Billy The Fish - Plot Elements

Plot Elements

As the above characters suggest, plot elements in the strip are frequently nonsensical, inconsistent, and highly contrived, often being set up and then forgotten about for no reason. They include:

• Surreal turns of events, especially in order to make ludicrous cop-outs from cliffhangers. For example, at the end of one strip, a game in Japan is interrupted by Mothra, the giant beast from the Godzilla movies. At the start of the strip in the next issue it is swiftly revealed that it was actually just a harmless cardboard cut-out of Mothra. Everyone sighs with relief and the game continues. On more than one occasion, characters have awakened from perilous situations to discover it was "just a dream" (e.g. "So... it was all a dream?"; "Yes, apart from the bit about playing for England.").
• Satire of the tendency in football fiction to have impossibly competent teams steamrollering their way through the competition. Fulchester usually win a game with scores of around 5-nil – but if Billy is not in goal they instead lose by the same margin. One strip, lampooning the 'back from the brink' plot type, had Fulchester narrowly beating a team of paperboys (because their goalkeeper's mother called him in for his tea) and then moving on to the FA Cup final the next day.
• Incidents relating to real-life events in British football. For example, Billy The Fish often adopts the current hairstyle of footballing celebrities such as Paul Gascoigne or David Beckham. On another occasion, Billy shouted a tirade of abuse at Tommy Brown, for daring to order him to tie his shoelaces (even though Billy, not having feet, does not wear shoes.) This prompted Brown to drop Billy from the team, which mimicked the incident whereby Irish footballer Roy Keane was dropped from his team and sent home from the 2002 World Cup for hurling abuse at his manager.
• References to the strip's supposed unpopularity amongst Viz readers. In one strip Tommy Brown drops his trousers and defecates on his desk to prove that no-one is reading.
• A "spot the difference" version of the strip, the differences from the normal version being extremely obvious; for instance the strip is titled "Pilly the Fish", Syd Preston suddenly appears nude in one panel, and Tommy Brown is replaced by Adolf Hitler.