Biff (cartoon)

Biff is a British cartoon strip, created since the mid 1970s by Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd. The first Biff collection was published in 1982 The strip was first published in the newspaper ''The Guardian'' in 1985. Biff Weekend ran there weekly for 20 years. The comic originated in a series of single-panel postcards before evolving into multi-panel comic strips. It has also been published in the magazine ''Viz'', fRoots and since 2001 in the magazine of the Rough Guides.

The cartoons are notable for their absurd, ironic, satirical and metafictional edge.

History

Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd met at grammar school in the 1950s and have collaborated on Biff since the mid-1970s. Chris Garratt creates the artwork (a mixture of collage, found images, tracings and original drawings) and Mick Kidd is responsible for the text. Kidd lives in London and Garratt in the Scilly Isles. They have created their strips and other artwork over the last 30 years by means of phone, post, email and occasional meetings.Guardian retrospective
accessed 26 April 2008

In 2007 Chris Garratt introduced a retrospective of Biff work in these terms:Press Release for 2007 retrospective

accessed 26 April 2008

::''Raised on a diet of Hymns Ancient and Modern, Sartre and Joe Meek hits, Goldfish Virgins of the dodgems, Intrepid Riders of the Waltzers, wags of youth club literati and pioneers of skiffle, the Biff boys belong to a generation that said goodbye to trilby hats, pipes and National Service and ushered in the Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues, Existentialism and Vietnam. Their early work, retrospectively recognised as anglicised Situationism with its artless articulation of image and text détournement, montaging comic strip and philosophy, angst-riddled soliloquies and cowboy drawls, featured prominently in the sprawling publications and smudged ink mags of the Counter Culture.''

::''Holding up a cracked and peeling mirror to a cracked and peeling generation of new adults who exchanged WRP for SDP, beanbags for Habitat and IKEA, Biff eschewed the tedious route of “political satire” and its toothless ranting-to-the-converted in favour of a bewildered but first-hand commentary on the mapless aspirations, pretensions and farcical antics of the baby boomer meritocracy. Threaded through this nonsensical catalogue of faux-academic posturing, management-speak, Baudrillardian ramblings and psychobabble set in the deathly milieu of wicker furniture and avocado dips was a continuing fascination for new frontiers in astronomy, particle physics, psychology and the arts, deliberately colliding such “serious” endeavours with the loonier fringes of self improvement such as cushion-bashing psychotherapy, astrology and sweat lodges.''

::''Biff’s 20 year tenure in “The Guardian” effectively charted the Rise and Fall of the not-so-angry young things as they shambled from Grosvenor Square to Hay-on-Wye, from the Ugly Rumours to Iraq, into the present wilderness of collective paranoia.''

They are still working and contribute to BBC
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