Comic Book / Viz

Britain's most famous "Adult" comic (it is the only non-porn title to be considered an "adult publication" by the British Professional Publishers Association), Viz began as a satirical fanzine in Newcastle and has grown hugely since.

Many of the characters and stories are deliberately exaggerated stereotypes, and there is a solid core of people in the UK who can't get enough of the sight of the word "fuck" in a talk balloon in what looks like a children's comic.

A typical issue will contain a few strips that appear in virtually every issue, a few more that are less frequent, and a few one-official strips that only appear once. The one-offs often feature celebrities or historical figures in ludicrous or obscene situations.

At its best, Viz can be well-written, witty and occasionally thought-provoking despite being crude and raunchy. At its worst, it's just crude and raunchy with little to no redeeming qualities. Think of this comic as MAD for adults or Cracked if it went to places that MAD didn't dare.

During the 1980s, Viz was repeatedly threatened with prosecution by DC Thomson, the Scottish publishers of famous British children's comics The Beano, The Dandy and The Broons, for copyright infringement over their coarse parodies of DC Thomson characters. Viz retaliated by printing a one-off strip featuring "DC Thompson", a cartoon Scotsman obsessed with intellectual property. DC Thomson responded with an issue of the Dandy that parodied the "war" in a strip featuring their recurring Scots vs. Northumbrians characters "The Jocks and the Geordies". More seriously, the publishers of Viz were threatened with criminal prosecution for incitement to racial hatred in 1990 because of the content of a one-off strip called "The Thieving Gypsy Bastards". Ironically, the Romani man who tried to sue the Viz for this comic was later found guilty of handling stolen property. They had also printed a strip called "The Nice Honest Gypsies" on the very next page.

Not to be confused with North American anime and manga publisher/distributor Viz Media.

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Viz provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: There was a strip whose protagonist was cursed with the power of being a "Tranny Magnet". Much to his frustration, men in drag (transvestites) just wouldn't leave him alone, and he got no attention at all from cisgender women.
• Abusive Offspring: Timmy "Spoilt Bastard" Timpson spends every strip insulting, bullying, manipulating and/or blackmailing his docile mother into getting whatever he wants.
• Abusive Parents: Victorian Dad, Mutha and Fatha Bacon.
  • Parodied in "Robbie on the Run" where a plucky orphan boy runs away from home because his foster mother is using him as "slave labour." She's actually a normal person who just asked him to help her with small chores.
• Affectionate Parody: Many strips are shout-outs to characters in classic British comics. For example, Biffa Bacon is loosely based on the Dandy character Bully Beef, while Billy the Fish is a parody of football-based comic strips like Roy of the Rovers. Some Viz characters are homages to the once-common "unusual child with special powers", such as the Beano character Billy Whizz (a boy capable of incredible running speed) — the twist being that the Viz child characters have spectacular but generally useless powers (such as Johnny Fartpants, whose 'power' is epic levels of flatulence). The spat with D.C. Thompson was over the Viz bunch including a D.C. Thompson character in the background as a cameo which was never intended to be anything other than recognition of what had inspired that particular strip. With the demise of children's comics in Britain (only The Beano remains) the source material is becoming more obscure, putting some Viz comic strips at risk of succumbing to Parody Displacement.
• The Alcoholic: The humour of Eight Ace, The Drunken Bakers, and Brown Bottle revolves around the characters' alcoholism.
  • One of Roger Mellie's many vices. On one occasion in 2006, while requiring a liver transplant (due to chronic alcoholism), he became a hit-and-run driver: he ran over and killed a motorcyclist without stopping, later receiving the dead man's liver for himself, then celebrating the successful liver transplant with a booze-up at the nearest pub.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: Dirtyarse, who first appeared in the Sid the Sexist strips but later stole Ivan Jelical's girlfriend, seems to exemplify this trope.
• Alliterative Name: Loads. Sid the Sexist (full name: Sidney Smutt), Biffa Bacon, Major Misunderstanding, Lawrence Logic, Billy Britain and Timmy Timson (a.k.a. Spoilt Bastard) to name a few.
• All Just a Dream: Happened to Millie Tant once — she grew to be 50-ft tall, squashed Sid the Sexist by treading on him and went on a King Kong-style rampage against the patriarchy, destroying several buildings ... only to find that this was all a dream she had after fainting while on a visit to a model village. Also, any time Sid the Sexist appears to have finally got lucky turns out to be one of these.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: "The Modern Parents"
• Always Identical Twins: Subverted in "Garry and Barry the Identical Twins" where a kid believes a tree is his identical twin brother.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Malcolm and Cressida, Mutha and Fatha Bacon, Sid The Sexist's mother, the titular character in the "Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em?" strip.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Some long-running strips will occasionally switch focus to a supporting character - such as Ciderwoman (the enemy of Brown Bottle), Cedric Soft (a kid frequently bullied by Biffa Bacon) or Fixed Odds Betty (a customer of the businessman from "We ..."
• Animated Adaptation
  • Sid The Sexist has a few animated shorts.
  • There's more. Sweary, corrupt TV presenter Roger Mellie, The Man on The Telly also had a series (NSFW). The voice of Roger may sound familiar.
  • Billy the Fish. Observe.
  • Not forgetting the claymation version of The Fat Slags (NSFW footage here) over a decade before the film version.
  • And now there's an online adaptation produced by Channel 4.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Male Online is the anthropomorphic personification of Britain's very right-wing, moral-panic prone, and hypocritically pervy Daily Mail tabloid newspaper.
• Anti-Humor: Mr Logic from Viz was once best man at a wedding. Knowing that he would need some jokes for his speech, and being Mr Logic, he came up with these belters:
  1) What is the difference between a gnu and a gnostic? A gnu is a large even-toed ungulate native to the African savannah, also known as a wildebeest; a gnostic is a member of a first-century religious movement that advanced the moral primacy of the spiritual world above the material.
  2) Did you hear about the Irish hydrometer? It didn't know how to measure the moistness of the atmosphere.
• Antiquated Linguistics:
  • A main comic element of "Raffles the Gentleman Thug" is the rewriting of familiar coarse exclamations in an antiquated style.
  • Also Victorian Dad.
  • Mr Logic. Most of the humour comes from the fact what he says is so outdated or technical-sounding that no one else can understand him.
• Apathetic Clerk: One issue had a comic strip titled Lazy Disinterested 16 Year Old Shoe Shop Girl, featuring a 16 year old cashier who showed more interest in her mobile phone and blowing bubbles with her bubble gum than she did in serving customers.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the "Eurosidney" episode of the Sid The Sexist cartoon, Sid makes the comment that "Only queers, lasses and southerners" don't go on holiday, to which his friend only disputes lasses.
• Artistic Licence – Physics: At play with Terry Fuckwit, when things often take a turn for the bizarre due to Terry's extreme idiocy causing him to forget the laws of physics, which as a result no longer apply in his world.
• Ascended Extra: Meddlesome Ratbag started out as a one-off character in a Gilbert Ratchet strip, appearing for just three panels where she mistook Gilbert's Guy Fawkes doll for a beggar and forced a policeman to arrest the Guy, thus being something of a Distaff Counterpart to Major Misunderstanding. This spun off into her own strip where she basically takes Disproportionate Retribution up to eleven.
• Ascended Meme: The internet-ism "fap" being included in Roger's Profanisaurus.
  • In an example from the comic itself Finbarr Saunders' catchphrase of "fnarr fnarr" is a popular response in the UK to double entendres, even by people who don't know the character.
• Asian Store-Owner: Mr. Patel, the turbaned and ever-smiling owner of "Patel's 24-Hour Nanomart", where Eight Ace gets his beer from. He seems a nice guy, although some might look askance at someone so willing to sell cheap booze to an obvious alcoholic.
• Ass Shove:
  • The "Tommy 'Banana' Johnson" strip always ends with Tommy's giant banana being shoved somewhere painful.
  • Sid the Sexist is sometimes on the receiving end of this as well — for example, when he became a builder and started to use this position to make lewd comments at female passers-by (as per the common stereotype of builders), one of them took exception and shoved some tools and a couple of bricks where the sun doesn't shine.
• As the Good Book Says...: Parodied in the Ivan Jelical strips, as the Bible quotes he uses are obviously made-up (examples include the books of "Palpitations", "Testicles", etc).
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Lidl Richard, who is frequently sent by his wife to buy groceries but constantly distracted by special offers and returns home with junk they don't need.
• Autocannibalism: Miserly Norbert Colon was tempted by a special offer on tongue at his local butcher but was too stingy even to pay the reduced price. Instead, he had the idea of saving money by cutting off his own tongue and then cooking and eating that. The plan proved less than successful when he found that he couldn't taste it.
• Awful Wedded Life:
  • Mutha and Fatha Bacon constantly verbally and physically abuse each other.
  • Eight Ace's wife berates him for his alcoholism and usually throws him out of the house in each strip.
  • One of the Mrs Brady, Old Lady strips revealed that she wasn't actually a widow; her husband moved to Carlisle to get away from her, as he "couldn't stand the old cow".
  • The Male Online endlessly rants at his wife Beryl, often calling her a "woke traitor" and similar, or humiliating her in public. This often drives her to physically lash out at him or retaliate in some other way (like locking him in the cellar, or drugging him just so he'll stop bothering her, or on several occasions killing him).
  • The couple in Whoops Aisle Apocalypse, who are rarely seen doing anything other than arguing over the husband's obsession with the "Whoops Aisle" (discount aisle of the supermarket.)
• The Baby Trap:
  • At least one woman pulled this on Sid the Sexist despite them not actually having sex.
  • The title character of "Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em?" tried this on one of her boyfriends so she could marry him and get her hands on his pension. Her son can't believe the guy is stupid enough to fall for this, since she's well into her sixties.
• Baby's First Words: In "The Modern Parents", Malcolm and Cressida want their baby Guinivere's first word to be "dolphin", but (thanks to big brother Tarquin) Guinivere's first word ends up being "football".
• Badass Biker: Dirtyarse is so unbelievably badass that his mere appearance causes Sid the Sexist to literally crap himself. The crew who hang around with him is also full of hard cases; the women in attendance beat Sid viciously and carve words into his face. Dirtyarse is also capable of getting Ivan Jelical's hardcore Evangelical Christian girlfriend to not only abandon her abstinence and sexual virtue pledges (and her clothes) instantly, but even abandon her religion entirely to take off on the back of Dirtyarse's ride.
• Bad Boss:
  • The employer in "My Workfare Lady" exploits a workfare scheme (where unemployed people are required to "earn" welfare payments by working for an employer that doesn't pay them) in order to get free labour and sexually abuse young women.
  • The businessman from "We ..." is this in any strip where he is shown to have employees.
  • Mickey Wonga in "Charlie and the Sportswear Factory", whose factory is essentially a giant sweatshop where workers can be fired just for speaking to someone or going to the toilet. He is last seen shocking an employee with an electric cattle prod after they have a heart attack on the job.
• Bad Liar: Aldridge Prior the Hopeless Liar. Aldridge is a compulsive liar who lies about absolutely everything, however unbelievable his lies might be. This goes up as far as claiming that the Nolan Sisters live in his fridge.
• Basement-Dweller: Despite being a grown man, Sid the Sexist still lives with his mum.
• Bat Deduction: Grassy Knowlington, a parody of Conspiracy Theorists, takes this up to eleven.
• Batman Parody: Mild-mannered millionaire Craven Adams and his ward Benny Hedges ^note  a nod to two cigarette brands, Craven A and Benson & Hedges have secret identities — they are in fact Tabman and Benny the Boy Lighter, the 80-a-day crime fighting duo ^note  a "tab" being Northern English slang for a cigarette . Who solve the case despite spending most of the time wheezing and coughing as a result of their heavy smoking habit.
