Cracked Magazine is back. You may not have even known it was gone…or maybe you thought it was gone long ago. But the longest-running MAD imitation is returning to newsstands after a two-year hiatus and an ownership change. The new version promises edgier material and "star" writers, including some from hit TV programs such as The Daily Show. This article tells a little bit about the return and then over on the Cracked website, they have a preview of the first issue under the new regime, which I believe is starting its numbering over with #1. (The last issue before the layoff was #357.)
Will the new version fly? I dunno. One does get the feeling that the day of the humor magazine is past; that the target audience can get all the irreverence it wants (plus porn) for free on the Internet. Sales on MAD are not what they once were, even though that publication's sharper than it's been in years. I'm guessing that the new owners of Cracked are expecting to drop a lot of bucks on newsstand sales and are just publishing as a loss leader. They're more likely out to hype a brand name that can be used in other venues, the way MAD became a TV show and the name of National Lampoon has been used to sell movies of variable merit. There hasn't been a National Lampoon magazine published since 1998 but its logo apparently still conveys some sales boost to teen-targeted comedy.
So maybe the new Cracked will succeed, at least in that way. Its name certainly seems to be lucky. Cracked started in 1958, when it was supervised by Sol Brodsky, who was later a key player in the Marvel Comics revolution of the sixties. The current management is trying something which was never really attempted either by Brodsky or his successors. They're trying to establish an identity for their publication…an identity that has nothing to do with MAD.
For much of its existence, Cracked was kind of a minor league or farm team MAD. Several key MAD artists, including Will Elder and Jack Davis, worked for it while in exile from the home of Alfred E. Neuman and other illustrators — like Angelo Torres, Bill Wray and Tom Richmond — worked for Cracked until they were deemed good enough for MAD. Several key MAD writers sold their MAD rejects there and one of MAD's most prolific writers, Lou Silverstone, edited Cracked for a number of years. In '87, Cracked got a huge boost by grabbing onto "MAD's maddest artist" Don Martin when he quit in a dispute with MAD's publisher and longtime MAD associate editor Jerry DeFuccio also found a home at Cracked when he was let go.
In other words, Cracked has consistently defined itself in terms of MAD, featuring talent that either had been in MAD or wanted to be in MAD, and aping the look and feel of the competition. The new management is trying to build something different and I hope it works. You'll know it has when we start seeing Cracked movies or a Cracked radio network or a Cracked TV show. Because sad to say, just being a humor magazine that succeeds as a humor magazine is no longer enough. There's no money in it.
