Another apology could be in order from the head wonks at Viz... Better late than never.

(Disclosure: I am a Caucasian(word auto-capitalised, not by me) male, who only listens to indie music in my bedroom and that is the only perspective I can ever bring to the arts or cyber-discussions. That's enough about me. TMI. Yuck. P.S. I have never bought a copy of Viz... (Ed: "Boo! Hiss!") Also, naturally I do interpret it as an instance of cultural erasure, that the racist comic strip, that I have only vaguely described, is indicated to NOT have anything to do with Viz. This is a classic example of the imagination of an individual defeated by faceless sheeple (nun intendid) kow-towing to rigorously established cold hard facts. You could have humoured me by falsifying a page from a backissue (lumbar problems from snogging sheep again?) of the magazine... But, in actuality, I should take my troth to another forum and stop clogging up (Dutch plumbers? "Sorry, mate, it's clogged again...") this one. Someone else might tend to this embarrassing artefact of memory. Apologies for all that).

Quote: a plate @ 7th April 2024, 5:04 PM

'cut out and keep apology'

View original

Definitely Tarby is talking about the BEAUTY of Viz, past and present. Should we instead be appreciating the RUTHLESS EFFICIENCY and SELECTIVE APPLICATION OF STANDARDS of the Viz propaganda-machine, as demonstrated by that eternally insensitive pee-take? It was probably more efficient to exact cleansing of racialistical material from Viz, because there are simply too many meta-races and supra-ethnicities to take into account. Family heritage is always a can-of-worms, especially if you're a worm who lives near an angling club. Plus, who in their right mind wants to wipe their arse using a rag containing a thousand eyes of foreign (whatever that means in a globalised world?) faces peering out from it? Not I, nor any honourable Viz subscriber, nor anyone else visiting this website presumably! Clean your bottom with a clear conscience. Thus, with this candid kernel of truth, we find core veracious beauty. (Never-you-mind that it is financially convenient, in terms of ink, for Viz to make the stars of their pages as pasty as their shut-in readers, who subconsciously recognise themselves reflected in the tint-free protagonists. This creates a synergy of mutual sympathy. Poor economising Viz. Poor essentialising readership. It's the marriage of white-washed puritanical and picante Dionysian sensibilities to achieve the compromise of the line-of-byootee. Then we get to the double-standard of when back-catalogues of Viz are sent abroad to countries where they don't have any toilet-paper, in those shoeboxes at Christmas, where citizens are only-too-happy to tidy-up after a number-two with anaemic scraps of page-bound depictions of 'western' corporealities. When will this madness end? This kind of thing doesn't happen to Granta.)

Here's to the principled progress of society.

In summation, you wouldn't tell someone to eat yellow snow because that would be a massively inconvenient waste of time if there's already a load of pristine powder around to chow on; you wouldn't make pantomime rip-off of a show called twankety-plank, because there's already a perfectly good one called blankety-blank; Viz knows how to be proper, sensible and upright, in a world of accumulating, nebulous PR pitfalls.

Those poor gypsies, I hope they're alright.

(Ok, I'm just stepping out to the shop to buy my first copy of Viz...)

Quote: ARS @ 7th April 2024, 2:57 PM

That problem can be addressed by introducing two characters to the mag.

View original

I assumed you were talking about Viz as this is a Viz thread and you said 'to the mag'. I wasn't being critical of your character creations.

Don't bother buying Viz - It's not as funny as it used to be.

Quote: Definitely Tarby @ 7th April 2024, 9:53 PM

I wasn't being critical of your character creations.

View original

Thank goodness for that. They wouldn't stand up to criticality. If anyone were to be critical of them, the characters' abstract concepts might implode into a dimensionless anti-space. Though such a result of that digital trial would spare them the prospective fate of becoming published provincial potty pulp, if you will...

...think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Quelqu'un a envie d'une pinte?

Normally I would, but I've spent all my pocket money on the latest edition of Viz.

Quote: ARS @ 8th April 2024, 11:11 PM

Normally I would, but I've spent all my pocket money on the latest edition of Viz.

View original

Sorry, typo and omission... That's supposed to read "Norma Li [the fresh recruit to the Viz editing team]? [I don't/can't discriminate, So, yes, of course] I would... But [also, did you notice that the exotic sirens] Ivy Zbent, Alma Pock-Keate [and] Moon Ni all feature in the latest edition of Viz? Besides that, she [Norma Li] wouldn't touch me with the help of a large Pole! Which is a missed opportunity at job creation for at least one of our friends from a hard working immigrant community [Fnarr fnarr - ambiguous translation - fragment; consider revising... Can you tell [Kanye Tell? Ain't that Yeezy's new hip-hop-opera about following though in his white trecksoot buttumz, whilst performing that famous trick where he farts immediately above his son's head?] that I teach evening classes in English as a second language [it's always sensible to carry a spare - reminders getting tyresome?], at the MS Word Academy of Exceptional Petulance (Motto: "Clippy Says Relax", next to the Old Shift Keys Pub) with most case study sentences being drawn directly from between the inky sheets of the notorious V.I.Z? For my sins, dear reader, I do... [FACT CANNOT BE VERIFIED]].

Too much about myself and not the literature again. Don't mistake me for a Viz character! Chortle.

Yours eff-feck-chunally
Mr Higgin Bleacher the Pissed Up Pidgin Teacher

And if Viz were truly noble (or interested in appeasing reputable NGOs) they'd feature characters that appeal to human universals, like say Walter Pellier the Water Sommelier and his arch enemy Silly Sophie Werther the Illicit Resevoir Siphoner, or the Adventures of Helen Skelton the Anatomist's Skeleton or... Twa Noomskulls, about the Geordie brain cells that get lost when on a pub session and have to rub themselves together to stay warm... or Bertha Cannel the Wino Gyno; Tipsy before the Birth Canal; Half Cut in time for the C-Section (of course performed with a cork screw). Now I'm almost fresh out of ideas (Ed: "You think you nearly embody the fact that Will Smith is publicly coming to terms with being gay...? Also, there's no way you're getting printed. Sorry") Or... Five Finger Discount, the light fingered dyslexic disco enthusiast aristocrat everyone loves to hate. Or... Two, Wise, One Mouth about the infant who philosophises (terribly) about the World, but always ends up looking like a sucker (for a teat). Or... No Homo Erectus, the prehistoric man's man who just can't get it up (lazy writing). Or... The Sun, a celestial body at the centre of a planetary system that dreams of having daily newspapers named after itself... some sunny day! Or... Atom Ant, the lilliputian synth-pop-star turned particle-physicist.

These suggestions are only adding to the current atmosphere of malaise around Viz, as described by Definitely Tarby.

Quote: a plate @ 7th April 2024, 5:04 PM

Well, Viz did have a story called 'The Thieving Gypsy Bastards', for which they issued a 'cut out and keep apology' for in a later issue!

Funnily enough when I just googled it to refresh my memory, one of the first things that came up was page 2 of this very forum thread, where it'd been mentioned (in 2009!) https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/15484/2/

View original

Just found it along with the apology on-line. Pretty mild in terms of offensiveness and the ending was a bit weak which is surprising for such an early issue. Makes me wonder if some stories were rushed to meet publication deadlines which would explain how they can start off promising and fizzle out.

'cut out and keep' Good old Viz giving the veiled middle finger.

There is a documentary about Viz on radio 4extra tonight

Or on BBC sounds

See. All the puerile childish things - and Mrs Brady.