• Bedmate Reveal: One Sid the Sexist strip has the lads go out for Sid's cousin's stag night in Blackpool. Everyone gets progressively more drunk and at the end of the evening Sid storms off to find a woman while his cousin is handcuffed, naked and protesting, to a street lamp. The next day Baz reads a newspaper with the headline "Youth Dies of Exposure in Blackpool". Sid, meanwhile, wakes up with a hangover and sees a head of curly blonde hair in the bed next to him. Thinking he has finally "pulled", he asks his "date" if she fancies another ride and is terrified when the owner of the blonde hair is revealed to be a rather large man, who calls him "Sidney, my love" and tells him to "roll over".
• Bee-Bee Gun: "Barnaby's Spelling Bees", whose schtick is that he has a swarm of killer bees that attack on command... so long as their target begins with "B". Hilarity Ensues as normal.
• Beware the Silly Ones: In a 2012 issue, one of the Pathetic Sharks actually killed and ate someone. While trying to eat a toffee. And he had to wash his mouth out.
• Big Ball of Violence
• Big Beautiful Women: The Fat Slags. It might not sound like it, but The Fat Slags is all about two heavily overweight women who nonetheless have sex several times a day, with a different man almost every time.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Defied by Baz in the Fat Slags strips. He is under-endowed but remains married and shags San regularly. Not that she's fussy.
• Bigotry Exception: The Mrs. Brady strip has a Running Gag in which she will say something incredibly racist and then almost immediately fulsomely praise her (never seen) GP, "Dr. Chakraborty".
• Black Comedy: Many, many examples across all features of the magazine. Some of the best remembered examples include a strip about serial killers Harold Shipman and Fred West living on the same street and competing to be the first to murder a new neighbour; and a spoof advert for "Mummy, This Lemonade Tastes Funny!", a collectible china doll that comes with a bottle of bleach.
• Black Comedy Rape/Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Has been known to happen to men who turn down one of the Fat Slags.
• Bladder of Steel: One Sid the Sexist strip has Sid and his mates gannin' doon the pub to neck a few pints o' Broon. The lads are seen in the pub chugging down pints of beer — eight or nine each, by the end — and getting visibly more uncomfortable as their bladders fill. But their Code of the Lad dictates that you hold it in, and that the first man to crack and run to the bog under the pressure of a very full bladder is, by inexorable logic, a poof and a lassie who cannae hold it in. All four are seen playing a desperate game of Bladder Roulette, each praying that one of the others cracks first, so he can take all the censure, allowing the rest to go for a piss with their honour intact. And all the time they are trying to put on poker faces and shrug off painfully full bladders as if this is nothing...
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: A "Nobby's Piles" strip has a substance called 'Devil's Brand Fiery Habanero Pepper Sauce Bang! Bang! Molto Explosivo'. In a dark cupboard. Next to the pile cream.
• Born in the Wrong Century:
  • Victorian Dad seemingly believes he is in the Victorian period and his strict ways cause a lot of embarrassment to his children.
  • Major Misunderstanding is a conservative war veteran who wishes for the good old days — but is evidently senile, frequently mistaking something for something else which he then criticises for being too politically correct.
  • Jack Black and His Dog Silver is similar to 1960s adventure comics, but the time period changes depending on the appearance.
• Born Lucky: Spawny Get embodies this trope, typically having a piece of moderate bad luck that causes a piece of very, very good luck. In one strip, he is carrying a ten-pound note into a bookmaker's to place a bet when he slips on a turd; he lets go of the money and yells "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt!" The ten-pound note flies into the hand of the bookmaker, who assumes Spawny Get is placing a bet on a horse called "Oh bugger, I've skidded on a dog dirt". Which wins. At odds of 1,000-1.
  • Lucky Frank, a character similar to Spawny Get, also fits the trope.
• Bothering by the Book: Mr. Logic combines this with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. An example being the time he visits a pound shop and is told by the shop assistant that "everything's a pound". He immediately assumes that he can buy the entire contents of the shop for a pound, rather than paying a pound for each individual item. He is told of his mistake, and then gets confused and tries to buy the cash register for a pound, only to be told it's not stock. He subsequently explains what the shop assistant should have said to him, before getting carried out by security.
• Bouncer: Norman the Doorman is such an extreme example that he refuses to let his wife open their fridge.
  • In the one-off strip Jason and the Lagernauts, the final enemy that the titular Lagernauts must face is a seven-headed bouncer, with each head shouting different stereotypical reasons for a bouncer to refuse entry to a nightclub.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: John Fardell's most frequent strips, "The Modern Parents" and "The Critics" are caricatures of this type of person. The protagonists of both strips are smug, affluent cultural leftists with shallow, ignorant political views, who are actually huge social and intellectual snobs despite their professed ideals.
• Brainy Brunette: Baz's wife Thelma in "The Fat Slags" fits this trope in appearance at least. Strangely enough, most of the time in "The Fat Slags" Tracey is almost the Brainy Brunette by default. She's no intellectual, but she's much smarter than Sandra, and appears to have more common sense than Baz.
  • Mind you, there are things growing on damp bread which are smarter than Sandra and Tracey put together...
• Bridezilla: Wendy Haystacks, who appeared in a Sid The Sexist strip. Sid, who'd been on a couple of dates with her, tried to ask her for a blow-job but ended up accidentally proposing instead. Wendy quickly became a very horrifying Bridezilla, verging back and forth between Sickeningly Sweet and Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, while Sid became a Henpecked Husband even before they have got married (which they did not, as he decided to run away instead).
• Britain Is Only London: This attitude is satirized in "The Critics", who are completely ignorant of the UK outside of London, to the extent they sometimes don't seem aware it exists at all. Even when they are aware, they believe large cities such as Liverpool or Newcastle are small villages and are very snobby and condescending about them despite admitting to knowing nothing about them. And of course, on the rare occasions they venture outside of London, their attempts to "go native" by adopting various outdated rural stereotypes make them look like complete lunatics.
• British Teeth: Mercilessly turned on its head in a one-off strip called "Crystal's Big Chance". This was about an American girl who wanted to become a cheerleader but was regarded as hideously ugly because one of her front teeth was just slightly out of line. She eventually got her happy ending and was hailed as beautiful at the end despite the enormous braces she now wore.
• Bungling Inventor: Gilbert Ratchet. Played with, in that quite a few of his machines have a harmful mode that he's deliberately given them for no explicable reason, but to which the machine will inevitably be switched.
• Butch Lesbian: Millie Tant, a strident feminist who has all the stereotypical butch features.
  • "Miserable Butch Bus Driver Lady", a grumpy and unhelpful butch bus driver.
• Butt-Monkey: Sting and Bono are often ridiculed for being egotistical pretentious hypocrites who claim to help the poor whilst spending a lot of money on extravagant luxuries. In the 1980s, Shakin' Stevens was the Butt-Monkey but he is considered a 'has been' nowadays, he is usually brought up in articles when someone wants to milk their connection to a minor celebrity.
  • Morrissey is a more recent addition, joining Sting and Bono in a troika of celebrity bell-ends.
• Calling Me a Logarithm:
  Sid the Sexist: Well, I must admit...
  Big Dave: DIVVUN CAAL ME MUSTARD MITT! [punch]
• Calling the Old Man Out: This happens with a lot of characters. Spoilt Bastard is constantly insulting his mother in order to get what he wants. Biffa Bacon often insults his parents and gets beaten up by them. In The Modern Parents, Tarquin is always insulting his parents because of their hypocritical beliefs.
• Captain Ersatz:
  • Biffa Bacon is a parody of Bully Beef from The Dandy. His mother, who is rough-looking and masculine, bears a striking resemblance to Desperate Dan.
  • Spoilt Bastard is similar to a comic strip called "Mummy's Boy" which appeared in Monster Fun and later Buster.
• Casanova Wannabe: Sid the Sexist, who, while not wearing a leisure suit, is very much a virgin despite his claims to the contrary and his numerous attempts to change that situation. His friends could also possibly come under the same category — while they have occasionally been shown having success with women, usually they appear to look up to Sid for his 'studliness'. One strip even featured the brother of one of Sid's friends, who wore a leisure suit and claimed to be a massive hit with the ladies. Sid attempts to one-up him by getting several love bites with the aid of a bicycle pump. He is, of course, caught and mocked by his friends. But then the last panel shows the friend's brother, alone in a tiny bedroom, doing the same trick, surrounded by porn magazines, used tissues, inflatable dolls and other sexual paraphernalia, making him possibly the only character to have ever been made to look even more pathetic and lonely than Sid in the strip.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: Sid the Sexist routinely gets caught in the act; for example, his mates pop round his house on the way to the pub and his mum says he's upstairs in his room "getting ready", following which they go upstairs and walk in on him wanking.
• Celebrity Lie: From 2016 on "Tony Parsehole" was joined by "Pierce Dorgan", a vicious parody of Piers Morgan whose obituaries for celebrities always rapidly devolve into transparently-false boasts about how close he was to the dead person and what great friends he is with other celebrities.
• Celebrity Paradox: In one Paul Whicker strip, the titular tall vicar goes to the park to sit on his favourite bench and get drunk, only to find that it's already occupied ... by two men who are reading about his exploits in Viz. One, who disapproves, thinks that this is an accurate social commentary on the church (what with the Rev. Paul's violence, racism, etc) — while the other loves it, thinking he's a "fukkin magic violent vikka".
• Celebrity Resemblance: In one Sid the Sexist strip, Joe points out that Sid, if he had a new wardrobe and hairstyle, would bear an uncanny resemblance to a pop star and girls would flock to him as a result. So he goes along with this deception to pull women and invites them back to his house for a "rock'n'rurl orgy", only for it to be announced that the pop star in question has come out in the press as gay. The girls are disgusted, only for Sid's homophobia to be exposed when he's chased by gay men who fancy him (or rather, the pop star he's mistaken for).
• Censored Title: The comic has a variety of creative ways to mention strips with sweary titles on the front page, such as Spoonerism, other creative misspellings, and even in a couple of cases Censor Steam.
• Cerebus Syndrome: "George Bestial" began as an occasional one-joke four-panel strip about a guy who looked like the footballer George Best and liked having sex with animals. After Best's real-world death, the strip didn't appear for a while. It then came back as a full-page strip featuring a character who looked a lot less like Best, and whose zoophilia was clearly just the most obvious sign of his pathetic and frightening psychopathy.
• Character Development:
  • Laurie Driver was initially an otherwise normal guy with a compulsion to murder female hitchhikers. More recently, he is portrayed as a generally corrupt person that engages in other criminal activity like smuggling.
  • The Kewl Chix developed from just being airheaded young women, to an exaggerated critique of over-reliance on smartphones and the internet.
  • The Male Online's wife used to be treated as a background character who would wearily put up with him most of the time. Over time she has become a foil who is much more willing to stand up to him; often getting him back in some way (such as anonymously trolling him online), or just snapping and violently attacking him.
• Cheating with the Milkman: In one Postman Plod strip he competes with the milkman over who will have sex with a housewife first, only for the woman's husband to come home when he is trying to have sex with her.
• The Chew Toy:
  • Sid the Sexist invariably ends up in hospital after getting beaten up by the women he tries to hit on.
  • Mr. Snodworthy from Tinribs, who can't seem to last a whole strip without being gruesomely disemboweled.
• Choosy Beggar: At play in an Ivan Jelical strip set at Christmas. A vagrant on the street is looking for food, and finds a leftover kebab in the gutter that's just been pissed on by a cat. He then spots a church offering Christmas dinner for the homeless. Inside, he finds that in order to have the dinner, he must endure the proselytising of Ivan and his friends. So he goes back outside and tucks into the piss-soaked kebab.
• Christianity is Catholic: Parodied in a Goldfish Boy strip, where a hotelier demands that the Reverend Brown, the strip's actual main character perform the last rites on a dying guest. Brown points out that he's a Church of England priest and therefore has no idea how to do the Catholic last rites, but the hotelier is completely unable to grasp this point.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Jack Black, who regularly turns against Aunt Meg and/or PC Brown, and has even callously murdered them (though they are always resurrected in time for the next strip.)
