Cracked was an American humor magazine. Founded in 1958, Cracked proved to be the most durable of the many publications to be launched in the wake of Mad magazine.America's Only Humor & Video Site, Since 1958 . Cracked.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.CANOE – CNEWS – Media News: Cracked.com will crack you up. Cnews.canoe.ca. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.Burr, Ty. (1993-03-05) Harvey Kurtzman: 'Mad' Genius | News . EW.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.CRACKED — Crooked Timber. Crookedtimber.org (2006-02-15). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.Scott Gosar...Useless Information and Career Lowlights . Themadstore.com (2007-06-01). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
In print, Cracked conspicuously copied Mads layouts and style, Arnold, Mark, If You're Cracked, You're Happy, BearManor Media, 2011 and even featured a simpleminded, wide-cheeked mascot, a janitor named Sylvester P. Smythe on its covers, in a manner similar to Mads Alfred E. Neuman. Unlike Neuman, who appears primarily on covers, Smythe sometimes spoke and was frequently seen inside the magazine, interacting with parody subjects and other regular characters. A 1998 reader contest led to Smythe finally getting a full middle name: "Phooey." An article on Cracked.com, the website which adopted Crackeds name after the magazine ceased publication, joked that the magazine was "created as a knock-off of Mad magazine just over 50 years ago", and it "spent nearly half a century with a fan base primarily people who got to the store after Mad sold out."
Crackeds publication frequency was reduced in the 1990s, and was erratic in the 2000s. In 2006, the magazine was revived with a new editorial formula that represented a significant departure from its prior Mad style. The new format was more akin to "lad" magazines like Maxim and FHM. The new formula, however, was unsuccessful and Cracked again canceled its print magazine in February 2007 after three issues. Later that year, the brand was carried over to a website, Cracked.com, now owned by Literally Media.
Early staff
The magazine's first editor was Sol Brodsky, who was better known as a journeyman artist and later production manager and a publishing vice president at Marvel Comics.
Crackeds original publisher, Robert C. Sproul's Major Publications, often imitated other companies' successes in various genres, such as westerns, men's adventure, and the Warren Publications mid-1960s revival of horror comics.
Editor Terry Bisson later recalled, "The whole company was about lowball imitations. The publisher, Robert Sproul, wanted to put out some imitations of western, romance and astrology mags, and I was hired (at about age 27) to put them together because of my romance mag experience... The pseudomags did pretty well (this was a very low end market)." Many of the Cracked contributors also worked on these titles. A number of monster-themed issues were printed under the Cracked umbrella, capitalizing on such publications as Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Sproul published Cracked into the 1980s.
However, even as the company chased publishing trends, its long-running flagship title was Cracked Magazine—or Cracked Mazagine''', as its cover often read, deliberately misspelling "magazine". (In the same vein, the magazine's website Cracked.com originally referred to itself as a ".")
Artists Some notable artists provided art for Cracked, in particular John Severin. Severin was one of the original artists on Mad, and he worked heavily on EC Comics' war books. He was also one of the pre-eminent artists in Western comics. He eventually came to be best known as Crackeds house cartoonist. For almost 40 years, he was the magazine's mainstay artist, frequently illustrating multiple articles in the same issue and virtually all of its covers. Reacting to his own company's obituary of Severin in 2012, Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson wrote, "I don't think I'm [alone] in thinking of Cracked for most of its run as 'a bunch of crap, and John Severin.
The magazine also regularly featured good girl artist Bill Ward, comic book stalwart Howard Nostrand, and gag cartoonists Don Orehek and Charles Rodrigues. In later years, the magazine was a useful training ground for such future independent comic book creators as Rick Altergott, Dan Clowes, and Peter Bagge. Clowes later discussed his childhood ambivalence for the magazine with an interviewer: "No one was ever a fan of Cracked. We would buy Mad every month, but about two weeks later we would get anxious for new material. We would tell ourselves, 'OK, we are not going to buy Cracked. Never again!' And we'd hold out for a while, but then as the month dragged on it just became, 'OK, I guess I'll buy Cracked.' Then you'd bring it home, and immediately you'd remember, 'Oh yeah, I hate Cracked!And Here's The Kicker: Conversations with 25 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft , by Mike Sacks, published 2009
Other name artists who contributed at least once to Cracked include such Mad veterans as Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Don Martin, and Basil Wolverton, and such future Mad contributors as Jack Rickard, Angelo Torres, Bill Wray, Greg Theakston, Dennis Snee, Mike Snider, Dean Norman, Charlie Kadau, May Sakami and Tom Richmond. Others included Marvel Comics regulars Steve Ditko and Gene Colan. Jack Kirby contributed once in 1960. In its later days, Cracked found it difficult to attract and retain the level of talent that the better-paying, better-selling Mad could. Richmond, who drew four articles for Cracked, reported on his webpage that he was paid just $100 for a finished page, a small fraction of what he earned for his first Mad assignment. Richmond also wrote about the bad feeling caused by his short tenure at Cracked: "[Editor Dick Kulpa] was very upset about my leaving Cracked for Mad, but let's be real ... not doing so would have been the same as a minor league Triple-A shortstop refusing a call up to the majors. That was no decision at all." Mike Snider had been submitting to both publications, and made the move to Mad after it accepted an article that had already been okayed by Cracked; Snider was obliged to rescind his submission to the lower-paying magazine. One publisher who looked into buying the Cracked operation felt that Mad was "in a class by itself" and that "Cracked couldn't top Mad's lineup".
