Naughty Nigel & The Imaginatively-Titled Comic

Here's a fairly "unique" title - from the publishers of the Sunday Sport (when it was all about alien loveslime killing petunias or the Loch Ness Monster being a Nazi U-boat, rather than the softcore tabloid it is today). It's the Sunday Sport Adult Celebrity Comic!

The first issue there's from 1997, so it's fairly late to the party in terms of jumping on Viz's bandwagon, but it DOES include work from some VERY talented/famous comics-folk. Comics-folk you wouldn't usually expect to draw smutty stuff. Ignore the labels at the bottom of this post if you want a surprise. But then, if you're under eighteen or at work, maybe you should just read the labels anyway. This IS the Sport after all, so be warned...

Honestly? I was expecting the absolute worst of the worst when I first got this comic. Even worse than Smut. The comic's slapped-together title just reeks of laziness and "That'll do"-ness - the word "comic" is even written in comic sans! Oh how my expectations were disintegrated. On the very first page of the very first issue... Blimey, is that Steve Bright?

It's not signed, but if it isn't Brighty it's a highly-skilled ghost artist. I'm more leaning toward the "Yep, definitely him" side, as who else do we have here? Nigel Parkinson, that's who. And he draws the bulk of the stuff in here. Some of it's good, some of it's not nice at all, but it's all signed at least.

For a start, here's Road Rage Ron's two stories from the two issues that I have:

Not exactly a good story, but it LOOKS good, which is more than can be said for most of the other Viz wannabes. And Nigel carries on, with Fat Cats:

The Commuter:

Horny Bloke, which is more along the lines of what I was expecting from the Sunday Sport Adult Celebrity Comic (read: utter trash, although that's possibly a fair parody of most of the Sport's regular audience):

Piss Artist:

And its sequel, Piss Artists (plural!):

Here's Mr. Parkinson's four-page, full colour, Spice Girl-parody extravaganza, from the first issue:

Issue 2 has the similarly-structured Babe Watch, which just might be the worst comic I've ever read - it seems some speech bubbles got missed out during production, not that your average Sport reader would notice something like that:

Okay, I like the punch-line on that one.

Last bit of Parkinson's tomfoolery before moving on, is Punters, featuring a female judge behaving exactly as you'd expect one to:

That one's from the second issue - in the first issue Punters was drawn by... Nick Brennan!

Nick Brennan's other strip for the SSACC is the charmingly-titled Blonde Bint:

The titular heroine of that particular strip may look familiar to Beano readers:

No wonder Daisy's got no time for Ernest - she's too busy blackmailing celebrities!

Outside of all the Parkinson strips and porn adverts, there's plenty of other fairly good stuff on offer here. The ever-present Nigel Maughan, for instance:

Then there's the vile Father Upp, by someone called Nicko (can't figure out what his full name is). Even the higher-up folk at the Sport had the decency to censor whatever Father Upp's doing to that poor lass's ear:

We also have this odd little story - it's not signed but I KNOW I've seen this artist somewhere else before - anyone? It's called The Menace That Stalks Our Streets:

Next up is the disgusting Ben Bedwetter, who'd fit in happily with the characters of The Bog Paper. It's credited to someone called Jools, and again, I recognise the style but can't place it. Has a bit of a European/birthday card feel to it. But that's besides the point - Ben Bedwetter remains one of the ONLY comic characters to bring me near to physical sickness (yellow urine does that to me, it seems). Here's both of his adventures:

Elsewhere we have strips and features of varying quality - a football story, a Star Trek parody, a comic about the sexual adventures of Saddam and Gadaaffi, several pages of celebrity photos with "funny" speech bubbles attached. None of these were worth the time and effort that scanning them would involve, in all honesty.

Overall though, Sunday Sport Adult Celebrity Comic was a nice surprise, sort of. I'll leave you with one final strip, credited to George Nicholas and Norris Tantamount (I suspect these may be pseudonyms). It's that old favourite trope of Viz-a-likes, the "naughty children's toy" - Tripod Ted. It's more disturbing than anything else:

That'll do, Ted.