  • The ending of a Big Vern strip is very often triggered by Vern's belief that Ernie and/or Vern's wife has betrayed him to the police.
  • A parody of Rainbow where George, Zippy, and Bungle try to sell each other out to a gang of kidnappers.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Several strips will add new characters who then never reappear. Examples include Spoilt Bastard's stepfather and stepsister (see below) as well as Biffa Bacon's new baby brother and Knacka the dog.
• Classically-Trained Extra: Luvvie Darling presents himself as an A-list actor but is only offered very minor (and ultimately humiliating) roles. His ludicrous ham acting style and overbearing personality result in him gaining only bit (walk-on) parts at best; at worst, his only theatre employment is cleaning the theatre's toilets. When he does get a part, he constantly forgets his lines.
• Cliffhanger Copout: Routinely done deliberately and for laughs in "Billy the Fish". Typically, the villain who is menacing the club will turn out to be a just a cardboard cutout with a tape recorder on the back or that one of the club had arranged for Jeremy Beadle to play a trick on his teammates.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Roger Irrelevant.
• Clothing Switch: In one issue Sandra and Tracey after realising they had only one outfit each, decide to go to a swishing party, where women meet up to exchange clothes as a way of getting different clothes and getting rid of their old ones in one go. However there were no other women as large as Sandra and Tracey, so they had to swap clothes with each other. They then go and get new haircuts to go with their new clothes, and when they come out it looks like they've just swapped hairstyles as well.
  • The artists have admitted that it has sometimes been difficult to tell Sandra and Tracey apart as they look so similar other than their hairstyles. On at least one other occasion Sandra and Tracey were drawn wearing each other's outfits and it wasn't referred to in the strip, so the above example may well be a case of Lampshade Hanging.
  • Sometimes Biffa Bacon's parents have swapped each others clothes and pretended they are each other just because they find it fun to screw with his mind.
• Comically Missing the Point: Letterbocks thrives on this. "These so-called speed bumps are a joke. If anything, they slow you down" and "This evaporated milk is a con. I bought a can and it was completely full" being just two examples.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Cockney Wanker is visually based on the actor and comedian Mike Reid, who tended to play that type of character.
• Composite Character: A 90s strip "The Mrs Brady Bunch" introduced two friends for the title character, Dolly and Ena. After this the Ena character was renamed to Dolly and the original Dolly character was removed. This was likely done to simplify the plots, as Dolly is generally characterised as a Flat Character who always agrees with Mrs Brady's recollections no matter how absurd they may be.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Grassey Knollington. When his dad twisted his ankle on a stray walnut, Grassey realised that it was the work of the Bilderburg Group, and not just some ludicrous "lone nut" theory.
• Content Warnings: All issues bear the warning "not to be sold to children" on the cover.
• Conviction by Contradiction: Regularly parodied in Spot the Clue, supposedly written by a different guest celebrity every month.
  • When Tim Westwood "wrote" the strip, the murderer gave himself away by referring to an album that hadn't been released at the time the strip was set.
  • When David Bellamy "wrote" the strip, the murderer revealed himself by giving a plant's botanical name in capital letters in his speech bubble.
  • When Hugh Scully "wrote" the strip, the thief claimed she had been cleaning an Edwardian bureau at the time of the theft, when the style of carving on the bureau clearly showed it be be from another period.
  • When Albert Camus "wrote" the strip, the murderer's lie was to say he enjoyed life, when in fact the inevitability of death renders everything we do meaningless and absurd.
  • When Alan Sugar "wrote" the strip, the murderer claimed to have sent a message on an Amstrad eMailer, forgetting that Amstrad eMailers are shit and never do what you want them to do.
• Conviction by Counterfactual Clue: Parodied by, among others, Spot the Clue. A whodunnit situation is shown, with the reader being asked to work out who the perpetrator is. Each time the villain is the one who made an innocuous error, ranging from incorrectly describing the era of a piece of furniture, to claiming to have been sending emails on a piece of hardware that everyone knows is too unreliable to work.
• Corrupt Politician: Baxter Basics MP is an extremely amoral and sexually deviant Conservative (and later Labour) MP who first appeared at around the same time as John Major's Back to Basics campaign, and a transparent statement on the hypocrisy of politicians.
• Crappy Carnival: A one-off strip showed Robin Hood and his Merry Men in such a carnival, where Robin futilely tries to win the obviously rigged games because Maid Marion insisted he win the prize cuddly toy for her.
• Crapsack World: Many of the strips comedically tend this way, but Barney Farmer's and Lee Healey's ones ("Drunken Bakers", "Hen Cabin", "George Bestial", "Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em?", the "We..." strips about the balding businessman, "Whoops Aisle Apocalypse", "Robbie's Robot Carer", "The Male Online") are unbelievably bleak. "Foodie Bollocks", "Roy'll Watch EIIR", and "Cop Her Knickers" are less so, but "Roy'll Watch EIIR" often involves unpleasant things happening to the main character and his friend (being beaten by police, left to freeze on the street, etc.) while "Cop Her Knickers" is basically about police sexually harassing an old lady. Most of their one-off strips such as "Out Came Stanley", "Last Tan&Go in Powys", and "Morbid O'Beesley" would fit the trope as well.
  • The one-shot Camberwick Greggs, a parody of the children's show Camberwick Green, was also noted for being exceptionally bleak and lacking the humour found in most strips.
  • Gordon's Grandad, which ended with a young boy devastated by the death of his beloved grandfather.
• Cutting Corners:
  • Frugal Sharkey, whose character reflects the cost of living crisis in the UK.
  • The couple in "Whoops Aisle Apocalypse", who will buy anything - no matter how rancid - from the discount store in their local supermarket just because it's cheap.
• Cyclops: Farmer Palmer is very proud of his cyclops grandson, the result of generations of first-class in-breeding.
• A Day in the Limelight: Mrs. Brady, Old Lady's friend Dolly Earnshaw got her own one-off strip once, The Adventures Of Dolly Earnshaw which consisted of Dolly going to the corner shop to buy a scratchcard.
• Death by Irony: Happens at the end of every Suicidal Sid strip after Sid regains the will to live.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Jack Black is a parody of the Enid Blyton-esque boy detective. Much like The Comic Strip Presents' "Five Go Mad in Dorset'', the strip highlights his negative traits - he's a xenophobic, classist, elitist, amoral bigot who gets well-meaning people, who have done nothing wrong, arrested (or worse) on a minor technicality or obscure law for his own benefit, often with another awful crime being committed right under his nose which he completely fails to notice.
  • Cockney Wanker is a parody of Frank Butcher and Del Boy, albeit with none of the sympathetic traits that made them lovable rogues. An embodiment of everything Northeners hate about Londoners, he's a sexist, racist, nationalist, greedy, wife-beating con man with no regard for others and values money above all else.
• Depraved Kids' Show Host: Roger Mellie, a foul-mouthed alcoholic and perverted TV presenter who in several strips lands a job on kids' TV and inevitably reverts to type in front of the horrified audience.
• Dirty Foreigner: In one strip, a foaming at the mouth rabid dog enters Britain through the then recently opened Channel Tunnel, followed shortly by its French owner, who explains that the dog isn't rabid but ate some soap having mistaken it for cheese, because they don't have soap in France.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Victorian Dad would beat his son and daughter over little offenses that would be seen through his point of view as a big offence in Victorian Times. He once beat his son for Achieving "grade As" in all of his classes just to teach him to "Never rest upon his Laurels" (i.e. be complacent in your success)
• Distaff Counterpart:
  • Terry Fuckwitt, Ratboy and Suicidal Sid have all had girlfriends that look like female versions of themselves with Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. One issue of Spoilt Bastard had his mother dating a man who had a daughter. The daughter was a Spoiled Brat girl named Angelica, and the father was a Spear Counterpart to Spoilt Bastard's mother.
  • Biffa Bacon's father and mother have exactly the same stubble on their faces, and on occasion the artist has accidentally drawn them wearing each others clothing and left it in for comic effect. They both enjoy hurting Biffa and both enjoy blaming him for doing something the other told them to do. The only difference between their personalities is that 'Mutha' tends to be much more violent than 'Fatha'. 'Mutha' is also a past master at hiding in improbably small spaces.
• The Ditz: Sandra in "The Fat Slags" fits this trope well. She can be quite sweet at times, but she is always extremely stupid.
• A Dog Ate My Homework: Neotenous bank manager Playtime Fontayne once used this excuse to explain his failure to deliver a bunch of monthly reports to head office.
• Don't Try This at Home: Jonny Fartpants once worked as a nail gun by having a load of nails inserted anally, which he the farted one-by-one at the relevant target. As the nails were funnelled into his bum, he pointedly warned readers to "be extremely careful when you try this at home".
• Driver of a Black Cab: Cockney Wanker's appearance is based on a combination of a stereotypical London taxi driver. He once took the Knowledge, which included directions from two arbitrary points for Londoners (a straightforward journey) and out-of-towners (Up the M1 to Dundee, and back down again), and being able to do a stream-of-consciousness speech from any topic to "Enoch Powell, send them all back" (known as "The Ignorance").
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: "Drill Sergeant Jumbo", a parody of The Beano's General Jumbo, sees Jumbo ignore a crisis in favour of berating and bullying one of his soldiers.
  • Major Misunderstanding appears to be a retired version, as he sometimes talks about abusing his subordinates when he was in the military.
• Dodgy Toupee: The whole point of the "Wig Spotting" feature. Also alluded to in any one-off strip that happens to feature Bruce Forsyth, which will invariably have as many euphemisms for wigs as can possibly be crammed into it.
• Double Entendre: the whole point of "Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres". Fnarr Fnarr etc.
• Downer Ending: "Gordon's Grandad", which ends in the death of the Grandad. It's notably absent of the toilet humour of the usual strips and paces itself in such a way that makes the ending a shock.
  • "Thomas and the Breakdown", where ''Thomas becomes depressed after a suicidal person jumps in front of him.
  • "Zip O'Lightning" is about a boy who befriends an "alien", actually a robber with a bucket over his head. The robber eventually tricks the boy into getting beaten up by another thug, and the strip ends with the boy bleeding to death in the gutter, his expression euphoric as he thinks about how happy he is to have an alien friend ...
  • Many of the "Drunken Bakers" strips have a Downer Ending, although special mention goes to one strip where the Bakers go down to a canal and pick up a sex worker who is desperate for money to buy alcohol. At the end of the strip she is seen crying and drinking straight from the bottle, while the Bakers are so drunk they fail to notice that she has either jumped or fallen into the water and drowned.
  • "Last Tan&Go in Powys" ends with a girl dying from skin cancer after becoming addicted to indoor tanning, which she only got into because her "friends" laughed at her for being pale.
• Drunken Master: Parodied with "The Brown Bottle", a superhero parody who undergoes his heroic transformation by drinking six bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale and gaining the ability to ... slur incomprehensibly, stagger about and piss himself while wearing a superhero costume. He ends up inadvertently saving the day anyway, usually because the villains leave in pity and disgust — or, in the case of his arch-nemesis Ciderwoman, because she's even more pissed than he is.
• Dumb Blonde: Sandra. Except when she's a dumb redhead.
• Eagleland: Type 2, obviously. Stock American stereotypes crop up now and again; cowboys, trigger happy gun nuts, cheerleaders, valley girls, frivolous lawsuits, etc.
  • The one off strip Yankee Dougal pokes fun at British kids who want to be American because of outdated stereotypes from old American shows they had seen on TV. The strip dates from 1990, when most British kids had never met an American in real life. With the internet, many have befriended them online and realised that there isn't that much difference after all. Also, his desire to have braces purely to be like an American is outdated as they are commonplace worldwide (and dentists will very rarely tell people they don't need them).