Articles and features A typical issue of Cracked included two TV or movie parodies illustrated by Severin. The magazine also published "interview" articles featuring the recurring character Nanny Dickering (Nancy Dickerson was then an investigative newscaster).
One of the magazine's longest-running features was "Shut-Ups", which were two-panel gags in which a character would make an observation or excuse in the first panel, and then be told to "SHUT UP" in the second, as the true situation was visually revealed. "Hudd & Dini" by Vic Martin, a gag strip about two convicts' failed schemes to escape prison, also ran frequently, as did John Severin's Western strip "Sagebrush." Other recurring features included "Ye Hang-Ups", "The Talking Blob", "Spies vs. Sabs" (originally "Saboteurs & Investigators") and, in the 1980s, "the Uggly Family" by Daniel Clowes.
Titles MagazinesCrackedBiggest Greatest Cracked Cracked Blockbuster Cracked Collector's Edition Cracked Digest Cracked Monster Party Cracked Party Pack Cracked Shut-Ups Cracked Spaced Out Cracked Stocking Stuffer Cracked Summer Special Extra Special Cracked For Monsters Only Giant Cracked King-Sized Cracked Super CrackedSuper Cracked Vol. 2 / Cracked SuperBooks Ace Books Ace Books published four Cracked collections, The Cracked Reader (K-111 NA, 1960), More Cracked, Completely Cracked and Cracked Again (M-146, 1965). Sproul was listed as editor of the 1960 book.
Dell Books Dell Publishing produced six collections; Get Me Cracked, Half-Cracked, Cracked Up, Your Cracked, Cracked in the Saddle and It's a Cracked World.
International editions In the mid-1970s, Cracked moved into foreign markets. In Great Britain, they produced Cracked British Edition, which consisted entirely of reprinted material from the American magazine edited to localize spelling and pop-culture references. In Germany, there were three publications that included Cracked reprints. First was Kaputt, which ran from 1974 to 1983; it was followed by Stupid, which ran from 1983 to 1984, and, finally, Panic. All magazines used original material in addition to the translated Cracked reprints. Articles were often colorized, particularly in Stupid, or printed in black and white with a single added color. Covers were original, but were often reworkings of previous Cracked covers. It was published in Brazil under the name Pancada by Editora Abril, from 1977 to 1980. The content was translated from the English original and adapted to the Brazilian reality of the time (the Democratic and Republican parties were substituted respectively by ARENA and MDB, political parties of that era), and football jokes were made into soccer jokes. Most covers were reused from the original American magazine, but some were made by local artists. Two attempts were made in the 1990s to launch the magazine in Australia.
Mad raid In 1985, Mort Todd became editor of Cracked magazine at age 23. In 1987, Cracked made waves in the comic industry by seemingly raiding cartoonist Don Martin from rival Mad, after Martin's 32-year career there.Burgess, Steve. "Don Martin", Salon, January 15, 2000."Don Martin Moves to Cracked," The Comics Journal #118 (Dec. 1987), pp. 12–13. Martin had left Mad months earlier due to a royalties dispute for reprints of older material.
Martin worked for Cracked for about six years, and the magazine, in a tweak at its rival, billed him as "Crackeds Crackedest Artist". Crackeds concurrent attempt to sign Mads caricaturist Mort Drucker was unsuccessful, but the magazine did acquire longtime Mad contributor Lou Silverstone as editor and writer. Former Mad associate editor Jerry DeFuccio also worked at Cracked for a short period.
Though sales of Cracked always lagged far behind those of Mad, Cracked endured for more than four decades through low pay rates and overhead, and by being part of large publishing groups that could bundle Cracked in with its other magazines as a package arrangement for distributors. Cracked also appeared monthly during the period when Mad was being published just 8 times a year, thus picking up readership from Mad fans that couldn't wait out the six weeks for their next "comedy fix." The magazine sometimes included attention-grabbing giveaways inside its pages, such as iron-ons, stickers or postcards.
In the 1990s, Cracked also benefited from the collapse of the National Lampoon, picking up Andy Simmons as an editor, as well as such former Lampoon contributors as Ron Barrett, Randy Jones, and Ed Subitzky. In 1995, Greg Grabianski began his career as a writer and associate editor at Cracked before going on to write for TV and film projects including Beavis & Butthead and the Scary Movie franchise.
Rise and decline At its height, Crackeds circulation might have been a third of Mads, with the overall total generally rising or falling along with the bigger magazine's fortunes. But at its nadir in the 2000s, this sales figure plunged to around 25,000–35,000 per bi-monthly issue, or about one-eighth of Mads monthly circulation, which had also plummeted from its mid-1970s peak of over 2 million per issue.