Pathetic Sharks

The Pathetic Sharks is a long-running but sporadic feature of Viz. Perhaps the feature's true title is "Oh, No! It's the Pathetic Sharks" since this text typically appears in the opening panel of each instalment. They were given their own "Bumper Special" in 1991, also featuring Felix and his Amazing Underpants.

There are five Pathetic Sharks: Rupert, Justin, Adrian, Timothy, Henry, although only four usually appear in the magazines. The group has no official leader, since each Shark is completely self-centred and considers himself more important, smarter, more talented, more interesting (and just better in general) than the other three. All the Sharks are drawn as black silhouettes with white highlights. Adrian, Timothy & Henry tend to flop about and complain while Rupert and Justin conduct petty arguments. The phrase "drama queen" would be a fair description of the two upright Sharks, and probably the others as well.

Each of the Pathetic Sharks is extremely vain and childish, each one jockeying for superiority over the others based on some trivial ability or petty accomplishment which the other three denigrate, while challenging each other's political correctness and other credentials. They all speak in childish euphemisms, such as "peepies" for "sleep". When any Pathetic Shark expresses a fondness for anything (a celebrity, an activity), this will almost invariably be something which the typical Viz reader would consider "naff" (boring and insipid).

In each of their strips, the Pathetic Sharks show up to interrupt some form of social activity among humans, causing the people to flee in terror ... until the pathetic bitchery and whining among the Sharks prompts one person to announce "These sharks are crap!" or something similar. The Pathetic Sharks never accomplish anything. In the early strips, they showed up in aquatic situations such as beach parties. More recently, they have turned up in land-based situations very far from water: typically, one early panel of any given strip will show an open manhole, with one of the two horizontal Sharks crawling out of this (after the other Sharks have already arrived) to establish how the Pathetic Sharks get about on land. Viz 166 (June 2007) showed the Sharks attempting to attend the Wimbledon tennis championships: they couldn't get into the stadium, because their tickets (purchased on eBay by Rupert) were actually second-hand bus tickets. In this particular episode, there was some confusion among the sharks as to whether they should be supporting 'Tim' (Henman) or 'Andy' (Murray).