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the earliest Billy the Fish strips, Billy has short, cropped hair, while Syd Preston is depicted as an older, heavyset man with white hair. After a few strips, Billy would get his distinctive mullet hairstyle, while Syd started to be drawn as younger, with red hair. Gus Parker was also depicted with his eyes fully visible, and only wore dark glasses as part of a Paper-Thin Disguise in one strip; the Animated Adaptation had him always wearing the glasses, which was later back-ported into the main strip.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the first Jack Black strip, Jack's aunt was named Jessie and was married to Jack's uncle, and the humour of the strips was based around his attempts to solve ridiculous "mysteries" such as why there was a cabbage lying in the roadside. The setup soon changed to its current format as a parody of Boy's Own-style adventures and middle-class hypocrisy, with his aunt named Meg and apparently a spinster. PC Brown was originally named PC Barnet in the first few strips. The art style was also very different until the current and best-known artist (Simon Ecob) took over the trip.
  • The comic's creator Chris Donald considers the characters of Billy Britain (a fanatical right-wing nationalist) and Eric Daft (a boy with very low intelligence) to be early prototypes of Major Misunderstanding and Terry Fuckwitt respectively.
  • Along these lines, the first annual features a strip called "The Lager Lads", who are students who will only drink a certain kind of lager. This was the prototype for "The Real Ale Twats", a group of middle aged men who similarly go into average bars and request specific beers to the confusion of staff. The Twats were introduced around 20 years after The Lager Lads appeared and disappeared, conceivably being the same people at older ages (particularly as they make reference to beer festivals as far back as the 70s). Amusingly, though the twats seem to hate lager, they have been tricked into ordering and enjoying it if it is presented as a blonde ale.
  • The first Sid the Sexist strip depicted the title character just going around and making misogynistic remarks to women, seemingly for the hell of it. It naturally didn't take the strip's artist long to figure out that this wasn't particularly funny in and of itself, but then he got the idea to remodel the character after a friend of his who had a lot of bravado around women, but whose attempts at actually chatting them up always went spectacularly wrong, leading to the more familiar version of the character.
  • Early on, "Mrs Brady Old Lady" had a different, more grotesque design, always travelled alone, and would usually annoy the general public with her inability to adjust to the modern world. As characterised since the late 90s, she is always seen with her friend Dolly, more family members are seen, and she will often explain medical problems to anyone much to their detriment. One point of consistency is her late husband Sidney, who is sometimes pictured via flashback in early strips, though expressly unseen in later strips. The strip is intentionally never clear as to how and when he died.
  • In the earliest Biffa Bacon strips, Biffa bullied a boy called Percy Posh. The strip's focus then shifted towards Biffa's parents constantly picking on him, while Percy was replaced with Cedric Soft.
  • The first Tommy "Banana" Johnson strip was followed by one that showed Tommy in different situations with the banana (such as trying to help a group of kids who have lost their ball.) Ever since then, he has only appeared in various "remixed" versions of the very first strip.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Gilbert Ratchet often meets them, and they always have a ludicrously specific and relevant eccentricity.
• Elderly Ailment Rambling: "Mrs. Brady, Old Lady" is constantly going on in disgusting detail about her digestive and gynaecological problems.
• Embarrassing Old Photo: Sid the Sexist once actually managed to persuade a girl to come home with him - only for his mother to intercept them as they enter the house, drag them into the living room and proceed to totally ruin the whole thing by showing the girl albums upon albums of Sid's baby photos.
• Enfant Terrible: Timmy "Spoilt Bastard" Timpson, a horrible, fat, ungrateful and vicious-tongued little shit. One shudders to think what his life would be like for those around him if he were released after schooling on the rest of the world!
• Europeans Are Kinky: Any time a German person appears in a strip, they will be into scat. No, not Skat.
  • Everything is Big in Texas: A one-off strip had the Pope get a visit from a Texan archbishop, who spent the whole time saying that everything there was smaller than what he had in Texas, including the Vatican and even when God himself appeared he said that they had fairies at the bottom of the garden bigger there. The Pope and God eventually team up to get rid of the archbishop using a clockwork dinosaur.
• Evil Old Folks:
  • Several of these have appeared in one-off strips, especially those that are parodies of Boys' Own-style adventures.
  • Jack Black often comes up against people who are ostensibly this trope (since Aunt Meg always lives in a quiet rural area with mostly older residents.) In reality, they're normally innocent people who have offended Jack's far-right sensibilities, or were only committing some very minor offence.
  • The title character of "Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em?" is in her sixties. She's violent, foul-mouthed, aggressive, and usually involved in some or other criminal scheme.
• Extreme Doormat: Cissy Timpson, Spoilt Bastard's mother.
• Failure Is the Only Option:
  • Sid the Sexist's attempts to chat women will always end in rejection, sometimes violently.
  • Whenever Luvvie Darling gets an acting gig, it will invariably end in disaster.
  • Ironically, Suicidal Syd's attempts to top himself fail, yet he dies anyway via unforseen circumstances.
• Fake Rabies: One comic strip ran a story about the then recent opening of the Channel Tunnel. An apparently rabid French dog emerged on the English side, and the main character exclaims "Oh no! In a million to one scenario, a rabid French dog has made it through the Channel Tunnel!" The dog is shortly followed by its owner who explains that far from being rabid, it ate some soap, which it had mistaken for cheese because there is no soap in France.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Invoked in canon with a strip where Roger Mellie goes to an SF fan convention to con money out of Doctor Who fans by falsely claiming to have been a Dalek operator. Even after they realise he's a fake and he insults them, what drives them to severely beat him is when he calls them "Trekkies".
  • Also invoked in a "Sid the Sexist" strip which abandoned the strip's usual subject matter completely to parody Novocastrian outrage at the relegation of Newcastle United FC from the English Premier League in 2016 - not so much at the relegation as at the fact that hated local rivals Sunderland had stayed up.
• Fartillery: The eponymous Johnny Fartpants uses farts to various effect and can alter the effect by eating different things i.e. a tranquilizer fart made by eating 200 paracetamol or an electric fart to power a life support machine by drinking battery acid.
• Farts on Fire: Johnny Fartpants, who on several occasions took terrible revenge by, for instance, eating a strong vindaloo curry, placidly waiting a while, then dropping his trousers in front of his foes and lighting a match... on one occasion, just to make sure, he was seen to drink petrol as a prelude to Flamethrower Madness.
• Fat Bastard:
  • There are quite a few one-off strips based around these, such as "Tubby Tucker the Big Fat ... Person"
  • Jack Black's Aunt Meg is a very large lady who, like Jack, is a Nazi supporter and very corrupt. Her various "projects" in each strip have included animal testing, people-smuggling, and bribing local authorities.
• Fetish: Mr. Logic seems to find his own blend of Bothering by the Book and Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to be a turn-on, as evidenced by the strip in which he hires a prostitute whom he chastises for saying that he's got the biggest penis she's ever seen. When she changes tack and starts to describe his penis in a way that he would describe it himself (ie. "your penis is not the biggest I have seen, and based on my own experiences would estimate it to be in the 45th percentile"), he's evidently aroused.
  • Bert Midler, Biddy-Fiddler has a fetish for mature ladies - the older the better (preferably in their nineties.)
• The Film of the Book: The Fat Slags (already adapted into claymation shorts in the early 90s) received a critically-mauled live movie adaptation in 2004.
• Firemen Are Hot: The following conversation appeared in a Sid the Sexist strip:
  Baz: What is it with women and firemen's uniforms? It's like fancying a bird just because she's wearing a nurse's uniform.
  Joe: What's wrong with nurse's uniforms, Baz?
  Baz: Well, nothing, but she'd have to be a cracker in the first place. The uniform's just the icing on the cake. Whereas you could put the Elephant Man in a fireman's uniform and he'd be fighting them off with a shitty stick.
  • All of which prompts Sid to join the Fire Brigade in order to get laid, with predictably disastrous consequences.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Victorian Dad, even though his wife and children do not live by his Victorian Era viewpoints.
• Flying Saucer: Johnny Fartpants is used by NASA as the propulsion system for an experimental spacecraft using the power of his flatulence to drive the vessel at incredible speeds.
• Football Hooligans: In one Billy the Fish story, rival boss Gus Parker and his henchman Wilf try to get Billy's team Fulchester kicked out of the European Cup by dressing as Fulchester fans, getting drunk and smashing up the city where they're playing their next match. Unfortunately for them Fulchester are playing in a People's Republic of Tyranny, and no sooner have they stepped off the boat than they get a thirty year prison sentence for insulting a local police officer.
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: "Bertie Blunt (His Parrot's a Cunt)".
• Funny Foreigner: Finbarr Saunders's Russian friend Sergei, who keeps providing him with obscene mispronunciations of English words.
• The Gambling Addict: Just one of Roger Mellie's vices. One strip had him avoid loan sharks chasing a debt. He borrows Tom's holiday money to pay them off, only to bet it all on a horse that loses. The strip ends with Roger, having been beaten up, getting a job hosting a gameshow that turns out to be late night poker, where he predictably does badly enough to throw his watch and car in.
• Gargle Blaster: The "Cuntbuster," which is the Fat Slags' cocktail of choice. The exact description of it tends to vary from issue to issue, but basically it's pretty much every spirit (and a few different mixers) you can think of, all put into the same drink.
• Gasshole: Johnny Fartpants and Farting Dilemmas with Archie McBlarter.
• Generation Xerox: Biffa Bacon is a bully, but who himself is bullied by his parents constantly, and occasionally his uncle too. The character was based on a father joining in a fight their son was having with someone (it was never clear whether what this person had done to make the person fight them, or if it was a random assault).
  • One Sid the Sexist strip was set in Roman-era Tyneside and featured "Sidneum Sextus, Segedunum's Silver-Tongued Proletarium" ^note  Segedunum being the fort at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall, located on the site of modern-day Wallsend which is to all intents and purposes a suburb of Newcastle. To celebrate the completion of Hadrian's Wall, Sid and the lads go to an orgy, at which he fails to pull.
• Genre Deconstruction: "Biffa Bacon" began as, and often still is, a parody of Naughty Is Good children's comic strips, in particular "Dennis the Menace". It takes the graphic violence to gory extremes, but still uses it as comedy.
• Gentleman Thief: Parodied in "Raffles the Gentleman Thug", in that Raffles isn't (usually) a thief but just a gratuitously violent and bullying Jerkass.
• Good Victims, Bad Victims: Discussed in a Kewl Chix strip where one of the girls is complaining to her friends that a stranger groped her. They are sympathetic but, as soon as she leaves, start gossiping behind her back and saying she invited it - as she was specifically wearing a T-shirt that said GRAB MY BREASTS.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Spoilt Bastard speaks this way because he's too young and sheltered to know any swear words.
• Gossipy Hens: Meddlesome Ratbag and her friends. A one-off strip depicted The Daily Mail as a farm, with editor Paul Dacre as a millionaire farmer putting Richard Littlejohn in charge of looking after Daily Mail readers, who were shown as old biddies who acted just like hens, clucking and living in a chicken coop.
• Groin Attack. Sid the Sexist often ends up on the receiving end of this, courtesy of women who do not appreciate his vulgar attempts to chat them up.
• Guinness Episode:
  • "Maxwell Straker, Record Breaker" is based around a boy repeatedly trying and failing to break a world record, only to inadvertently succeed in setting a record for something no one wants (such as getting the longest ever prison sentence, falling into the world's longest coma, or being voted "the daftest cunt in Britain")
  • The Drunken Bakers once agreed to help a Boy Scout troop set a world record for baking the largest ever mince pie. It ultimately didn't happen, since the Bakers passed out and couldn't let the Scouts into the shop.
• Has Two Thumbs and...: A Sid the Sexist strip from back in the 1990s had "What's got two thumbs, speaks French and likes bler jobs?" (The answer, of course, was Moi, and the speaker was injured by the recipient of this chat up line.)
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": The whole point of "Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres" (catchphrase: fnarr fnarr). There is literally an example of this in EVERY PANEL, except the last couple where the whole premise is inverted.
