Cracked #175 - Major Magazines

January 1981 - It's way too long to only now get to Cracked magazine, the perennial also-ran to Mad.

Sure, Cracked lived in Mad's shadow during its entire, almost forty-year(!) run, but as a kid I didn't know that. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Mad still had a bit of a reputation as being edgy, or at the very least something my parents probably wouldn't automatically approve of. So I went for Cracked, which seemed a little gentler or less edgy. I laugh now, reading that sentence back.

Anyway, I had a whole ton of Cracked, and for a long time never missed an issue. They disappeared from my life at some point along the way, and I always meant to get to it here, but never seemed to quite do it.

Then I saw a couple issues for sale (cheap!--er, sorry, that's Mad) from an eBay seller I was buying some other mags from, and picked one up.

I picked this issue, with its M*A*S*H cover, because I love the show, and wanted to see how they skewered it:

The thread of this parody--drawn by the peerless John Severin--is the M*A*S*H actors might want to try other roles after playing the memvbers of the 4077th for so long, and they get replaced by other TV stars, like Archie Bunker, Mork, and Fonzie.

Hardly an idea so funny you have to pick yourself up off the floor from laughing so hard, but I think that's because, for the most part, M*A*S*H was a massively popular and beloved series that it was hard to parody. Indeed, the cover says "We Salute M*A*S*H", not "We Destroy M*A*S*H."

After that, there's a piece on mail-order catalogs ("what-order whats?" says a younger generation) featuring some nice cartoony art by Charlton mainstay Warren Sattler:

...I love the stereo guy's laid-back, keep-on-truckin' posture.

There's a piece on different pictures on U.S. currency, a one-page strip called "Ye Hang Ups" drawn by Catherine Severin, who I couldn't find much info on. Since John has a famous sister, the awesome colorist Marie, I assume Catherine is John's wife or daughter.

In any case, she has a nice style, similar to John's, but more cartoony, and she acquits herself well on several features, like this one:

There's also "The Cracked Lens", which is a cost-effective feature putting funny captions on movie stills, "Cracked Headlines", "How to Be A Salesman", "When the U.S. Adopts the Metric System", and "Profile of a Coward."

That last strip is drawn by Cracked mainstay Bill Ward, who also drew the regularly-featured character Nanny Dickering, who was the magazine's roving reporter:

...as a kid, I never really wondered why Nanny was built the way she was. I mean, jeez! If my parents had seen this maybe they woulda been happier with Mad!

(A few years later, when I got interested in, um, other kinds of publications, it was deeply disturbing to see Bill Ward drawing a hardcore, XXX-rated comic strip for the porno magazine Club. It was basically a strip of women that looked a lot like Nanny Dickering doing things involving...well, you can guess. It was odd to have something from my childhood crash so directly into my mid-teenage years)

The issue ends with "Cracked Shut-Ups", which is what it sounds like.

I hope I don't sound too critical here. Sure, the humor now is mostly lame in the extreme, but Cracked was meant to entertain your average 11 to 12 year old, and it did its job.

In fact, when Cracked returned in 2006, I was a little disappointed to see it was brought back as a pseudo Onion-style humor magazine (which folded after a measly two issues!). I woulda been more than happy to see Sylvester the janitor again.