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The comic features rude and tasteless gags and characters like:

• Badly Drawn Boy – the singer is named after a one-off Viz cartoon character, who was indeed very badly drawn
• Badly Overdrawn Boy – a spoof of the above whose cashcard is rejected from an ATM due to insufficient funds in his bank account
• Biffa Bacon – a boy and his family, all of whom are violent psychopaths. This was very much a parody of the Dandy`s Bully Beef and Chips cartoon strip.
• Big Vern – a stereotypical London gangland career criminal, who is convinced the most ordinary everyday activity (a trip to tthe supermarket, say) is in fact a major criminal "job". Every episode ends with him taking his own life for the most trivial of reasons – "you'll never take me alive, copper!"
• Billy the Fish – half man, half fish, he is a star footballer despite being drawn with no legs (he does apparently own a pair of football boots , but it is not clear why). BTF is a satire on, or homage to, the popular football comics of the 60s and 70s – Roy of the RoversRoy of the Rovers was a British comic strip about the weekly activities of a footballer. The strip began in 1954 as a weekly feature in the magazine Tiger and ran there until 1983. In 1976 the strip was given its own magazine, 'Roy of the Rovers', which c and so on
• Black BagBlack Bag the Fearless Border Collie Bin Liner is a character in the comic VIZ. He is a spoof of 1950s comic strips with an irritatingly proper little brat and his " Lassie"-like dog, wandering around the country and generally messing up the lives of the – a black bin liner which lives the exciting life of a sheepdog
• The Bottom Inspectors – a parody of Hitler's SS. A fascist organisation who knock on people's doors in the middle of the night and inspect their bottoms. Any transgression is dealt with arbitrarily and cruelly.
• Buster Gonad and his unfeasibly large testicles.
• Cockney WankerCockney Wanker is a character from VIZ based on a stereotype of the male Cockney (someone from East London). He is a thief, conman and charlatan who speaks in impossible rhyming slang and spends his days drinking, selling stolen or unworkable goods to pas – a swaggering Londoner who speaks in rhyming slang.
• Eight AceEight Ace is a character in VIZ magazine. He is a miserable, foul-mouthed, unclean alcoholic, named after the quantity and brand of lager which rules his life and prevents his battleaxe wife from ever letting him into their ramshackle home, in which she b – an alcoholic who drinks "Ace" beer (eight cans for £1.49)
• Farmer PalmerFarmer Palmer is a character in the British comic, VIZ. As the name suggests, Farmer Palmer is a parody of farmers in Britain. He is evidently from the West Country, judging by his accent (like many Viz characters, all of his speech is written phoneticall – a paranoid farmer whose catch phraseA catch phrase is a phrase or expression that is popularized, usually through repeated use, by a real person or fictional character. They are especially common among TV and cartoon characters. Today, catch phrases are frequently seen as an important part is "Get orf moi laaaand!"
• The Fat Slags – two young women with huge appetites for sex and chips
• Felix and his Amazing Underpants – a boy with underpants with amazing powers
• Finbarr Saunders and his double entendres – a boy with a good ear for homophones (he's homophonic – Fnarr fnarr)
• Gilbert Ratchet – a boy who can invent anything, usually to solve people's bizarre "problems" as he comes across them. However, his inventions invariably cause far more problems of their own. Usually the entire premise of the strip turns out to be a misunderstanding.
• Jack Black – a young amateur detective who gets people "busted" for minor technical transgressions.
• Johnny Fartpants – a boy endowed with extreme flatulence
• Mickey's Miniature Grandpa – a senile old man, convinced that he's four inches tall
• Millie Tant – angry feminist
• The Modern Parents – and their long-suffering children
• Mr Logic – ("such is my name, therefore one may infer that this strip is in some way about me") a serious young man with no sympathy for other humans
• Mrs Brady the Old Lady – spends all her time exaggerating her age and complaining about the young people of today and how things were different in her day
• Norbert Colon – an old miser
• Paul Whicker , the tall vicar. A deliberately badly-drawn cartoon of a misanthropic vicar.
• Postman Plod "The Miserable Sod" – a bad-tempered postman with a serious attitude problem.
• Raffles, Gentleman Thug – a late 19th century aristocrat who behaves like a stereotyped 21st century thug
• Roger Irrelevant ("He's Completely Hatstand") – a young man with a very strange mental problem where he continually produces irrelevant and surreal streams of language.
• Roger Mellie ("The Man on the Telly") – a foul-mouthed and violent TV presenter
• Sid the Sexist – a young man with no sexual experience who boasts of his success with women
• Spoilt Bastard – a fat, ungrateful boy who manipulates his weak-willed mother
• Student Grant – a student at Fulchester University who is determined to be fashionably "right on" and a left-wing radical, though when things go wrong, it's always his " bourgeois" rich parents that bail him out. Very popular with students.
• Suicidal Syd – a manic depressive
• S.W.A.N.T a crack paramilitary police team with "Special Weapons and No Tactics" which parodies American SWAT teams.
• Victorian Dad – a father who applies strict Victorian values to himself and his family, even though they are living in the present. The cartoon first appeared at around the same time as John Major's Back to Basics campaign, and could be seen as a satirical commentary on it.
• Wacky Racists a take on the Wacky Races cartoon series from Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Most of the stories take place in the fictitious town of Fulchester. Fulchester, was originally the setting of the British TV programme Crown Court before the name was adopted by the VIZ team. Billy the Fish played for Fulchester United F.C. The Internet domain fuck.co.uk was at one time held by fans of VIZ who claimed to be promoting the Fulchester Underwater Canoeing Klubb.

Many strips appear only once. These very often have extremely surreal or bizarre storylines, and often feature celebrities. For example: " Paul Daniels' Jet-Ski Journey to the Centre of Elvis", and "Arse Farm – Young Pete and Jenny Nostradamus were spending the holidays with their Uncle Jed who farmed arses deep in the heart of the Sussex countryside...". The latter type often follows the style of Enid Blyton and other popular children's adventure stories of the 1950s.

In addition to comic characters, VIZ also includes spoof newspaper articles, advertisements, and letters pages. Another spinoff was " Roger's Profanisaurus ", a thesaurus of (often made up) rude words, phrases and sexual slang.

The comic was acquired by John Brown Publishing (JBP) in 1983. At one time the bi-monthly comic reached sales in excess of 1 million before entering into a steady decline since the mid 1990s to around 200,000 ( 2001). In June 2001 the comic was acquired as part of a £6.4 million deal by I Feel Good Holdings, a company belonging to the ex- Loaded editor James Brown.