• High Hopes, Zero Talent: Luvvie Darling passionately believes in promoting the cultural value of theatre and is ecstatic at any chance to show off his self-proclaimed (and utterly non-existent) acting talent.
• Honest John's Dealership: Cockney Wanker sometimes trades used cars. Playing upon the stereotype of the indigenous population of London being fantasists, he often buys a car, sells it back to the same person, for the same amount of money, then declares the transaction to have been "A nice little earner!"
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: The writers get quite creative with their synonyms. The recurring feature and spin-off book "Roger's Profanisaurus" is built on this.
• Hypocrite: Baz routinely cheats on his wife with the Fat Slags, but will get violent with any man he even thinks is making advances on the former, even though such interactions are always innocent. Once, he even beat up the vicar, who'd popped round to discuss their child's forthcoming christening.
• Immoral Journalist: The tabloid-style news pages sometimes feature the adventures of "Mahatma Macaroon", a purported investigative journalist whose activities usually involve unprovokedly stealing from celebrities, perverted voyeurism against them, or vandalising their homes. This was originally a parody of notorious News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood, who used to use false identities to befriend celebrities and then trick or badger them into helping him obtain illegal drugs, which led to several of his targets being criminally prosecuted, until pop singer and The X Factor judge Tulisa turned the tables on him, as a result of which he was prosecuted and imprisoned for perverting the course of justice.
• Improvised Sail: Felix and His Amazing Underpants often does this with... well, guess.
• In the Blood:
  • Biffa Bacon's family are all violent, including his parents, grandparents, and uncle. In one strip he gets a baby brother who demonstrates the same tendencies from birth.
  • Both George Bestial's parents are shown to have also enjoyed bestiality.
• In the Style of: The Broon Windsors, a satire of the Royal Family in the style of The Broons.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: Subverted in a way Viz is particularly fond of. Mickey's Minature Grandpa only thinks he's tiny, but he is actually normal size.
• Informed Obscenity: Sweary Mary invents a new swearword. "Fitbin" is both (we are informed) obscene, and also obscure enough to put on the front page of a comic.
• Innocent Inaccurate:
  • Finbarr Saunders fails to realise in each strip that his mother has gone off to have sex wih Mr Gimlet, always coming up with some "innocent" explanation.
  • "Sleeping Bag" features the characters from Bagpuss wondering why Bagpuss has been missing for weeks since being taken to the vet. Even after one of the mice reveals that Emily's mother said it was the kindest thing to do for Bagpuss, they still don't get it.
• Insane Troll Logic: Many of the "top tips" run on this. For example: "Why waste money on expensive binoculars? Simply stand closer to the object you wish to observe." Or "A small coniferous tree in the corner of your living room is an excellent place to store Christmas decorations."
• Insistent Terminology: One "Tommy 'Banana' Johnson" shows Tommy with a plantain instead. Other characters continue to call it a banana, whereupon Tommy smugly tells them it's a plantain and recites a list of its differences from a banana.
• Interactive Fiction: Parodied in a "Tommy 'Banana' Johnson" strip based on Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, where the viewer could make choices at different points, including allowing Tommy to get his own back by shoving the banana up the policeman's bottom for once.
• Internet Jerk: The bimonthly "letter columns on ridiculously mundane subjects" spoofs at first included a spoof Twitter thread in which a completely banal and inoffensive tweet was followed by multiple graphic death threats in response.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Mr. Snodworthy in the "Tinribs" strip.
• It's a Wonderful Plot: In one strip of the Drunken Bakers one of the bakers meets Clarence, his guardian angel. Who shows him that because he was never born that his foster parents had a better life, and because of that they adopted Roy, who now runs the bakery much more successfully.
• It Was His Sled: invoked One strip titled "George Best Is a Cinema Pest" was about the late footballer George Best disclosing "spoiler" endings to certain films (all of which fit the trope) to incensed people in a cinema who didn't know the ending.
• Jerkass: Easily half or more of the various strips' characters.
• Jizzed in My Pants:
  • Happens to "Billy No-Mates: the Antisocial Teenager" when a female shop assistant measures him for a new pair of trousers.
  • Whenever Sid the Sexist appears to have got lucky, he's actually having a wet dream and is revealed at the end to have done this. Usually in public, or at least in front of visiting relatives who've popped round while he's been asleep on the sofa.
• Joke of the Butt: Any given issue will have bum jokes aplenty, especially in "The Bottom Inspectors", which is built around them.
• Kavorka Women: The Fat Slags. They're tremendously overweight and eat a buttload of food, yet they still manage to bed some studs.
• Kick the Dog: After seducing Ivan Jelical's girlfriend by sheer force of personality alone (although a bottle of cider may have helped), Dirtyarse rides off with her on his bike ... riding over poor Ivan in the process.
• Kid Detective: Parodied with Young Jack Black, who is an extreme-right-wing Jerkass who often inflicts Disproportionate Retribution on people who, in some cases, weren't even doing anything legally or morally wrong.
• Kids Are Cruel: Biffa Bacon, but that's nothing to how he's treated by his Mutha and Fatha.
• Lampshaded Double Entendre: Finbarr Saunders is a parody of this. He reacts to any even marginally suggestive line with spluttered laughs (written "Fnarr fnarr") eyeball rolling, nudges ("Eh? Eh?"), and silly catchphrases ("As the actress said to the bishop"), but would put innocent interpretations on the words of his mother and Mr Gimlet the lodger as they went off to have sex at the end of the strip.
  Mrs. S: How about a little shag, Mr Gimlet?
  Mr. G: Righto, Mrs. Saunders, I'll just get me pipe out.
  Finbarr assumes she's offering him some tobacco.
• Lethal Eatery: "Hen Cabin", whose proprietor's rule is that anything can be covered up with batter and anything that doesn't need to be covered up with batter is too expensive to make a profit on. Also, the unnamed bakery in "Drunken Bakers", although this is due to the proprietors' crippling alcoholism rather than malice.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics:
  • Frequently exploited by Baxter Basics.
  • The strip "Kid Politician" features a child who acts like a stereotypically corrupt politician, often producing highly dubious statistics to support his point.
  • Millie Tant once asked her two housemates what their salaries were; turned out, the male housemate earned less than the female one, but Millie produced statistics "proving" that the average salary for a man in the household was higher. The other two immediately pointed out that the figures were skewed because Millie herself doesn't have a job.
• Literal Genie: Mr. Logic has taken on this this role more than once. The Critics also encountered one who was more of a Jackass Genie as he misinterpreted their wish out of spite, but it should be noted that he only did so because they were rude to him first.
• Literal-Minded: Mr Logic takes everything said literally. For example when he is asked to boil the kettle he points out that the kettle is made out of stainless steel and he can't produce a temperature high enough to boil stainless steel.
• Live-Action Adaptation: As well as the infamous Fat Slags movie, Jimmy Nail had been in talks to star in a Sid the Sexist Sitcom.
• London Gangster: Parodied with Big Vern, who ends every strip by massacring everyone around him through a paranoid misunderstanding, and blowing his own brains out so "the bastard cozzers" won't get him.
• Long-Runners: Viz has been going strong since 1979.
• Luvvies: Luvvie Darling, a melodramatic and self-important thespian who is always "Resting Between Jobs" (ie. out of work), principally because he is completely talentless. He's depicted as an exaggerated parody of old-school British Shakespearian stage actors — pompous, bombastic, profligate and pretentious in his use of literary quotes, and habitually referring to famous, real-life actors in familiar terms (such as "Dear old Larry" for Sir Laurence Olivier). Darling's name is a pun on the insincere and over-affectionate terms, "luvvie" and "darling", that actors and actresses are stereotyped as employing with each other. He's in his forties, dresses in a Hamlet-style costume with embroidered tunic, frilled collar and cuffs, high boots and short ornamental cape. His appearance is based on stereotypical images of William Shakespeare.
• Male Restroom Etiquette: Often referred to in Sid the Sexist; he and his mates inevitably have some rules about this:
  • First man to go to the toilet is inferior in some way ... which after a few pints leads to everyone experiencing severe discomfort as they're all desperate to go, but no-one wants to be the first.
  • You can't go to the toilet until you've consumed a specified number of drinks. In one strip, Sid meets a woman who wants to have sex with him in the pub toilet, but his mates won't even let him visit the toilet for this reason until he's had multiple drinks ... which he chugs back quickly ... which results in him throwing up outside while the woman gets off with someone else.
  • After urinating, anything more than three shakes is a wank.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Played with in a Billy Quiz strip. Billy's wife has a baby and he suspects he's not the father; so he asks her to "guess", in the manner of a game show, which of four potential fathers is the right one. She admits the father is a neighbour, which he says is "the wrong answer!" and reveals the baby looks exactly like him.
• Manchild: Playtime Fontayne. Plus, it later turns out, all of his colleagues.
• Momma's Boy: Sid the Sexist - also a grown-up virgin and ashamed of it, hence his constant crass attempts to get laid.
• Moral Guardians: The lefty liberal variant of this is gleefully skewered in "The Modern Parents".
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: In "The Modern Parents", Malcolm, Cressida, and Tarquin visit Kaftanistan to persuade a local warlord to stop hunting endangered mountain goats. Malcolm has prepared a speech that is supposed to go along these lines: "You should be happy to let the mountain goats breed in peace," "You and your men should not upset the natural balance of the soil," or "If you are irresponsible now, your children will inherit a twisted and barren environment." However, after translating it into Kaftanistani, it comes out as:
  "You enjoy mating with goats."
  "You and your men perform unnatural acts in the dirt."
  "Because of your evil wickedness, may your children be born deformed and barren."
• My Little Panzer: The comic has done many parodies of General Jumbo and featured one-off strips about evil living toys and similar things. Regular strip "Tinribs" is based around a young boy's "robot" (actually glued together from random parts and unable to do anything mechanical) which is typically used to mutilate or kill the boy's teacher in every story. Another recurring strip using the trope was "Tommy Salter's Chemical Capers" about a boy who would perform horrifically dangerous, and usually fatal to others, experiments with his chemistry set.
• Naughty Nuns: Subverted with the one-off Topless Skateboard Nun as she isn't naughty at all, just topless.
• Nephewism: Jack Black is always shown spending every school holiday staying with his Aunt Meg. The "Ferdinand the Foodie" strip includes Ferdinand's nephew Jamie as a regular character. The trope is used in an interesting way in "The Modern Parents". Malcolm and Cressida's sons find their parents so irritating they wish they would disappear forever so they could be adopted by their Uncle Eddie, and in fact they end up staying with him and his family quite often after the parents have got themselves into trouble yet again. When Eddie's wife appears she makes no secret of the fact she hates Malcolm and Cressida and would rather their kids came to see them on their own.
• Never My Fault: Spoilt Bastard. He usually blames his poor put-upon mother if anything goes wrong because of his actions. On one occasion he picked a fight with a bunch of other kids and at the end claimed "Everybody else started it!"
• New-Age Retro Hippie: The Modern Parents.
• New Technology Is Evil:
  • Many Kewl Chix strips portray the girls as completely dependent on technology, unable to do even basic things without it, and completely socially stunted because they spend so much time online.
  • "Mobile Dick", a man obsessed with his smartphone, has this premise.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The comic regularly runs one-off strips showing celebrities in ludicrous or vulgar situations, or starring in parodies of cheesy old-style action-adventure strips. 2000s issues include a longer-running strip depicting Sir Elton John engaging in various acts of petty crime ("Elton John's Baccy Run ^note  tobacco-smuggling operation", "Elton John's Hooky ^note  pirated Videos", etc). Sometimes it is very much a Take That!, such as in the early '90s when radio DJ and TV presenter Danny Baker was depicted as "Danny Wanker".
