The Viz ripoff that's 30 years too late!In 1977 a punk fanzine started up called Viz, it's popularity slowly grew until circa 1989, when it was selling a million copies a month. Naturally loads of crappy ripoffs appeared. Some were pretty good, when looked at objectively, but most just copied the superficial appearace of viz ("bad art and swear words"), expecting to make the same amount of money without putting in any actual effort. You may recognise this as the same thing US and some UK comics did with "manga" in the 2000's. Most of them only existed for a few years, around 1989 to 1991, before going bust. So in 2019, I decided I ought to give it a go! SCV was originally intended to have 12 monthly issues from September 2019 to September 2020. This was swiftly switched to 12 bimonthly issues, ending in September 2021. Actual number made in that time? Er, four and a bit. Now I've decided to create "SCV Series 3", with a "whenever I'm ready" release schedule. Most of the strips in Series 3 will be the same as those in Series 2, bar a few particularly-topical ones about Coronavirus, which you can now read online for free!. SCV Series 2 was supposed to have 16 pages of all-comic content. Series 3 will probably be 24 pages, with about two-thirds comics to a third text articles / fake newspapers etc. The main reason for the page increase is so I can increase the length of the British Adventure / American Superhero comic parodies. I tried to cram them into two pages of the old version, and there simply wasn't the room! SCV Series 1
There was also a much earlier version of SCV, which was going to be a fanzine for the Cambridge rock / metal / ska / reggae / folk scene in 2006, but that didn't get far! Issue 1 was supposed to advertise a Zeroscape gig at Man on the Moon (RIP), but didn't get done in time and was sort of abandoned. Oh well, click the old cover above to read what was finished! Also that SCV was originally going to be a fanzine for just one band, called Saint Zoe, and called Clowning Around!
SCV Series 2
Three issues of this were actually completely finished, but the POD service I was planning to use were, by that time, operating in a pretty restricted capacity due to Corona and the associated bullshit. Not wanting to add my crappy scrawlings to the pile, I decided to hold off (Issue 4 being miles behind schedule didn't help neither). This meant a lot of the topical strips related to Corona are now out of date! So I'll give them to you for free! Just click the covers above. Most of the material prepared for issues 1-4 will be used in the new SCV, though not necessarily in the same order! There's a bunch of other adventure / superhero comic parodies that haven't been put online yet. They will be re-drawn for series 3, but will have much the same scripts. They'll be put online once the print versions are out. |
