The Critics

The Critics are the main characters of a long-running cartoon of the same name in the British comic Viz. It was created and is illustrated by John Fardell.

They are Natasha and Crispin Critic, two high brow art critics from London. They work for The Sunday Chronicle, though they have done freelance work with the BBC and Channel 4, writing elitist and sometimes sycophantic articles on contemporary art. However they're very damning of pop culture and popular art as "tat".

The strip itself is, like much of Fardell's work for Viz, a satire on the fashionably solipsist, pseudo-liberal middle classes and their attitudes. He depicts Natasha and Crispin as shallow, sycophantic, elitist, snobbish and hypocritical people who live and work in a cliquish social circle. Although a couple rather than siblings (a flashback sequence in one episode shows them being born to different mothers) Crispin and Natasha do look somewhat alike, giving the impression that they may be related and that their elitist circle is at least metaphorically incestuous. (Nepotism also features in at least one episode, with Crispin giving his nephew a lucrative helping hand during a search for supposedly fresh new talent.)

Their sharklike profiles could be an allusion to the predatory nature of journalism and arts criticism, as some sharks (like tabloid hacks) are predatory themselves. Despite this, they are very snobbish, and though they practically drool over gritty and cutting-edge art that is in touch with the working classes, they loathe the working classes themselves. In fact, they have little knowledge of what is outside London, once describing the North of England as "That place we fly over on the way to the Edinburgh Festival."

The artists they admire are all fictional, but are clearly inspired by real-life artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. A frequent plot device involves Natasha and Crispin mistaking some everyday object - like a fire extinguisher, puddle of vomit or even some public toilets - as a piece of modern art. In other episodes, they don't grasp the concept of art at all - once, they viewed an artist create artwork with conventional methods like drawing and painting, and marvel that it is something they have never seen before.

The pair have died frequently, usually thanks to their habit of reviewing the works of a reformed-violent-criminal-turned-artist, giving tactless negative reviews and then coming to a brutal end at the hands of the artist in question. They are invariably automatically resurrected in time for the next episode, although once they did actually make it to heaven, where they proceeded to deride the pearly gates to heaven as being unfashionably minimalist. Saint Peter could not bear to have them in heaven, but the Critics were not evil enough to warrant Hell either, and so he had them reincarnated as the lowest form of animal, fleas. After finishing that life-cycle, Natasha and Crispin were reincarnated as the life form just slightly more advanced than fleas - art critics.

They once received a booby-prize at the Critics Awards for bringing the reputation of critics into disrepute for writing a review that was not only positive but actually made sense.