I had never read Sick before--growing up, I don't remember ever even seeing it on a newsstand, and I was a frequent buyer of Cracked and Mad, so it wasn't like I didn't hang around that part of the newsstand. But, amazingly, Sick ran for twenty years, publishing 134 issues(!), so somebody was buying it, somewhere.
This issue features two of Mad's top talents--Jack Davis on the cover, and Angelo Torres on the first parody piece:
...the jokes aren't much (how do you parody The Addams Family, after all?), but of course Torres' art is the selling point--its beautifully comic and creepy at the same time.
The rest of the features are your usual grab-bag of concepts and approaches, some mild:
...and some just sort of "eh." (Although I realize that these jokes were written forty-three years ago, so maybe I should cut them some slack):
Pretty much all the jokes here are about how miserable it is to be a mother, how rotten your kids are, etc. I'm guessing this was Sick's way of buttering up any potential Mom who found this magazine in their kids room and intended to throw it out:
The rest of the features are your usual grab-bag of concepts and approaches, some mild:
...some a little darker:
...and some just sort of "eh." (Although I realize that these jokes were written forty-three years ago, so maybe I should cut them some slack):
This issue features one of--no, the--least favorite things I occasionally see in magazines: the concept of the flip-book.
Yep, if you flip this issue over, you get a totally different magazine, called Mother:
Yep, if you flip this issue over, you get a totally different magazine, called Mother:
Pretty much all the jokes here are about how miserable it is to be a mother, how rotten your kids are, etc. I'm guessing this was Sick's way of buttering up any potential Mom who found this magazine in their kids room and intended to throw it out:
...maybe Sick hoped Mom would throw all the Mads and Crackeds(?) out, leaving Sick to eventually become...the #1 humor magazine in the world!
Sick was created and edited by Joe Simon, who never seemed to lack for coming up with interesting new comic book ideas; some great (Captain America), some good (romance comics), and some so bizarre they achieve a sort of grandeur (Prez).
On a personal note, I'd love to see what Sick's final issue looked like. These sort of gentle-but-occasionally stinging humor magazines were so of their era that I'm trying to picture what it looked like in the age of National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, etc. If I ever find it on eBay I'll snatch it up and you'll see it here!
Sick was created and edited by Joe Simon, who never seemed to lack for coming up with interesting new comic book ideas; some great (Captain America), some good (romance comics), and some so bizarre they achieve a sort of grandeur (Prez).
On a personal note, I'd love to see what Sick's final issue looked like. These sort of gentle-but-occasionally stinging humor magazines were so of their era that I'm trying to picture what it looked like in the age of National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, etc. If I ever find it on eBay I'll snatch it up and you'll see it here!
1 comment:
I read some issues of Sick in the 70s. As I recall, it didn't look nearly as good as this example. While this issue looks almost exactly like Mad, the art work in the later Sick magazines seemed pretty poor. Sick was definitely a distant third to Mad and Cracked.
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