Viz fans it's been along time since I last talked about anything to do with Viz comics and well as luck would have it one of my presents for Christmas this year was the latest Viz annual. As such since there's a bit of a tradition going on here where I review each Viz annual when it comes out or when I get my hands on the annual it only makes sense that I review the latest annual and so here is my review of "Viz: The Wizard's Sleeve" enjoy.
CHARACTERS FEATURED INCLUDE
BIFFA BACON
For some reason this annual features alot of Biffa Bacon which for those that don't know Biffa Bacon is meant to be an average lad but he lives in a world dominated by violence. As such Biffa often finds himself in brutal but comical fights often with his own parents and for some reason in this annual the character is featured quite alot which wouldn't be an issue if the character was good or his stories really funny but sadly there not and Biffa and both of his parents aren't that good characters and so his stories just come of as dull and if i'm being honest kind of boring in my very humble opinion.
MR. LOGIC
The character of Mr. Logic does appear in few strips which is good because I find his stories to be pretty funny and the same is true here. I just love that even tho this character is very good natured he more often then not ends up in more danger or trouble then what he was in originally due to his insistence of using logic and giving people these very longwinded talks about how to reached whatever conclusion he was trying to reach.
THE FAT SL*GS
Lastly in the characters that i'm listing we have my personal favourite characters from Viz The Fat Sl*gs. I just adore these characters because not only do you get a good sense of who each of the characters are in each strip that they appear in but you could literally put these characters in any location and in case of this annual time and give them any kind of set up and it would be funny and i'll fully admit that there strips in this annual got alot of laughs out of me just due to how funny there comic strips were in my opinion.
There are alot of characters who appear quite alot in this annual and so I chose not to include them all since I would be here all day listing them all. However as you can no doubt tell by the character's that i've listed alot of the old favourite Viz characters are featured in this annual and alot of them do have some really funny storylines but at the same time characters like 8Ace only have one storyline and our featured several times and in the case of 8Ace it's that he's trying to find money to buy some beer and that's that's the story which would be fine if 8Ace appeared once but he makes a few appearences in this annual and it's all just variations of the exact same story.
As to be expected by now they don't list who's doing the artwork for each comic strip anywhere in the annual as such I cannot tell you who's doing the art work for what strip. However in terms of what I thought about the artwork that was featured in this annual it wasn't that bad with alot of comic strips having some really good art work of course the artwork isn't perfect which is to be expected but the artwork is in the minority in this case with there being alot more better drawn comic strips then there are comic strips in this annual that aren't drawn as well as the other comic strips in this annual.
There are some characters that don't make an appearance in this years annual for some reason like for example Buster Gonad is nowhere to be found. Which I found to be rather odd since from what I could gather Buster Gonad was a fairly popular character as well as a character who appeared in alot of issues of Viz Comics and so it would make sense for him to show up even once in this annual but nope him and a few other characters (who I cannot remember the names of right now) don't appear at all in this annual.
Now then since Viz Comics / Viz Magazine is a comedy comic / magazine that does mean that I have to talk about the jokes that are in this years annual. Which for me personally the jokes in this years annual weren't that funny don't get me wrong there are some really good jokes like for example alot of the newspaper stuff is really funny as are alot of the letters that are featured in the annual but alot of comic strips just either didn't make me laugh or had a very weak punchline which for Viz is never a good thing since the guys and girls over at Viz can make anything funny but they just didn't with alot f the comic strips that are featured in this years annual.
Overall while this years annual is indeed very good and can be very funny at times as i've mentioned in this review. They put alot of focus onto unfunny and uninteresting characters and tell the exact same story with the same character in multiple comic strips in the same annual but I do recommend this to any Viz Comics / magazine fan just because it's filled with the same Viz goodness that many of us know and love as such this years annual which as the title of this review says is called "Viz: The Wizard's Sleeve" gets a 7.5 out of 10 from me.
All of the images that I used in this review were gathered from either Amazon UK , Google Images , the official Viz fandom wiki page or the official Albion British Comics Database Wiki fandom wiki page. I honestly have no idea which would be the best website to use for images mostly because there aren't that many images out there when it comes to this annual and so you have to know what characters you want to feature and look up the images individually which means that the image quality really does vary as such i say use whichever website you want to use but I will say that Google Images is a very good place to start since you can get alot of images from Google Images but that's just me being helpful tho you guys feel free to use whichever website you want to images from either this annual or anything to do with Viz Comics / magazine.