Comics fans i'm British and more importantly i'm from the north of England I mention all of this because not only am I reviewing my first British comic strip and it's one that i'm sure alot of older fans will love so here is my review of Viz: The Pieman's Wig.
I really would like to comment on the plot of the stories except each strip has no real plot since it's a collection of stories from previous issues of the magazine so you can really read any of the stories and have a fair understanding of the characters as well as the world that they live in. I will say that like alot of things in this book the stories are very adult so please do NOT read anything from Viz unless you are over the age of 18.
Due to the adult nature of Viz comics the images I use won't be from the actual book itself and the names of certain strips will have to be edited but I will say that if you love character names with great puns or names that just make you laugh then this is the series for you because there are names like Billy the Fish someone who is half man half fish and is a footballer (soccer player) , Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large T*******s does it really need saying why this is a great name , The Fat S***s these are two women who love s** and food.
There are honestly more great funny names in the book but these are just the best ones in my opinion and yes I did have to censor some of the names but tho that's just because I want to make sure that alot of people remain happy with the post and it's honestly because alot of the names are quite rude and yes there is a chance that you'll be hearing me say that it's a rude book many times in this review.
One of the things that the magazine became famous for is it's spoof news articles like for example the one seen in the above picture and I will say that like alot of things in this book I was laughing quite a bit of the time while reading some of the headlines unfortunately tho I cannot supply you with any of them mostly because i've forgotten alot of them so you'll just have to trust me on this but tho I will say that you will get the jokes not only in this book but also in the news articles if your British.
Speaking of being British all of the shows characters live in the north of England which is where yours truly is from and if you are from the north then you might pick up on where some of the characters are from because like any good comic strip does it doesn't tell you out right where they are from instead it lets you work out from certain words that the characters use.
As you might have seen by the two actual images from Viz magazine the art style for each strip is exactly the same i'm not even kidding outside of the characters there's nothing to tell each strip apart to me that is both a good and bad thing good because it means that these characters can live in the same universe but bad because there are times were you can't tell where one strip ends and the other begins so having something visually to tell us that were reading another strip would have been nice.
I don't really think I can stress enough how adult this book and the magazine is heck if you want prove of how adult this series is just try and work out some of the words that i've censored that alone should give you some idea of what to expect in this book because yes each of the characters that i've listed does appear in this book at least several times but the jokes in those strips are usually all different which is good.
Now this isn't the first time that Viz have put out an annual infact they do it at least once a year and they pretty much have done since either the late seventies or the early eighties I can't really tell since there's no way of finding out for sure but all of them collect the best bits from previous issues I like to think of them as a more funny version of the collected editions from either Marvel or DC.
Overall it is a really funny and adult book but at the same time I think that only us British would like it since alot of the jokes would fly over everyone else's head and since this is a collection of stories i'm not going to give a rating mostly because I am a fan of Viz but also because I can't think of one.