The Drunken Bakers is a strip cartoon in the British adult humour magazine Viz created by writer Barney Farmer and artist Lee Healey.
They are drawn as - and have the personalities of - a pair of classic clown archetypes, an odd couple: the curly haired but balding one being short and aggressive, the taller being doleful.
According to Roberta Smith, the characters are "two middle-aged Bumstead-like alcoholics haplessly lurching from one disaster and one drink to the next as they attempt to run a bakery.
As critic Steve Lowe says, Before long, they're both staggering round a smoke-filled bakery surrounded by empty spirits bottles.
He succeeds, producing the number 25 in cake form, while his partner drinks mulled wine made in the kettle, which has held something nasty.
In the final frame the inevitable happens - the fellow vomits up his stomach contents all over the anniversary cakes, and so their only success is utterly ruined.
[1] Leckey created a film using frames from the original strips to construct a narrative and added a soundtrack spoken by himself and his colleague Steve Claydon in Liverpudlian accents.
[3] According to Emily Mears, By fading the screen to black between episodes, Leckey constructs an elliptical narrative that mirrors the sense of time lost by the drinkers and the viewer.
[3]In Roberta Smith's words, Leckey constructs "dreamy, druggy, disjointed variants on music videos...He has ingeniously filmed the comic strip with close-ups and jump-cuts, creating a kind of stop-action animation, and added a skillfully explicit soundtrack replete with convincing belches, slurps, breaking glass and vomiting.
"[4] The characters from the Viz cartoon also feature in a standalone novel, Drunken Baker, written by Barney Farmer and published by Wrecking Ball Press on 26 April 2018.