Sick #53, 3 of 3

The last of the issue of that issue Sick I previously posted pages from it here and here.

I'm still not sure who read Sick despite the fact that it lasted twenty years. It had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands but I never saw a single kid reading it in school. You rarely see a copy in the back issue bin at comic stores. Yet it somehow lasted as long as it did. I know it went through a bunch of publishers so it might have been sold as a package deal. A publisher acquires several magazines when it buys a company. I never understood those deals either, because a publisher could just cancel a magazine unless it needs to have it to sell to the next publisher.

These pages were done by “The Professor” a/k/a Harry Borgman. It seems Sick wasn't always trying to compete with Mad as much as CAR-Toons and the Peterson line of vehicle-based humor magazines.

This was the original art for that article.

Although this piece illustrated by Al Scaduto purported to be about LBJ's Great Society, it's more about the era.

Whatever “Z” was for must have been really funny for the reader to cut it out and probably paste it to something.

Or maybe this was the one that apparently had something funny. Mad Men-era humor magazines were notorious for sexist articles like this one by Bernard Wiseman. Sexism and racism continued in some of these magazines up until the 80s, probably because most pre-countercultural cartoonists were still alive.