Zit (comic)

Zit was an adult British comic that was published by Humour Publications UK, beginning with a free sample issue in January 1991, and with issue 1 in February 1991.

It was one of many such comics similar to "Viz", and was also of lower production quality than its inspiration. As well as comic strips, it also included photo strips, joke articles, celebrity references, and adverts for phone lines and mail order products, many of a pornographic or sexual nature.

The owner of Humour Publications, Russell Church, attempted to stir up an aggressive rivalry between his publication and the far more successful "Viz", but, as "Viz" editor Chris Donald stated in his autobiography, "Church's magazine was so bad he couldn't give the thing away". In 1993 Church sued another "Viz" clone, the Huddersfield-based "Spit!", for "passing itself off" as Zit. He pursued the case all the way to the High Court, where the judge ruled that nobody "with reasonable apprehension or eyesight" could confuse the two comics. Church was ordered to pay "Spit!"'s legal bills, which came to around £32,000. Soon after this setback, Church was sued by the British TV presenter Anne Diamond, following a tasteless reference in Zit to her child's tragic cot death. This effectively sank Humour Publications, and Zit continued with a different publisher's backing before vanishing from the shelves in 2002.

Its strips (many drawn by Anthony Smith) included:
* Acid Head Arnie - a young man whose sole aim in life was to take LSD and go to raves. This strip also appeared in Brain Damage
* Angus McBastard - an extremely violent Scot
* Billy Bunt (he's just a fat... fool) - an obese, gluttonous schoolboy derivative of Billy Bunter
* Dad And Son - a divorced father and his teenaged son, who were basically losers who spent their lives failing to obtain female company. This strip also appeared in Spit
* Father Spikes - Obnoxious, swearing, violent man of the cloth. Appeared in a rather memorable spoof of "The Exorcist", where he was more vile than the demon. His great grandfather was also responsible for the sinking of the RMS Titanic by putting his fist through the ship in a moment of violent temper.
* Gavin St. James (the Docklands Don Juan) - a shallow yuppie who believed he was a passionate lover, unaware of his unsatisfied lovers due to his small penis
* The Girl With No Brain - a catatonic girl who, despite being inanimate and unable to comprehend her surroundings, nonetheless was very good at foiling bank robbers and other such stock bad-guys
* Gordon's Gin - an alcoholic who was always drinking gin ("Gordon's Gin" is a famous brand of that particular beverage in Britain)
* Julie's Bollocks - a prepubecent girl who, in the manner of such strips, owned a pair of talking cartoon testicles
* Lamb Brusco - an alcoholic sheep whose name was a parody of the wine brand named Lambrusco
* Madass Hussein - a politically crude satire of Saddam Hussein
* Mary Lamb (and her acts of wanton cruelty) - a small child who mutilates house guests
* Mickey Muck and his Magic Spunk - a boy who believed his sperm ("spunk" in British slang) was magical. Sadly, it wasn't, and he was invariably arrested for his attempts to help people by masturbating on them
* Mrs Clean - a housewife who was so obsessed with cleanliness that it exceeded all other considerations, such as the time she flayed her two children after learning that dust was mostly made up of human skin
* Richard Cheese - He's Really Horrid! - A man who endulges in disgusting antics for kicks in front of the public :- For example he took full advantage of a stinking cold and blew his snot out on a restaurant windows and regurgitating the mucus back up again, much to the disgust of the people in the restaurant.In another he goes swimming and retrieves the hairs caught in outlet pipe strainer, he then surfaces in front of everyone and wrings the water out of them into his mouth:- Mmm! Nice and sweaty! - He comments.This strip appeared in 1994, and the fist frame of the cartoon has him saying "Smell My Finger!
* Tales of the Riverbank - a strip similar in style to Wind in the Willows, except with arbitrary twists - for example, the characters would be killed by crashing aircraft, blitzkrieg Nazis, and so forth
* Teenage Mum - a teenaged girl whose parenting skills left a lot to be desired (e.g. force-feeding her baby gravy granules and insisting "These won't stop your diarrhea but they should thicken it up a bit") and who was presented as an immoral single mother to coincide with the moral panic occurring at the time in the UK. This strip also appeared in Spit
* My Neighbour's a Coon - A politically incorrect parody of the sitcom Love Thy Neighbour, in which the racist main character attacks a foreign neighbour in each strip. His wife encourages him to try and make friends with said neighbour, but by the end of the strip he has usually had the neighbour killed.

In other media

A video called Zit The Video was produced in 1993, featuring many of its characters in five minute segments.

Also to boot there was the strip YOUNG TARBY which told the exploits of Jimmy Tarbuck schooldays only to prove his material has not changed.The artwork was by the rather talented liverpool cartoonist GED PURVIS.