Rat Boy is star of his own strip in popular British comic
Viz. Drawn by the same
Alex Collier of
Tasha Slappa fame, Rat Boy is in fact Tasha's
brother.
Rat Boy is best described as an barefoot anthropomorphic rat, about the size of a pubescent child, clad in a red not-Kappa tracksuit. A large, brown turd emerges from his bum cheeks. He is constantly scowling and shouting angrily, flipping the 'V's with his tobacco-stained fingers. What you need to keep in mind is that this is caricature. Rat Boy is based off of the subhuman preteen hooligans who feature in newspapers as having terrorized their council estate. His giant ears and ratlike face are sometimes only slight exaggerations on the real child criminals he's based on - the caricature doing well to express the savage, almost animalistic and outrageous behaviour of these young boys.
Rat Boy is a thieving chav. His strips are always about him breaking into houses and stealing VCRs, and his inevitable entanglement with the owner and/or the police. What makes him 'endearing' (and I use the term very lightly here) is his constant stream of outrageous curses and professions of innocence; to wit: "Here man, y'fuckin' radge! Tek a chill pill, we're deein' nowt man". This statement has to be taken in the context of an embattled old woman armed with a bottle of bleach trying to drive out the army of ratboys that are destroying and looting her home.
Again, all of these concepts are based on real life - these people do exist, and they do break into your house, steal your video and then take a shit in your living room as a 'calling card' (hence the bum cigar constantly emerging from Rat Boy's tracksuit bottoms). Rat Boy will nick your television and run off, shouting, "What the fuck are ye lookin' at? Fuckin' mine, this!," and when caught, declare that his father will be round to sort you out (as soon as, Rat Boy admits, he finds out who his father is).
In the course of his adventures, Rat Boy has tried to steal the radio from an occupied police car, chewed off his own leg to escape a court-enforced electronic curfew tag, and even tried to sell his sister Tasha back her own VCR for £20. Quite impressively, he can produce enough feces to spell his own name.
Sadly, with Alex Collier's departure from Viz, Rat Boy can now only be found in Viz Annuals. Unlike Tasha Slappa and 8Ace, rat boys are not as often spotted in the real world, preferring to scuttle around their estates, safe in the knowledge they're beneath the age of legal responsiblity.
Sources: Cook, William - 25 Years of Viz: Silver Plated Jubilee
personal knowledge