Comics UK

Hi all,

I see adult comic Smut has just relaunched itself as "Twisted". Don't worry, the quality is still as high as it has always been...

Best,
Chris

I had a flick through this in WH Smith today but couldn't bring myself to buy it. It's a shame Viz has no decent competition, and probably never will.

PaulTwist wrote:I had a flick through this in WH Smith today but couldn't bring myself to buy it. It's a shame Viz has no decent competition, and probably never will.

No newsagents around here had a copy. (But they didn't stock Smut either.)

Lew

Lew Stringer wrote:
No newsagents around here had a copy. (But they didn't stock Smut either.)

Lew

I can pick one up and stick it in the post if you like - I doubt very much that WH Smith will be selling out of it any time soon!

Having looked at the first issue of 'Twisted', there's actually very little difference between this and 'Smut'.

The artwork on the whole is reasonable enough, but the scripts are, IMHO, not funny. The ads for porn lines are still there and there appears to be a lot of reprint stuff. I say appears as I don't know for certain, but some of the artists have marked the years on their strip and others cover out of date topical issues (foot and mouth disease for example). I also noticed some of the features appear to have been crudely updated with words pasted over the top. The whole thing looks cheap and hastily put together...

It's perhaps odd that out of all the Viz "tributes" comics that sprung up in the eighties and nineties, Smut is the only one still going...

Yeah, it's a shame. I thought they'd take the opportunity to improve but it looks like base, lowest-common-denominator rubbish. Perhaps it's got an audience, I suppose, but it's not for me.

Well IMHO Smut as with (Gas and all those other "Viz" wanneabes is total errr mince-andI'm being VERY nice here) it should be exposed for the lack of talant and class that it is its total RUBBUSH (I bought it) waste of my ? - get folk like Lew Stringer etc on it & maybe it'll improve.

PLEASE don't get me started on the dreadful, DREADFUL Smut / Twisted. I did some work for these people back in the 90s and I could quite easily curse them between now and doomsday without repeating myself once.

I've only seen it on sale in ONE place, and there is stays rigidly on the shelves. How they keep in business i'll never know...

felneymike wrote:I've only seen it on sale in ONE place, and there is stays rigidly on the shelves. How they keep in business i'll never know...

Is it still published, even? I saw one issue of Twisted before it seemed to disappear forever... couldn't bring myself to buy it. Looked abysmal.

Wow, I'm amazed any of these humour titles still exists. It's 20 years now since I had work in Viz and then started working for the "me too" titles. I was in Gas and Brain Damage, the comics that enabled me to go freelance in 1989, then got the chance to edit a title. Anyone remember UT? I vainly tried to make it more than a Viz rip-off, and was proud of some of the work we got in there, but sadly our publishers were the Sunday Sport who packed it so full of porn phone line ads that it was never going to cross over to a wider readership. Still, 18 months wasn't a bad run.

The title I grew to hate most was Zit, who went bankrupt ripping creators and printers off (I was greatly out of pocket myself) then promptly resumed publishing as a new company. Ooh I shudder at the memory. Last I heard of that publisher was that he'd ripped off a load of kids by running a dodgy Boyzone fanclub, which shows how long ago he crossed my radar.

So, Smut's still running after all these years? Who'd a thunk it?

kevf wrote:
So, Smut's still running after all these years? Who'd a thunk it?

As noted at the top of the thread, Smut ended last year and a month or two later relaunched itself as Twisted. Distribution seems very poor. I've only seen one copy of Twisted (issue 2) and it seemed to be full of reprint from Smut, with pages dated from the late Nineties.

All the other Viz clones are gone. None of them ever really understood what made Viz tick anyway, thinking it was just the obscenities that were needed to make an imitation work. Your UT comic was the exception Kev, with a wit and satire of its own. The lads at Viz quite liked that one.

Lew

the poorest-ever title I ever encountered along these lines was an early '90s effort called 'POOT'. They were so hard up for material, they encouraged readers to mail in artwork for inclusion, claiming: 'it doesn't matter if you can't draw!'

kevf wrote: The title I grew to hate most was Zit, who went bankrupt ripping creators and printers off (I was greatly out of pocket myself) then promptly resumed publishing as a new company. Ooh I shudder at the memory. Last I heard of that publisher was that he'd ripped off a load of kids by running a dodgy Boyzone fanclub, which shows how long ago he crossed my radar.

So, Smut's still running after all these years? Who'd a thunk it?

I knew Zit were thoroughly bad because two of their regular contributors made unpaid contributions (which was really good of them) to my early nineties fanzine 'Klam', and their letters were always full of the latest news about Zit's publishers, none of it good.

As for Smut, I worked for them for a brief while (and contributed to their frankly P**s-poor children's spin-off title Acne) and I've never met a duller pair of 'lads down the pub' blokey-blokes in my life. They promised the earth but couldn't deliver. As Harvey Pekar said, "good intentions come cheap but coming through on them is where most people fall down". I wouldn't have minded if they'd told me straight out that my work was crap, they didn't like what I was producing, they couldn't afford to pay me etc, but they just kept fobbing me off and fobbing me off until I'd had enough. I remember one of the editors promising to send me a drawing board and a set of Rotring pens, with a view to making me a freelancer on both titles - did it ever happen? Have a guess. Another time a promised cheque for £100 turned up sixty quid short, simply because my original (rather good) artwork had been re-drawn to save them a few poxy quid. C S!

Lew Stringer wrote: All the other Viz clones are gone. None of them ever really understood what made Viz tick anyway, thinking it was just the obscenities that were needed to make an imitation work.

As Chris Donald himself put it, cynical publishers thought...

CRUDE CARTOONS + SWEARING = ENORMOUS PROFIT

I think I should say here and now I thought Spit! (featuring Lew's 'Whitley Baywatch'!) was a pretty decent little magazine while it lasted. Graham Hey employed me to do some funny voices for the Spit! phone-lines, and even paid me fairly. Plus he bent over backwards to promote my fledgling fanzine Klam!

I also bought a couple of copies of Elephant Parts because I liked Charlie Brooker's 'Horny Estelle' strip.