Giant Cracked #45, 5 of 5

Here's the last of this issue of Giant Cracked

#45 from October 1986, featuring the magazine's best and first of features.

When I was a kid, it seems every other issue was a Star Wars parody of some kind. They were always doing parodies of that and Happy Days, Jaws, Laverne and Shirley, or a combination of them.

This was their first parody. There's an editorial at the beginning annotating all the articles. It said:

The one film representative of the 1970's was the box office giant STAR WARS. Here's CRACKED's parody from #146, November 1977. It was written by resident satirist JOE CATALANO and drawn by (surprise!) JOHN SEVERIN. They usually had photo captions in every issue and eventually They gave it the title The Cracked Lens for each issue.

I spoke to Randy Epley a few weeks ago about his writing for Crazy. He told me he wrote more for Cracked, including this and many of the Shut-Ups. I told him I hadn't prepared any questions about the latter only because you didn't know who did what since they almost never gave writer credits. This was a big problem when telling friends or relatives of his writing for them. They printed a few of their covers on the inside covers. They said of this:

CRACKED #6 (December 1958) had a cover illustrated by comic great RUSS HEATH. Russ is now designing characters for the G.I. JOE cartoon on TV, but we'd like to see him do more CRACKED articles! At the time, many readers wrote in to object to the cracked eggs on the cover, saying it was too revolting. As a result, the publisher vowed never to show yolk on a cover again! This issue is also notable for artwork drawn by BILL ELDER and AL JAFFEE! CRACKED #12 (January 1960) sported this cover by JACK DAVIS. Jack graduated to drawing horror and humor comics to doing covers for magazines like TIME and TV GUIDE as well as advertising for major advertising companies. Jack did a few covers for CRACKED and drew several articles. Over the next few issues, the character of SYLVESTER was refined by JOHN SEVERIN into the lovable little janitor we know today.

CRAZY #32

Next up is the 32nd issue of Crazy, dated December 1977.

Cover by Bob Larkin Inside front cover by Murad Gumen. Parody of this obscure film from the 70's that isn't remembered now called Star Wars, illustrated by Alan Kupperberg. Art by David Wenzel Kent Gamble Alias of Michael Ricigliano. Vic Martin Sam Viviano Parody of Black Sunday illustrated by Walter Brogan. I think the guy furthest on the left is editor Paul Laikin. I don't know who the others are. Next Monday:CRAZY #33

KRETEN 1 of 2

In Hungary, there are two different editions of Mad. The one called Mad which has translations of the American material and this one, Kreten, a humor magazine using the name Mad but containing original material. This, the magazine of “America's cultural wasteland” is issue #39 in May 1999. The interior of the magazine has a fumetti parody of the new Star Wars movie.

Here are excerpts from a syndicated gag panel. Most of the jokes are self-explanatory without translations. The Star Wars gag is similar to one Sergio Aragones did in A Mad Look at Star Wars in #197, March 1978 The front page, in addition to the above gag panel, also has a couple text pieces. This is an illustration for a recipe for “bacon pie” This is from their Star Trek: The Next Generation parody. More gag panels. They can get away with more tit jokes there.

The rest of the highlights from this magazine next Wednesday.

TRASH #1, 1 of 5

Some people object to my calling all humor magazines MAD imitations. They have a point. After all, I wouldn't say Burger King was an imitation of McDonalds or Facebook was an imitation of Myspace. More than anything, it's shorthand. MAD didn't own their formula nor were they the first to do what they did. They created the template for which others followed suit, though. Some were more like MAD than others, and depending on the editor they tried to do their own take with varying degrees of similarity.

Despite this, there were some magazines that were unquestionably created solely for the purpose of emulating MAD and this is one of them. For every magazine that had its own style, there were magazines like TRASH. You can make a magazine with a cover mascot, the same audience as MAD, 52 pages in black and white on newsprint, and even with seemingly those kind of restrictions there's still room for originality. Not so with TRASH. In addition to imitating MAD, they imitated other juvenile humor magazines, and not only cashed in on the success of those magazines, like everyone else they also cashed in on other elements of popular culture. They seemed to aim towards a younger audience than usual with their posters and contests.

Thanks again to Michael Sullivan for providing me with xeroxes of magazines I don't have.



At one time, it was considered absurd that there would be a convention devoted solely to science fiction. Wouldn't that be weird if there were such a thing?
It's supposed to take place in 2001 which in 1978 was considered a long way away. The artist either didn't pay attention or there's a city on Planet X that looks just like New York City. Or maybe they were suggesting that Planet X would be the name for Earth in the future.