It features parody competitions and advertisements for overpriced 'limited edition' tat, as well as obsessions with half-forgotten kitsch celebrities from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as Shakin' Stevens and Rodney Bewes.

Circulation peaked at 1.2 million in the early 1990s, making it the third-most popular magazine in the UK,[2] but ABC-audited sales have since dropped, to an average of 48,588 per issue in 2018.

To meet the demand, and to make up for Brownlow's diminishing interest in contributing, freelance artist Graham Dury was hired and worked alongside Chris Donald.

[12] Sales steadily declined from the mid-1990s to around 200,000 in 2001, by which time Chris Donald had resigned as editor and passed control to an "editorial cabinet" comprising his brother Simon, Dury, Thorp and new recruits Davey Jones and Alex Collier.

In June 2001, the comic was acquired as part of a £6.4 million deal by I Feel Good (IFG), a company belonging to ex-Loaded editor James Brown, and increased in frequency to ten times a year.

Characters often have rhyming or humorous taglines, such as Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly; Nobby's Piles; Johnny Fartpants; Buster Gonad; Sid the Sexist; Sweary Mary or Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres.

The one-off strips often have ludicrously alliterative and/or rhyming titles, for example: "Reverend Milo's Lino Rhino", "Max's Laxative Saxophone Taxi', and "Scottie Trotter's Tottie Alottment".

Billy Connolly has had more than one about him trying to ingratiate himself with the Queen and Bob Hope had a strip featuring the comedian trying to think up amusing last words to utter on his deathbed (but ending up with a torrent of swearing).

The singer Elton John has also appeared frequently in recent issues as a double-dealing Del Boy-type character attempting to pull off small-time criminal scams such as tobacco smuggling, benefit fraud and cheating on fruit machines.

However, in true Viz style, the wedding featured a lecherous groom marrying his pregnant (and significantly underaged) girlfriend, eyeing up her younger sister while being called a "cradle-snatching cunt" by her father (with the resulting fight prompting the bride's mother to cry out "less it, for fuck's sake" before the police arrived).

Other stories include ludicrous "kiss and tell" and similar stories by people who are portrayed as mentally disturbed, often with highly bizarre elements; examples include allegations by a man who claimed that, on holiday touring in his caravan, he found a campsite run by Elvis Presley who, when plied with drink, admitted to the Kennedy assassination; another from a retired toilet attendant who described the nature of faeces from various little-known celebrities and an elderly woman who blames anti-social behaviour in her area on bored Newsnight presenters, as well as a mental home patient who claimed to have had sex with a number of children's TV puppets.

Another regular feature is a column by 'Tony Parsehole', a parody of columnist Tony Parsons who frequently writes obituaries about recently deceased celebrities filled entirely with metaphor and empty sentiment which stops abruptly once the required word count is reached (with a note that the invoice is included).

Additionally, there are often stories revolving around celebrities, some in the "tell-all" vein (such as a customs agent who claimed he found drugs in Pamela Anderson's "plastic tits").

The words will often follow a theme, such as TV cops' names or types of curry, and will sometimes spell out a sentence, rarely relevant, if read separately from the story.

If I was George Michael right about now, I'd be shitting myself") or current events (a 2000 issue remarked "The Government spent £850 million on the Millennium Bug, and the only thing that crashes is Q [Desmond Llewelyn] out of the Bond films").

Letterbocks also formerly featured correspondence from, and has brought fame to, the late Abdul Latif, Lord of Harpole, proprietor of the (real) Curry Capital restaurant (formerly the Rupali), Bigg Market.

In Viz, naturally, they are always absurd, impractical or ludicrous: Some tips are for ludicrous motives, such as "how to convince neighbours that your house has dry rot", while others are for ostensibly sensible motives but with ridiculous and impractical suggestions for their application: Some are just inexplicable: Others inspire running jokes: A more recent trend is for sarcastic tips to be offered that are observations by the readers regarding other people's behaviour, such as a barmaid who suggests male public house customers who are "trying to get into a barmaid's knickers" should "pull back your tenner just as she reaches to take it when paying for a round.

In a further attack on the company, the map of Cuntinental Europe, given away free with Issue 118 and showing a large cartoon of stereotypes of the British and their neighbours over the relevant geographical areas, displayed the McDonald's logo on potentially insensitive locations, such as the Parthenon and the vicinity of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Viz has manufactured some of these items and sold them, including a china plate depicting "The Life of Christ...In Cats", featuring pictures of a cat in various stages of Jesus's life, and the "Elvis Presley Dambusters Clock Plate of Tutankhamun", a clock featuring Elvis in the style of Tutankhamun's death mask in addition to Avro Lancaster bomber planes.

Many of these adverts had a form with a tick box at the end, with outrageous binding statements in small print that invariably led the purchaser to usury, such as "I enclose £49.50 in an infinite series of escalating payments".

Another ad exhorted male readers to join the British Army, because "all the birds are gagging for squaddies" (with the fine print on the reply coupon indicating to the respondent that spending "33 years hiding behind some garden wall in Belfast should just about see [him] right" when it comes to the ladies).

These parody the format of supernatural and true-love British comics which were popular with young girl readers in the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Chiller" and "Jackie", as well as the "real life dilemma" photo strips often found in the advice columns of tabloid newspapers.

Arthur, former lead singer of the band The Chart Commandos, still continues to perform with "Big Black Bomb" and is still considered to be an innovating force on the Newcastle music scene.

In his book Rude Kids: The Inside Story of Viz, the comic's creator Chris Donald claimed that the first legal action ever taken against Viz was initiated by a man who objected to the use of a picture of his house (taken from an estate agent's catalogue) in one of these photo-strips, and that the British tabloid newspaper Sunday Mirror tried to provoke media outrage over another photo-strip which, if taken out of context, could be misconstrued as making light of the problem of illegal drugs being offered to children.

Chris Donald revealed in his book Rude Kids – The Unfeasibly True Story of Viz that the magazine's publishers had pencilled in Student Grant as the next animated release but this never came to fruition.

In December 2011, Viz produced three animated shorts for Channel 4's Comedy Blaps with Baby Cow, voiced by Steve Coogan, Sarah Millican, Simon Greenall and Gavin Webster.

A novelty single[26] was released in 1987 for Viz, featuring its Buster Gonad character, by the band XTC, with John Otway, as "Johnny Japes and His Jesticles".

During the Gulf War of 1991, SEPECAT Jaguar GR1A bombers of the Royal Air Force featured such Viz characters as Johnny Fartpants, the Fat Slags and Buster Gonad as nose art.

[citation needed] The Geordies' miserable efforts bore sharp similarity to actual Viz characters, such as 'The Boy with Big Pants' which was a reference to Felix and his Amazing Underpants.

In his book Rude Kids: The Inside Story of Viz, Chris Donald mentions that he was interviewed by police after giving the go-ahead to publish a Top Tip which could have been interpreted as an incitement to carry out a bomb plot.