Now then comic book fans as you might have gathered by now i'm a bit of a Viz fan not only do I read each new issue when it comes out but I also make it a habit to read the annuals and well since my review of last years went down a treat I thought i'd try and make this either a yearly thing or one that happens every few months and so here is my review of the new Viz annual Viz: The Trumpeter's Lips enjoy.
As I stated in my review of the previous annual there is no plot just a bunch of individual strips each with there own story to tell. So one of them might be about someone recording a Christmas TV special but the one below it would be about something completely different and so I would advise anyone thinking about starting to read Viz books to be ready not to expect a whole lot of plot just expect there to be a basic set up and nothing more,
All of the old favourites return including the likes of Buster Gonad , Biffa Bacon , Roger Mellie , The Male Online and The Fat Sl*gs. There's really nothing new I can add about these characters because alot of them have been going on for around twenty years and the same person who created them is still writing and drawing them to this very day and so if you already like these characters then your still going to like them here.
Just so you all know the characters that i've listed aren't the only characters who appear in the annual this year it's just there the only ones that I can actually remember. I honestly think that if I was to count how many characters appear in this years collection including one of characters there would most likely be around forty to fifty characters but that's just a very rough guess so please don't hold me to it.
I'll have you guys know that it's hard for me to find any suitable pictures for this review let alone any from the actual collection and so any picture I do use most likely isn't from the collection but is the best representation of the character. I honestly feel that the above picture is perhaps the best representation of the Roger Mellie character because without him saying anything you get what kind of character he is.
Now i'll full on admit I wasn't expecting to do this review so early on in the year and yes I know it's near the end of summer but what I mean is I wasn't expecting to be having a copy of this book until much later in the year. So you can imagine my shock when I walked into a shop in Wales and I found a copy of this book so you can bet that I bought it as soon a I saw it because i'm not waiting several months like I did last year i've learned my lesson.
As with any Viz book be it the I guess yearly annuals or the monthly issues the news articles are so worth reading. I have to wonder how the team come up with funny and fresh news articles every single month because each article is worth reading just to see what crazy stuff the editorial staff come up with and dare I say it this year there actually better and funnier then some of the featured strips but that's just my opinion.
Now I would very much like to mention who did the artwork and who wrote each strip but like alot of comic strips there names aren't seen anywhere. That being said the artwork pretty much what you expect from the Viz team at this point altho if you know some of the creators then you'll notice that some of the characters look alike for example the character of Buster Gonad looks alot like Baz from The Fat Sl*gs however due to Buster's full name I can't post any pictures.
If i'm being honest one of the strips that I enjoyed the most with this release is The Male Online which is weird because I barely find those strips to be funny. However when I was re-reading The Pieman's Wig and reading this annual I found myself not only enjoying the strip alot but also laughing at pretty much all of them because they are really funny and that was something that I wasn't expecting to do.
Now as with the previous Viz releases this collection of strips is rude as all hell which is also why I can't include pictures of certain characters due to their names. So if you have any young relatives then don't even think of getting them anything from Viz because chances are it will scar them for life even the one's that aren't quite that rude are still more mature then anything seen in the Beano or Dandy that's how mature they are.
In all honesty this annual isn't as funny as last years one but it still does have plenty of good jokes in it. For me tho the best one isn't even a joke it's a headline all it is is a question asking how Henry The 8th Mowed his lawn I don't know why but for some reason that really got a laugh out of me maybe because it's so strange and absurd that you can't help but laugh at the joke that being said tho there are alot of jokes that I just didn't find funny and there was a few jokes at a certain controversial president which were honestly pretty funny.
Overall this was a solid collection of the best strips from previous issues but with that being said it's not as good as the previous one and so it gets a 7 out of 10 from me. If you guys liked this review let me know because i'm thinking of reviewing every issue of Viz when it comes out and this would be a great way for me to gage if there's any interest