Nasty little skank

Now here's an interesting one - a race-based comic. Not as in who-can-run-fastest but as in the "race" term that separates folk by their country of origin. This one here's made by and for British folk of Jamaican descent, and it's... not that bad really. It's called Skank, by the way, and it's from 1994-ish.

It's still bad, but nowhere near the levels of badness seen in Smut or Jockstrap. The covers don't do Skank many favours, mind - seeing these in a shop (or indeed, on my bedroom floor), you'd be forgiven for thinking they were a "different" kind of publication:

So, read on for humour based around drugs, violence, sex, homophobia, xenophobia, racial supremacy, rape, wife-beating and orally-satisfying cars, if that's your thing...

Something appalling

Here we have it now - POSSIBLY the absolute worst out of all the Viz knock-offs. There's still a couple of contenders in my possession, and there's bound to be about a hundred and twelve others that I don't yet know about, but for now, this one's pretty dreadful.

From that Scotland place, claiming to be "Scotland's very own adult comic" - no acknowledgement for the superd Electric Soup there (soon to be "covered" on this very blog).

In terms of "history", Jockstrap's a fairly late arrival to the rude comics party, being from around 1998-ish (no dates are given, but frequent mention is made of the World Cup in France - helps to pay attention to football sometimes). The paper's nice and shiny, but that's about the only praise this one'll be getting. No artists are credited either (if you could really call them that), and no jokes or structure is to be found either. Just so you know all that before carrying on...

Ray Harryhausen, RIP

We're running out of heroes here...

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...

Adroit - "Clever or skillful in using the hands or mind", apparently.

Summed up by fellow rude comic "connoisseur" Mr. Turnock thusly:

"Hell's teeth, I only ever saw this once, when I was on holiday in Lowestoft! I always used to check out local newsagent's shops when I went on holiday and the only thing I remember about this was its title, so the contents couldn't have been that memorable."

Well I've found an issue of it, and it's certainly... different?

Straight away, the cover's different to the usual Viz-a-like "bunch of characters standing around swearing at each other", so it's a start. Let's see what's inside, yes?

Getting Ziggy With It

A general warning before going any further - Ziggy may well be the most "offensive" out of the whole lot of the Viz clones. Within its pages is humour based around AIDS, cot death, child abuse, the IRA, racism, mental illness, genocide... Pretty much any "taboo" subject you can think of, Ziggy went there and rubbed it in your face until you were unable to think about anything else for days afterward. Vile and obscene and - in the right frame of mind - hilarious (in a childish sort of way).

But there's bound to be some fun stuff in there too, so read on, if you're up for it.

Just saying, like.

This isn't a political blog, nor is it all that much concerned with current affairs. But wouldn't it be great if she'd've been drowned in milk or sealed into a coal mine or something?

Ah, Poot! is here

Bit of a delay in proceedings there, sorry about that. Accidentally got a "social life" for a few weeks, whoops. Anyway, enough of that sort of nonsense, here's another rude comic from a couple of decades ago. This time it's a GOOD one, and it's called Poot!

Birmingham-based, this one - done mostly by a couple of students from 1985 to 1990. Tim Westall and Jon Marks are their names. It's a bit of an odd one, is Poot!. Very silly, almost childish, but definitely a refreshing change from the violence and misogyny-fuelled Smut. As such, it stands out from most of the Viz clones in that it's still an enjoyable read today (as long as your senses are  subscribed to a certain form of humour).

The fun begins by clicking below:

Charity gubbins

Just taking a short breather from the Viz knock-offs, just for a moment. That Smut thing was depressing, and I've spent most of today reading Ziggy, which has got me verging on the suicidal (you'll see what I mean when I eventually get around to covering that one).

The "breather" is for a reason other than reminding myself that good comics exist - for on this approaching Friday, it's Red Nose Day. Raising money for all sorts of good causes (and ignoring the salaries taken by BBC folk), it's mostly a "fun"-based charity. This year has the Beano getting involved, and to be frank, it looks horrendous. Jessie bleeding J, One Direction, Olly bloody Murs, Harry Hill and David Tennant all done in Nigel Parkinson's caricature style.

Yech! Is this REALLY how far imagination can take the Beano these days? Just sticking the obnoxious faces of Saturday evening's television into the otherwise wonderful worlds of Dennis, Minnie and the rest of them? Why not celebrating the medium itself and doing something special with regards to UK comics as a whole? Well, probably because hardly anybody cares about comics anymore, but still.

Let's go back 22 years instead, and take a look at something that seems like it's had a LOT of effort put into it - the Comic Relief Comic.

Comic Relief has several different faces to it - there's the BBC show, in which folk from all over television-town come together and make tits of themselves. There's Sport Relief, where sports personalities do similar. And now there's the Beano, but instead of bringing together a load of comics folk, they just got the X-Factor crowd instead.

In 1991, people DID buy and enjoy comics a lot more than they do now, and of course that means there was more of them around - hence we have this wonderful publication, bringing together DC Thomson's Beano and Dandy crew, along with Judge Dredd, Doctor Who, Dan Dare, Captain Britain, Superman, Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hunt Emerson, the Young Ones, Dr. Strange, Iron Man, the cast of Fawlty Towers, Edmund Blackadder, the Sleeze Brothers, and hundreds more. All framed around a central, somewhat bizarre Christmas Carol-esque story about red noses conspiring to turn the world population's faces into doorknobs or something.

Want to read the whole thing? Go ahead then, just click on the "Read more" button...