CRAZY #17

At one point I decided the number of images on a post was thirteen. I was excerpting books that had mostly thirteen cartoons per chapter and when you looked at a blog for the week the links on the side would line up perfectly. It sounded like a good plan at first, then I noticed the links had different sizes each day, so so much for my anal retentiveness. And now that I'm overviewing humor magazines in their entirety making me have to pick which pages, I decided fuck it, just show the first page of each article, the number of pages be damned.

The following is from Crazy #17, May 1976.

I'm not sure who did this cover. The inside covers were the Ford poster and Marlbury ads from last issue.

Parody of Baretta by Len Herman and Murad Gumen. They had a lot of articles about “women's lib” like this. Not only did they seem to feel threatened by it, they seem to have misunderstood the concept completely, thinking women who wanted equality wanted to be superior. Parodies of movies written by people who probably never even saw them. Michael Ricigliano was one of the few contributors who stayed with the new editorial regime. Here's a picture of Stan Lee. “Aron Mayer” was the name of editor Paul Laikin's son, which he may have used to make it seem there were more writers on staff. Fred Wolfe was probably a pseudonym. I think the artist credited was an accidental misspelling of Bill Skurski. I think this was a reprint from an earlier issue and I may have even posted it, but I don't feel like looking. Similar to Sick Sick World from when Paul Laikin was editing Sick. I don't think Diane Levin and Anita Goldwasser were real people. Back cover Next Monday: Crazy #19.

CRAZY #16

Another of the Paul Laikin issues of Crazy. He must not have been very proud of his run since he barely mentioned them in a video interview he did.

This was the March, 1976 issue.

Last of the covers by Nick Cardy. The inside covers were usually “posters”, like this one of Gerald Ford by Jack Sparling. Their second parody of Good Times by Len Herman and Marie Severin, possibly inventory. Article illustrated by Murad Gumen. The last installment of History of Moosekind Here was Crazy Guide to Body Language illustrated by Michael Ricigliano This ad was the inside back cover. Next Monday, Crazy #17.

CRAZY # 15

Marvel decided not to use the staffers of the other comics for this and recruited editor Paul Laikin (he uses the name Paul Lamont for this issue, maybe due to some other contractual obligation). Having edited Cracked and Sick and written for Mad before this, he wasn't able to afford A-list artists like he did there, as we shall soon see. Most likely he wrote most of the issues himself under various pseudonyms, since most of the articles credited to other writers are similar to the articles he wrote for other magazines and were sometimes names of relatives and anagrams of each other. Though Laikin's run is derided by many, some issues from this time are fairly valuable because of the paintings of celebrities on their covers, as we shall see in future posts.

Here are some excerpts from #15, the January 1976 issue.

They continued to use cover artist Nick Cardy.

The inside front cover had an “International Swindlers' Certificate”

There was some inventory left over from previous issues, since the first few issues of the "new" Crazy had a few articles by Marvel staffers, like this Jaws parody from Stu Schwartzberg and Marie Severin. Here's another example of the one-page "poster" fillers that were now a trademark of the magazine. Here's what was probably left over from the previous regime from Vance Rodewalt interspersed throughout. Note what looks like an editor's mark in one panel, an example of the sloppiness the magazine occasionally had because of its grueling monthly schedule needed to outdo the frequency of its competitors. Another article that was probably left over from previous editorships. Good News/Bad News was a page of jokes with clip-art written by “Frank Wail”, Most likely a Laikin pseudonym.

They continued to serialize excerpts from Will Eisner's books.

Then this. Another example of articles meant for previous issues.

The magazine now had marginal jokes similar to the one-liners on Laugh-In An artist from the earlier issues was longtime Warren editor Bill DuBay. Then the rest of Lee Marrs' Crazy Lady, and a new recurring feature of one-liners called Crazy News of the Month.

They needed to use the last of the recurring History of Moosekind The back cover had Crazy Record Labels, an example of the "fake-out" parodies they would do which you could paste over the real thing.

Next Monday: Excerpts from CRAZY #16.