• No Communities Were Harmed: Originally, most of the comic's strips were set in Fulchester, a stand-in location that was meant to be just a generic British town, with some occasional similarities to Newcastle, the comic's hometown. In more recent years though, most strips actually are set in Newcastle, the main exceptions being Roger Mellie and The Critics (mostly set in London), Cockney Wanker and Big Vern (specifically set in east London), The Fat Slags (set in Mansfield, according to Word of God), Mrs Brady Old Lady (Somewhere in Yorkshire), Farmer Palmer (somewhere in the rural West Country), Boy Scouse (set, as you'd expect, in Liverpool), and Student Grant (set in a town called Spunkbridge.) The only strip that seems to still be regularly set in Fulchester is Billy the Fish.
• Nocturnal Emission: Happens a few times. Whenever it looks like Sid the Sexist is getting lucky, it turns out to be a dream and this is an obvious consequence ... usually when he's fallen asleep in public. This trope also causes Ivan Jelical a few problems and leads him to believe that he's an irredeemable sinner.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: "Barny the Complete Bastard", whose attempts to help others end disastrously and end in him getting beaten up, arrested, hounded and ultimately killed. E.g. when he tries to help an old man cross the road, the man thinks he's being sexually harassed and punches Barny.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: In universe, Roger Mellie lives by this rule. Put it this way, he's faked his death a couple of times just to sell some merchandise. Whenever a scandal involving him is reported in the media his first thought is usually to use it to plug whatever product or show he is doing at the time.
  • A Real Life example was when an advert which had licensed The Fat Slags received complaints, and a journalist wrote an article trying to ban the Fat Slags from the comic. But in the comic itself, the Fat Slags hadn't appeared for over a year at that point, and as a direct result of that article they appeared on the front cover of the next issue, in a confrontation with Millie Tant.
  • One Gilbert Ratchet strip had the titular inventor create a literal giant arsehole to run the local orphanage's social media presence; unfortunately, the machine turned "edgy" and started proclaiming its support for Hitler. However, this just increased the orphanage's media presence and before too long they got sponsored by a ridiculously rich businessman.
• Nominal Hero: Jack Black and his dog Silver. He's an amateur detective who gets people punished often using legal Loophole Abuse to see if they have accidentally committed a minor technical crime, and he usually commits worse crimes in order to do this, up to and including murder. Sometimes the people he is investigating are people who are doing good for the community, such as one case where he had a man who was giving soup to homeless people arrested for a tax error. Other times they are actual villains who are using their own Loophole Abuse to make sure their apparent crimes aren't really illegal, forcing Jack to find some alternate way of getting them convicted. In any case, they will suffer Disproportionate Retribution often at the hands of a Torches and Pitchforks mob. A 2012 issue took it even further by having Jack and Silver flat-out murder some The Famous Five Captains Ersatz just because he wanted to be the one and only Kid Detective around.
• Nostalgia Filter: A running joke in editorial columns and cover tag lines is that it "isn't as funny as it used to be".
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: An unusual case with regard to two of the adaptations, as they did bother with accents, but not the correct ones. As mentioned above, Fulchester is based on Newcastle, where the locals usually have a Geordie accent. However, the Billy the Fish animated series had everyone speaking in Scouse accents, while the Fat Slags film had the Fulchester locals speaking with a Lancastrian accent. The latter was doubly wrong since the Fat Slags don't even come from Fulchester to begin with, but Mansfield (the locals of which don't speak in Lancastrian accents either).
• Old Man Marrying a Child: The businessman from "We ..." once claimed to be married to a 17-year-old girl (the minimum legal age for marriage in England and Wales is 16 with parental consent.)
• Older Than They Look: You would expect Biffa Bacon to be in his late childhood or early teens, but he's actually shown as adult on more than one occasion - for example in one strip he is depicted as old enough to go to a pub and buy a pint, and in one from later on, his family are visited by a social worker concerned that Biffa has not attended school for the last 14 years.
• Old-Timey Ankle Taboo: Viz has published spoof Victorian-era editions of the contemporary Razzle porno mag (which they would euphemistically describe as an "Art Pamphlet"). They call this Enrazzlement and it largely consists of old time photographs of ladies desporting their delicate between-foot-and-calf areas.
• One-Steve Limit: Fully averted by Roger Mellie and Roger Irrelevant, and averted in sound (but not spelling) by Sid the Sexist and Suicidal Syd. Also worth mentioning here is the fact that the Fat Slags and Sid the Sexist both have a mustachioed friend called Baz.
• Oop North: In the 30th Anniversary issue they lampooned the way London based media tends to present the whole of northern England as one place by having The Critics comment on Viz's anniversary. They referred to Newcastle as a "tiny Lancashire mill town" (a jab at the Fat Slags film, where Fulchester was depicted this way even though it's meant to be an Expy of Newcastle) and having "Merseyside Docks".
  • Cockney Wanker, a portmanteau of everything northerners hate about London. Money-obsessed, trendy, greedy, materialistic, selfish, having the financial/political power to ravage the North purely to enrich themselves, as anyone who gets hurt is two hundred miles or more away and probably brought it upon themselves anyway.
  • The animated cartoon of Roger Mellie characterises Roger as a pompous Londoner and his assistant Tom as a soft-spoken Yorkshireman. This is not specified in the strips themselves, though it works very well to contrast the characters.
  • It's not uncommon for Viz to lampoon the Northern seaside resort of Blackpool, and its many seedy attractions, such as palm reading. On one occasion, Cockney Wanker travels to Margate, a southern seaside resort. It is portrayed in virtually the same way as Blackpool (right down to its infamously long traffic jams to enter), except for the fact that most of the people who come to it behave much like Cockney Wanker himself.
• Panty Thief:
  • One Jack Black strip introduced a woman opening up a plumbing business in Aunt Meg's idyllic village. Jack is instantly suspicious (because everyone knows women can't be plumbers!) and eventually discovers "she" is a perverted man disguised as a woman to facilitate stealing underwear from the homes of female customers.
  • "Cop Her Knickers" is about a group of policemen trying to steal an old lady's underwear.
  • The Scum Mother once brought over a new boyfriend, who was seen stealing underwear from the laundry basket while she was downstairs arguing with her family.
• Paper-Bag Popping: In one Baxter Basics strip, Baxter loses his seat in a general election, and his plan to be re-elected involves murdering an elderly Tory MP by popping a paper bag behind him to cause a heart attack and getting selected for his safe Tory seat in the by-election.
• Patriotic Fervor:
  • Cockney Wanker is established as a royalist, especially supportive of the Queen Mother, spouting received wisdom such as "Ninety Free she is. Ninety Free. Wahn the bladdy war for us she did!"
  • The Male Online is frequently whipped up into a patriotric frenzy by right-wing media.
• Payment Plan Pitch: Parodied in a letter - "A donation of just £2 a month supplies an African village with water says my water company, yet they charge me £10 a week, the robbing sods"
• Pedophile Priest: There was a Jack Black strip where Jack teams up with the local priest to frame someone as a pedophile by planting the priest's supply of child porn on him. There's also the one-off character Father McFiddly, whose ongoing attempts to see young boys' genitals infuriate the bishop, who is implied to have transferred him from many parishes in the past as a result of his behaviour.
• Pink Mist: The ending of any Big Vern strip.
• Pizza Boy Special Delivery: A Running Gag in the "Fat Slags", in which Sharon and/or Tracy will offer sex to just about any delivery man or tradesman who visits them, because they are perpetually broke and horny, and usually get taken up on it.
• Plain Palate: One running gag in "The Male Online" is the Male's obssession with steaks being cooked to the point of virtual dessication.
• Poe's Law: In one Sid the Sexist strip, Sid managed to score a bird on Blind Date because she thought he was a comedian and only pretending to be a perverted Geordie stereotype.
• Political Correctness Is Evil: Parodied with Major Misunderstanding, who is quick to assume that whatever he happens to encounter in his stories must be some kind of politicial correctness thing and go on an angry, prolonged rant about it. Of course, since he rarely ever has any clue at all about what is really happening in any given situation he barges into, his complaints ends up coming across as both extremely reactionary and nonsensical.
• Potty Emergency: Hoo boy. This gag has been recycled in many one-off strips in which someone struggles to find somewhere to defecate, usually with plenty of swearing and as many euphemisms for doing a shit as can be fitted in. Famously, there was the Doctor Who parody "Doctor Poo" in which an increasingly desperate Fourth Doctor roamed throughout time and space in order to find somewhere quiet. Back on Earth, numerous public figures have been subject to similar treatment, including Winston Churchill ("His Darkest Hour") and various cabinet ministers, TV presenters, Archbishops of Canterbury, etc.
• Pregnancy Test Plot: Played for Laughs in The Fat Slags. Sandra takes a pregnancy test and pees on the stick while she's still in the aisle at the chemists'. She makes a huge puddle of urine on the floor and says "Aw, fuck it Tray, it's gone all ower me knickers!" (She does turn out to be pregnant, by the way.)
• Preppy Name: Many of the John Fardell strips, as they tend to satirise pretentiousness in the upper middle class. There's "Ferdinand the Foodie" and "The Critics", Crispin and Natasha. "The Modern Parents" family includes mother Cressida and sons Tarquin and Guinevere. The exception is the father Malcolm, who ironically comes from a very upper class family, not that he'd ever admit it.
• The Production Curse: Invoked by their spoof article on the Curse of Dad's Army where they implied all the cast were under a curse of death after being in the show. ^note The fact most of the cast were in their seventies, eighties or nineties had nothing to do with it. Naturally.
• Product Placement: Newcastle Brown Ale is frequently seen in the comic, being the beer usually consumed by Sid The Sexist and his friends, as well as the character of Brown Bottle. This increased its popularity outside Newcastle.
• Pun: The one-frame Crap Jokes. Good puns need not apply.
  • Also a regular source of Gilbert Ratchet punchlines. As an example, he once drank a huge bottle of pop and then went of to what he was told was a "public toilet". On entering, he was given a rental lease for a stuffed teddy bear that was rubbing it's tongue against a licensed drinking establishment. In other words, that sort of "pub-lick-toy-let".
• Punctuality Is for Peasants: Roger Mellie is always late, whether it's for a job or a meeting, prompting Tom to say, "Where the hell's Roger" and Roger to arrive and say "Sorry I'm late, Tom".
• Purple Prose: The comic regularly runs spoof obituaries for celebrities written by "Tony Parsehole" (a vicious parody of real tabloid newspaper columnist Tony Parsons). They are always incredibly sentimental, badly researched, reliant on repetition to bulk out the word-count, repetitive to make the article longer, and padded out with constantly repeated sentences with slightly different word order. They usually cut off in mid-sentence as soon as the word-count is reached to make it clear that Parsehole is only writing for money and doesn't really care at all about OK that's enough, pls send cheque soonest.
• Pushover Parents: Timmy "Spoilt Bastard" Timson's appropritately-named mother Cissy. Timmy manipulates his weak-willed mother into satisfying his hollow and selfish desires, usually with serious health-threatening and/or financially dire consequences for her.
• Pyromaniac: Some 2000s issues portrayed boy band Busted as pyromaniacs/arsonists who would set anything on fire "for a laugh"
• Reality Is Unrealistic: In one Sid the Sexist strip, Sid and his friends get ensnared by a clip joint — a club which lures you in with attractive women, then charges you an extortionate amount for otherwise inexpensive drinks — and are then charged £1,400 for four pints of beer. Although it was intended to be an exaggeratedly huge amount, the artist later found out that £350 per drink is actually normal for a clip joint, and that the only unrealistic thing in the strip was that most clip joints don't actually bother serving any real alcohol, and just serve various mixtures of fruit juice instead.
• Reality Warper: Terry Fuckwitt is such a stupid twat that he forgets how the laws of physics work, leading to Mind Screw stories.
• Religious Robot: There was a General Jumbo parody called Jimbo Jumbo's Robo Jobos about a boy who controlled an army of tiny robotic Jehovah's witnesses. He uses them to destroy a blood bank because blood transfusions weren't mentioned in The Bible.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Most of the characters and strips have rhyming names, often lampshaded with absurdly contrived rhymes like "Tony Slattery and his Phony Cattery". Also done accidentally with "Spot the Clue with Albert Camus"- "Spot the Clue" being a regular feature that only happened to feature a figure that rhymed with "clue".
