Cracked Collectors' Edition #86, 3 of 3

Continuing with highlights from the last of Cracked's “Spies and Saboteurs” articles in this issue of Cracked Collectors' Edition from 1991.

Their parody of the James Bond film Live and Let Die

Vic Martin

A lot of people don't know this, but before the movie, Transformers was a toy and cartoon. Here's a parody illustrated by Steve Ditko

Illustrated by Gary Fields

“Spies and Saboteurs” by Mike Ricigliano, was in the margins of Cracked, sort of their answer to Sergio Aragonés' Mad Marginals

Wacky Races

Now to return to the Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network comics I used to write for DC Comics, this time I did a Wacky Races story illustrated by Gary Fields.

This story is from Cartoon Network Presents #11, June 1998. Here's the opening and closing of the show for those who haven't seen it. Update: They updated the cartoon in 2006. Next Monday: My Quick Draw McGraw story.

Wally Gator

Wally Gator was one of the many series Hanna-Barbera did in the early sixties of characters escaping their environment to live among people. I posted another story I wrote around 1997 or 1998 from when I used to write for the comics of many of the Hanna-Barbera characters for DC Comics then. One thing I did was set thirty-year-old characters in (then-)present times to show what they might do in current cartoons. This was written back when MTV used to concentrate on music.

This story is from Cartoon Network Presents #3

It's a Bizarre Ol' World

In 1997, I did a lot of work writing for DC's Cartoon Network line. DC Comics was a part of Warner which had just merged with Turner Entertainment, which owned Cartoon Network. This was also at the time when Cartoon Network was only showing re-runs of older theatrical and Saturday Morning cartoons. They still do Cartoon Network tie-ins, but only with the original programming they run today.

When they started, Cartoon Network Presents featured the inventory of the Hanna-Barbera characters they owned and I was one of the writers. Others who worked on the comics were Michael Kupperman, Ivan Brunetti, Bill Alger, and Bill Wray. We were hired by Bronwyn Taggart, who with her husband I knew through New York comics circles, and one of the few editors I worked with who accepted my philosophy that comics scripts should be drawn out like strips themselves and not written in text form.

The script for this was originally done with the Bizarro World in mind, but many higher-ups at DC didn't want the story to interfere with the continuity that was established. While I feel it alienates potential readers to have all a publishers' comics tie into each other by having all their characters exist in a single universe, (DC is not the only guilty party) the only change was some names. I'm in the minority with my crackpot ideas of what comics and cartoons should be anyway.