Old Viz's

In the bathroom lookin through old Viz's, I recall that humour industry that sprang up then. Viz was successful in its market share & therefore inspired a number of shoddy imitators.
And in the old  Viz's, printed on cheap paper, one can see the many strange subterranean cottage industries that were able to exist in its shadow, in the form of the ads for obscene or satiric T-shirts or cards or rubber stamps or inflatable sheep. All of it aimed at the lowest common denominator of Viz reader, vaguely thought of as someone young, sarcastic, a bit cynical. Targeted for the toilet humour sub-market. Nostalgia for anything...
When you leave a magazine for fifteen or twenty years and then look at it again you get a not-unpleasant sense of the futility of life, and you can examine the small ads with a clarity afforded by hindsight. As always, with the small, exploitative ads selling tat, you get a much more valuable insight into the period than with the big-money ads. The ads in old Viz's are not funny, but they belong to an old satiric tradition. This is why popular culture is always immensely more revealing than official culture.
K. is showing me the mildewing old Viz's with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. She always adopts a craze, usually too late, for rap or Marvel comicbooks or the Pixies, or Hong Kong cinema, say, and then leaves token examples of it around her room for visitors to see. Whether she appreciates the stuff in itself is debatable.