• Ridiculously Difficult Route: One of the photo strips was a story about a man and woman who fall in love whilst trying to cross an impossibly dangerous road. They end up trapped on a traffic island for all eternity.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Some strips follow current events — for example, Billy the Fish swapped his regular mullet for a pony-tail when then-England goalkeeper David Seaman sported one of the latter during the 2002 World Cup, and more recently Sid the Sexist met his friends in a Zoom call when they were unable to go down the pub because of the Covid-enforced lockdown. Roger Mellie is perhaps the most consistent, though, with many of his storylines mirroring real-life things that have happened to TV and radio personalities:
  • In a parody of the kidnapping of Alan Johnston, Roger is kidnapped in Beirut but after eight days it turns out to be an attempt to seek publicity. Tom discovers that the BBC is in on the deception and reluctantly takes part by being a fake phone-in contestant on Radio 4.
  • In 2011 (following a spate of news stories revolving around celebrities taking out super injunctions in an attempt to protect themselves from scandal), Roger goes to his crooked solicitor attempting to silence his ex-wife from releasing a book about their violent marriage which also details some of his more questionable hobbies. However it emerges he isn't trying to quiet his wife to protect himself, but is actually releasing this information himself in a new autobiography and he doesn't want her to cash in before him.
  • In 2015, following the high amount of media attention over Jeremy Clarkson getting fired from Top Gear after punching a producer (memorably referred to as a 'fracas'), the strip showed Roger entering his office just before he is due to renegotiate his contract to present Roger Mellie's Skidmarks and punching Tom in the face. As Tom attempts to recover, Roger organizes the ensuing scandal and his recovery to ensure a lucrative contract. When meeting the Director General of FTV in the cafeteria, Roger turns up drunk and is delighted to be told his show is being recommissioned for five years alongside a huge salary increase. However Roger then is told there is no hot food available (another reference to the incident with Clarkson), causing him to fly into a rage and then punch the Director General too.
  • In another strip, Roger finally finds mainstream success by presenting Bargain Hunt only to have it ruined when a dead body is fished out of his swimming pool, in reference to the scandal that ended Michael Barrymore's career.
  • He was also accused of various historic sexual offences, only to be cleared due to a lack of reliable evidence after so many years ... although he was then accused of groping one of the female police officers who interviewed him.
  • In 2020-21, Jack Black was used to satirise a number of conspiracy theories over COVID-19. E.g. in one strip he discovers Bill Gates really is putting microchips in vaccines ... so he can steal ultimately worthless porcelain from local residents' houses when they're out.
  • In 2015, a cyclist covertly recorded his argument with an angry driver named Ronnie Pickering over which of them had caused a near-miss. The video went viral and made the UK news. Subsequently Viz published a strip about "Bicycle Bell-End", a smug cyclist who antagonises other road users, only to get beaten up by Pickering at the end.
  • In the early 2000s, a popular moral panic in the press was tales of "happy slapping" (where young people would beat up an innocent person just to be able to film it and share it online.) Accordingly the Bacons, Tasha Slappa, Raffles, and others were shown engaging in this activity.
• Robot Buddy: Tinribs. Well, he's described as a robot, and everyone acts like he is one — even though he's actually just some tin cans, a pair of rubber gloves and a cardboard box on a skateboard with a Barbie doll voice-box attached, which is why the only thing he can say is that his name is Barbie and he loves you very much.
• Roguish Romani: A comic strip titled "The Thieving Gypsy Bastards" features a family of gypsies, who look like stereotypical Romani but have an Irish name, suggesting they were intended to be Irish Travellers. They move into a middle-class area and steal and vandalize everything in sight. The next issue contains a cut-out apology to all Romani and travelers, subtitled "what every gypsy's been waiting for!"
• Rotten Robotic Replacement: "Robbie's Robot Carer", where an old man's regular care worker is replaced with a robot due to budget cuts by the local authorities.
• Running Gag:
  • Tommy "Banana" Johnson was a strip that appeared in the very first issue, featuring a boy with a huge artificial banana that he keeps putting forward as an unlikely solution to other peoples' problems, until an annoyed policeman shows him where he can shove it. The strip has repeatedly appeared, often in anniversary issues, with exactly the same events and dialogue but with the art altered to parody new developments in comics (photographic fumetti, manga-style, bad Poser-style digital art, etc...).
  • The prose tabloid news story and listicle parodies frequently mention Calvin Phillips, the smallest man in the world.
  • In the reader submissions to the "Profanisaurus" column, readers who noticed some accidental Double Entendre claim that they smashed their TV/computer/whatever and sent [someone distantly responsible] the bill. This is a reference to the notorious Sex Pistols/Bill Grundy incident, where a viewer claimed to the press to have been so outraged by the swearing on live TV that he kicked in the screen of his set.
• Satire/Parody/Pastiche: many, of the most heavy-handed kind!
  • Billy the Fish was a parody of Roy of the Rovers and other football comics, intentionally playing up the bizarre situations and contrived coincidences used to create drama.
  • Roger Mellie sent up the 'nice on screen, horrible person elsewhere' television presenter by not even pretending to be nice on screen.
  • Even Doctor Who wasn't safe; a one-shot had Dr. Poo - "He flies round the universe looking for somewhere to have a shit". More affectionate than the rest, it featured the Fourth Doctor and enough Shout Outs to choke a Sea Devil.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: The eternally cantankerous and vicious-tongued Mrs Brady fits this trope.
• The Scrooge: The miserly Norbert Colon is written around this trope.
• Self-Deprecation: The computer game by Virgin Interactive has "You'll never play a bigger load of crap" on the game's cover.
• Shown Their Work: One Suicidal Syd strip has Syd trying to get a group of Doctor Who fans to kill him by calling them all gay. They enthusiastically agree.
• Slipping a Mickey: In one strip, The Male Online's wife Beryl goes to the doctor about her anxiety caused by his constant ranting. She is prescribed tranquillizers, and when they don't work on her, she resorts to slipping them into his tea so she can finally get a break from him.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: Mr Logic, Cedric Soft, The Real Ale Twats to name a few.
• Snowlems: In the '90s the comic would feature a seasonal parody of The Snowman, in which the snowman is a violent, drunken pervert who takes the young boy drinking and gambling with him.
• Social Services Does Not Exist: Biffa Bacon is routinely beaten up by his parents purely for their own amusement and yet nobody thinks to call either social services or the police.
• Sold His Soul for a Donut: God offers Terry Fuckwit eternal life in Heaven in exchange for taking his cakes out of the oven. The Devil interrupts and offers him an alternative deal: "why not sell me your soul for this dried up piece of dogshit?" Naturally, Terry accepts the Devil's offer.
• Sommelier Speak: The Real Ale Twats (or at least the one who speaks) use this to describe their beer. He is particularly fond of the phrase "a hop on the nose".
• Sophisticated as Hell: Raffles the Gentleman Thug is noted for its substitution of formal language in common slang phrases. For example:
  • "Kick the little bastard" becomes "Lapidate the little illegitimate".
  • "Tits oot for the lads" becomes "Kindly remove thy decollétage from its corsetry for the delectation of the gentlemen here assembled".
  • "Fanny magnet" (when describing his new car) becomes "Vaginal lodestone".
  • "You big girl's blouse" becomes "You sizable ladies chemise".
  • "Rat's cocks" (a frequent vulgarism used by Viz writers) becomes "Rodents' penii".
  • "There's plenty more where that came from" becomes "There's an elegant plenitude from whenceforth that originated".
  • "Run like fuck, it's the filth!" becomes "Run like coitus, it's the putrescence!"
  • "Fuck my luck" becomes "Fornicate my fortune".
  • "Stitch that" becomes "Embroider that".
  • "Eat my dust" becomes "Consume my pulverulence".
  • "You cheeky cunt" becomes "You insolent vagina".
  • "Wanker!" becomes "Onanist!"
• Sound-Effect Bleep: As in the Unusual Euphemism example below, visual Sound Effect Bleeps (not always involving actual sound effects) are often employed on the cover so it can be displayed in shops, or simply for humorous effect. One recent cover featured the word "bollocks" partly obscured by a smoke cloud. And then there's the "Continental Europe" poster, in which the first O quite possibly certainly wasn't an O but had a seagull hovering over the top of the letter.
• Spoiled Brat: Timmy "Spoilt Bastard" Timpson. In every strip he bullies and emotionally abuses his rather weak-willed mother, blaming her for whatever problem he's caused (and what's more she always believes it's truly her fault) and leading her to spend money she doesn't have to cater to her son's every whim. In one old strip he pretended to be sick to get out of school and kept implying that it was his mother's fault. The doctor then tells Timmy's mother that "There's nothing wrong with your son that a good smack on the bottom wouldn't cure!". In the annual he runs away from home because his mother put two sugars on his Weetabix when "She knows!" that he only has one and three quarter sugars.
• Spoonerism: Often used on the cover to refer to strips whose title includes swearwords, like "Boilt Spastard" or "Wockney Canker".
• Sports Dad: The one-off strip "Larry Ladd and His Ambitious Dad" - the first two activities into which the titular Larry is pushed by his father are boxing and ice-skating.
• Springtime for Hitler: Baxter Basics finds out that he'd make more money as an ex-MP than he would if he won his seat. So he tries his best to not get re-elected, openly saying he hates the voters, pissing on war memorials and vowing to close down the only hospital in his constituency, among other things. However he is re-elected in the end. It's implied that his plan would have worked, had his only opponent in the election not been TV presenter Noel Edmonds.
• Status Quo Is God: As per the characters in the children's comics that Viz parodies, none of the characters suffer any lasting effects as a result of what has befallen them in previous adventures. Big Vern and Suicidal Syd are both alive and well at the start of their next adventures, and Mr Snodworthy in "Tinribs" is back in one piece. And in addition to having made a quick recovery from whichever act of violence was inflicted upon him, Sid the Sexist has learned absolutely nothing as a result of his previous attempts to chat up women.
• Straight Man: Tom from the Roger Mellie strips. Sometimes he's Roger's agent and at other times he's Roger's producer, but he's always Roger's straight man. Sometimes, the strips even feature a sign on his desk that has "straight man" as his job title.
  • In The Male Online, the title character's wife Beryl fills this role.
  • Millie Tant's friend Jane is this trope and a straight woman as in heterosexual, leading to frequent criticism from Millie.
• Straw Critic: "The Critics" is about a pair of stereotypical avant garde art critics who despise anything vaguely accessible to people outside the avant garde clique, love anything "shocking", and see themselves as politically revolutionary while being ludicrously intellectually-snobbish and class-prejudiced.
• Strawman Political: Millie Tant (lesbian feminist), The Modern Parents (trendy liberal/environmentalist), Victorian Dad (reactionary), Major Misunderstanding (reactionary), Billy Britain (racist/fascist), Meddlesome Ratbag (right-wing Moral Guardian), Young Jack Black (leans towards fascism), The Male Online (far-right-wing Anthropomorphic Personification of The Daily Mail). All are buffoons and/or hypocrites.
  • Actual politician Baxter Basics isn't an example of this, as his strips tend to be more about his corruption than partisan politics. In any case, he's often switched between the Conservative and Labour parties as and when the plot dictates.
  • In fairness, those strips started out as parodies of people who claimed to hold a certain political stance while not actually understanding anything about the stance in question, and they tended to make some very valid and well thought out points. Unfortunately, Flanderization set in afterwards...
• Straw Feminist: Millie Tant, a fat, ugly and lesbian extreme feminist who spouts a lot of S.C.U.M.-esque nonsense and many strips end with her turning out to be a hypocrite.
