Cracked #212 - Major Magazines

July 1985 - The sort-of final issue of Cracked!

Why do I say "sort of"? Well, we'll get to that in a moment...

Despite the cover image, Cracked does not lampoon then-smash TV hit Magnum P.I. No, instead they satirize another CBS detective series, Simon & Simon:

...does anyone remember this show? I watched a lot of TV as a kid, but I don't think I ever saw more than two minutes of this show. It seemed so bland it never left any sort of impression on my brain.

I think goofing on a show as anemic and inoffensive as Simon & Simon shows that the sources of satire was like a food chain--Mad got to the big stuff first, and Cracked was left with the rest. I mean, were kids really dying to see Simon & Simon parodied? Luckily, it was drawn by John Severin, who could make anything worth looking at.

As it was for every issue, Cracked was a grab bag of disconnected features, though sometimes the writers went outside their comfort zone. Like in this piece, which is a parody of all the new programs available through the miracle of...Cable TV:

"Harrison Ford, shown here in 'Star Wars IV: Please Don't Let Han Die Because I'm Making Too Much Money' has agreed to star in a made-for-cable movie tracing the life of Tatum O'Neal. Ford will play a home computer salesman who once bought a glass of Tang from Tatum's Tang stand when she was 4."

...what the hell does that even mean? Harrison Ford, Tatum O'Neal, Tang? This particular joke is so nonsensical its almost Dada-esque.

Cracked certainly got their money's worth out of John Severin. Here's another feature he illustrated, about imitations of Cracked magazine, like this one, Fool:

...considering this was Cracked magazine, I'm not sure how much justification they had in goofing on other magazines being copycats. Just saying.

There's this one page feature, which stands out because of its unusual look (at least in relation to the rest of the magazine):

...I think this is where Alan Moore got the idea for V For Vendetta from.

Severin does even more work in this issue, like a parody of The Cosby Show, and this feature, about Censors running amok on TV:

...ye gods, those caricatures are spot on. Severin could draw anything.

I was disappointed to see that Cracked's regular "Interviews..." feature does not star Bill Ward pulchritudinous character Nanny Dickering, but a more generic reporter:

...sure, she's called Nanny here, but that ain't Nanny. Where's the 6 foot tall, 38DD, mascaraed sweetie perched on dominatrix stillettos that I came to know and love as a kid?

Too bad, too, since I would've liked thing I saw in Cracked to be Nanny. She helped usher me into adolescence.


Why do I say this was the last issue, when Cracked in fact did keep going, all the way up to issue #346? Well, that's because after this issue, the magazine was owned by a different publisher, shifting from Major Magazines to Globe Communications Corp. (and then again a few years to yet another publisher).

And, for whatever reason, Globe seemed to have a problem distributing the magazine, because it never showed up again in my area. A quick scan of the covers of the magazine published after Globe picked it up produces not a single memory of ever seeing them as they were published.

Cracked continued on, erratically, all the way until 2004(!), but to me, this was the real final issue.

Cracked - Those Cracked Monsters

Sept. 1982 - Are you ready to be scared? No? Howabout slightly amused?

Like Mad, Cracked knew that they could repackage some of the mountain of material they generated over the years around a common theme and sell it as a "Collectors' Edition." In the days when if you missed an issue of a magazine, it was essentially gone forever, this idea made a lot of sense (and a lot of money, I presume).

So this was Cracked's monster-themed issue, featuring a cover by John Severin that, when you look at it, isn't really funny at all--it's a superbly-rendered cover of a Monster Donnybrook and probably could've run on a Warren mag with just some slight tweaking.

Inside, first up is Severin again with a piece called "Planets of the Creatures" which takes the "Apes" concept and spins the Animal Speak And Spell:

..."Directed by that Italian Genius--Ant Tonioni." Now that's pretty funny.

Next is a feature that humor mags from this era simply couldn't live without--funny captions over old photos. This segment is one of four in the magazine:

Next is "A Tourist's Guide To Transylvania", which features mostly very silly jokes, but to my eyes, very nice cartoony art reminiscent of those classic Rankin-Bass animated shows:

This segment, like most of the material in this issue, is uncredited (only John Severin seems to have been able to get away with putting his name on his work), which is too bad--I would love to know who drew this.

Next is another piece by John Severin, a parody called The Ghost and Mrs. Mire, a fairly sedate choice of spoofery, but Cracked managed to throw some goofy elements into the mix:

Next is "Stationary From Transylvania", then another fumetti segment, then "Transylvanian Cut-Out Signs"(I'm seeing a theme here), then yet another fumetti segment--Cracked's writers must have had a hell of a time coming up with titles for all these photo funny articles.

Next is another movie parody:

...done in family photo album style, which is actually pretty clever.

Next is "Sylvester, The Blawson of Glock", which I could not make heads or tails of, another fumetti segment, a one-page gag strip called "The Terror Trip", ending with "Transylvanian Travel Stickers", which features jokes about the Mummy and the Creature From the Black Lagoon, who of course never set foot in Transylvania.

Maybe I'm expecting too much from the Cracked writers.

A fairly mediocre collection that doesn't really live up to the cover--the preponderance of fumetti material, which I loved as a kid, doesn't age all that well. More John Severin!

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.