• Strong Family Resemblance: In the Sid the Sexist strip, the siblings of his friends look very like each other. Joe's brother is identical to Joe, in fact the only difference in appearance is that the brother (only referred to as "Joe's Brother") is unshaven. Bob's sister Bobette looks exactly like Bob but with Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
• Stylistic Suck: The articles by Tony Parsehole, a parody of right-wing British journalist Tony Parsons, who writes tribute articles about celebrities (often recently deceased ones) in which he's obviously padding out the word count with random stuff he's got from Wikipedia ^note "But then came Michael Joseph Jackson of Gary, Indiana, blazing a trail of blinding brilliance like a comet. But not a comet made of ice, dust and small rocky particles, ranging from a few kilometres to tens of kilometres across.", heavy repetition of stock phrases, and thunderingly obvious clichés about their subjects, usually going on at length about his "tears of grief", sometimes giving the editor multiple names for the article to be about and the option for the editor to "pick one", and always ending as soon as he's fulfilled the word count, whether he's in the middle of a sentence or not:
  Tony Parsehole: And like a black hole, it sucks in our tears of sadness until we there that's 750 words inc title inv follows by email.
• Subverted Kids' Show: The art style owes a lot to British children's comics. The content... less so.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: The one-off strip "Tubby Tucker the Big Fat Person".
• Suicide as Comedy: Suicidal Syd always tries to off himself, fails, and then finds a reason to carry on living ... only to immediately die in a random accident.
  • Occasionally occurs with Terry Fuckwitt as well, but something always stops him succeeding.
  • The majority of Big Vern strips conclude with him blowing his own brains out, often after killing his friend Ernie and anyone else in the immediate vicinity.
  • Done in a parody of Thomas the Tank Engine where Thomas spirals into depression after someone commits suicide by jumping onto the tracks.
• Surprise Incest:
  • Tasha Slappa's boyfriend Bobba is suggested to possibly be her father (and perhaps her grandfather as well).
  • Norbert Colon was once set up on a blind date with his mother - the only person the dating agency could find who was as stingy as him.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Tommy 'Banana' Johnson is treated with utter derision for suggesting his oversize banana as a solution to other peoples' problems. Similarly, Sid the Sexist's totally, well, sexist chat-up lines get him nowhere with the ladies. Mild-mannered office worker Barry Brown turns into his superhero alter-ego the Brown Bottle by drinking several bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale in quick succession ... and becomes an incoherent, incontinent drunkard who can barely stand. And Barry the Cat (an incompetent version of the Beano character Billy the Cat) ends up in hospital as a result of his attempts to save the day.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: After John Fardell stopped drawing for Viz, the comic introduced "Foodie Bollocks" and "Poppy Bullshit and Araminta Bollocks, Art-Makers" which are very similar in premise and characters to, respectively, "Ferdinand the Foodie" and "The Critics" (both drawn by Fardell.)
• Take That!:
  • Practically every strip featuring a celebrity is a crude Take That against the person involved.
  • The notorious "Gypsy" strip was based on an individual who had stolen something from one of the artists and the character of Postman Plod was based on a bus driver who had been rude to another artist (as well as being a parody of a popular children's show.) Similarly, Farmer Palmer was inspired by a farmer who had been rude to one of the artists.
  • As mentioned above, the response to D.C. Thomson's copyright complaints, the full title being D.C. Thomson the Humourless Scottish Git.
  • A strip with Roger Mellie visiting an SF fan convention repeatedly mentioned "the fat Doctor Who that nobody remembers".
  • Roger Mellie often gets jobs that Paul Ross either turned down or was too pricey.
  • One Baxter Basics strip has his assistant note the only way into the House of Lords is to write a shitty musical (like Andrew Lloyd Webber) or an even shittier novel (like Jeffrey Archer).
• Tar and Feathers: In "Jack Black And His Dog Silver" in one issue, a palaeontologist is tarred and feathered for believing in evolution.
• Teeny Weenie: It is sometimes implied that Sid the Sexist is somewhat under-endowed. The same goes for Baz from the Fat Slags, but unlike Sid he still gets to have sex on a regular basis, since San and Tray aren't particularly fussy.
• Temporary Bulk Change: Anna Reksik instantly bloats up when she eats anything even slightly fattening, usually going back to normal via liposuction or vomiting.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Suicidal Syd, along with Big Vern and friends.
  • Jack Black occasionally betrays and kills Aunt Meg and/or PC Brown, but they are always resurrected in time for the next strip.
  • The Male Online has died in several strips after Beryl loses patience and kills him, or on one occasion where he died from COVID after refusing to believe it was real.
• A Threesome Is Hot: In one "The Male Online" strip, when the title character complains about women filing sexual harassment suits, his wife Beryl reveals that his friend once groped her at a party. A flashback reveals that The Male saw it happen, but found the incident arousing because of this trope.
• Toilet Humour: Where to start?
  • Well, a good place might be with Billy Bottom, whose strips are always about his adventures while trying to take a crap...
    • Ditto for Doctor Poo.
    • And the many, many different versions of the basic storyline of the above, in a which a famous person (or at least a reasonably well-known public figure like a cabinet minister) tries in vain to find a convenient place that can be used for defecatory purposes.
  • The various Bottom Inspectors strips portrayed a totalitarian regime where the secret police had the right to, well, inspect everyone's bottom. Various critics claimed this was political satire; in fact the writers just wanted an excuse to print as many words for "buttocks" as they could find in their thesaurus.
• Torture Technician: Parodied in a "Big Vern" strip, where Vern is summoned to see "the Dentist", who he believes to be some kind of terrifying underworld Torture Technician. He continues to act this way throughout what turns out to be a perfectly normal dental examination. "The Chiropodist", on the other foot...
• Toxic Friend Influence: Anna Reksik's friend and fellow model Belle Emia is an enabler.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: It's fairly common for there to be strips where the characters are out of their usual setting and in other scenarios such as Victorian times or the far future, or are used in parodies of other work. Examples include the Fat Slags in a parody of Batman, Jack Black in a parody of manga and a Roman version of Sid the Sexist.
• Unmoving Plaid: A striped version is used for Roger Mellie's jacket, and occasionally for other characters in other strips.
• Unreliable Narrator: Mrs Brady Old Lady, who especially in the earlier strips gave off the impression of having dementia. Her recollection of how things used to be is sometimes implausible, such as a time when she died of the Spanish Flu, but brushed herself off and got back to work (you just did in them days). In later strips, her friend Dolly tends to agree with her memories, which implies that the strip does take place in some kind of bizarro universe.
• Unusual Euphemism: Most characters curse explicitly, but Sweary Mary had to invent a new oath ("fitbin", apparently really rude, if it meant anything) in order to appear on the cover which would be displayed in shops. Raffles the Gentleman Thug renders all obscenities into Edwardian English, "Fornicate this ordure!", "It's micturating down" "Onanists!" etc.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: It's easier to name the characters who don't fit this description.
• Vacation Episode: Summer editions often see some of the characters going on holiday, and generally living up (or down) to the worst possible stereotypes about Brits abroad. Prime examples are the Fat Slags drinking and shagging their way through various holiday resorts, and Sid the Sexist trying to do likewise but merely getting badly sunburned as well as beaten up for his troubles.
• The 'Verse: Drunken Bakers and Hen Cabin appear to be set in the same universe as well as having similar premises and being drawn by the same duo. Also, Sid the Sexist and Millie Tant sometimes encounter each other while Dirtyarse has taunted both Sid the Sexist and Ivan Jellical. Roger Mellie sometimes appears in other strips when a reporter or narrator is needed; on these occasions, he's generally (although not always) without his usual lecherous and/or violent behaviour. There was an occasional gag where Roger and Tom appear in other strips before realising that they're in the wrong strip and leaving. A 2023 issue had the Male Online attempting to buy a second-hand car from Cockney Wanker.
• The Vicar:
  • Parodied and inverted to the nth degree with Paul Whicker the Tall Vicar — a violent, dishonest, lecherous, borderline-alcoholic, foul-mouthed hypocrite who happens to be an ordained Church of England priest.
  • Somewhat also with Reverend Brown in Goldfish Boy. He once spent a strip getting hugely annoyed with his parishioners for interrupting him when he just wanted to spend the day drooling over a Calendar Girls video.
• Video Call Fail: A one-off strip was created during the COVID-19 Pandemic which had a Diabolical Mastermind type attempt to hold the world to ransom via a broadcast hijack, only to fall prey to various teleconferencing mishaps.
• Viewers Are Morons: Inverted by Roger Mellie; the TV executives are usually the ones insisting that viewers want to watch highbrow material, whereas Roger's pornographic retoolings of popular shows (Call My Muff, The Bollock Naked Chef, etc, etc) inevitably end up being massive hits.

  Roger: Why bother feeding the pigs cherries when they are happy with shit?

• Violent Glaswegian: Occasionally, although violent Geordies are more common.
  • Sometimes you get both. One of the strips featuring Biffa Bacon had him at a restaurant, where he thought the chef was insulting him by giving him such a small amount of food, which Biffa decided to respond to with violence. Unfortunately the owner of that particular restaurant happened to be Gordon Ramsay, who promptly beat the crap out of Biffa and tossed him out on the street.
  • Another Biffa strip had them going on holiday to an old fashioned B&B. One of the conventions of these establishments is sharing a breakfast table with another family staying in there the same week. Unfortunately the Bacons were sat with the McBasher family from Scotland. It didn't end well...
  • 2016-on issues introduced "Wee Radge Joe", who is a Violent Glaswegian with a Hair-Trigger Temper, the Running Gag punchline of all the strips being whoever he is provoking or threatening turning out to be a better fighter than he is and beating him up.
• The Voiceless: Only one of the Real Ale Twats ever has any lines, though its possible that the other can never get a word in due to their leader's long-winded nature.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In pretty much every Anna Reksik strip.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: "The Modern Parents" is a satire of an extremist environmentalist/New Age couple and their antics, while their young son is the Only Sane Man.
  • "Scum Mothers, Who'd 'Ave 'Em?" focuses on a responsible, well-behaved man constantly embarrassed by his drunken, promiscuous and criminal mother.
• Weight Woe: The whole basis around Anna Reksik.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Most of the recurring strips are set in a fictional town called Fulchester, which based on accents and references is thought to be based on or near Newcastle Upon Tyne. The town gets its name from the setting of the ITV drama, Crown Court.
• Who's on First?: One strip involves Lou Costello running through this routine with the British politician Diane Abbott as they try to plan the agenda for a political debate.
• Writing Around Trademarks: In Tasha Slappa's first appearance, the strip was titled Kappa Slappa, after the low-budget sportswear brand. It was renamed afterwards because Kappa objected, not to the use of the brand name, but to the comic's implication that Kappa clothing was highly flammable.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Tommy 'Banana' Johnson, a strip featured in the comic's first issue and given various remakes in the years since, features the title character suggesting that other characters use the gigantic banana that he carries around with him for various purposes (ie. as a hair dryer or telescope). Were he appearing in a children's comic, the banana would doubtless be magical and able to do whatever the plot demands. In the world of Viz, however, it's just an otherwise-normal banana that happens to be freakishly oversized, resulting in the other characters treating his suggestions with the derision you'd expect.
  • Similarly, "Corky the Twat", in which Viz hires a cat to get up to zany antics for readers' amusement. In a children's comic, Corky would be anthropormorphic and able to play along with the storyline. In Viz, he's a normal cat who can't do anything funny.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After his failed attempts to kill himself, Suicidal Syd's faith in humanity will be restored only for him to die in random circumstances soon afterwards.
• Yet Another Christmas Carol: Happened in a festive Sid the Sexist strip. Sid unsuccessfully tried his chat-up lines on the (female) Ghost, was shown how as a child his idea of Playing House was to leave the girl in the pretend house and go hang out with his mates in a pretend pub, and was eventually shown his own gravestone, bearing the inscription "DIED A VIRGIN". He learned nothing from the experience, of course.
• Younger Than They Look: Jack Black looks like he should be in his late teens, but is no older than 11-12, since multiple strips have mentioned that he hasn't physically gone through puberty yet.

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