What a year this was. Most of it was devoted to comics and I enjoyed it a lot. It is always nice to have succes, anyway. My book Behaving Madly was published in August at the Comic Con in San Diego and received pretty well. I am pleased to note that after Christmas a spade of new positive reviews appeared n facebook and other places, which lead to a new spike in sales on Amazon. In fact, they are now announcing that there are only 17 copies left. I have known for some time copies were running low, because we couldn't get ny to send to friends and reviewers for a couple of months now. They only copies remaining are at different stores and whatever is left undsold there will be what is left of the first print run.
One thing I hope for the new year is that the succes of this book will make it possible to do a similar one on the early issues of Cracked. I am not really very interested in Cracked after the first forty issues or so. It had started as a very well made satirical magazine, but devolved into a juvenile Mad imitation somewhere bewteen #15 and #45. The reason that this took so long, is th fact that some artists, most noticable Jack Davis, were allowed to do their own gags. But slowly Paul Laikin took over and started writing his trademark Mad knock-offs. Anyway, because the copyright situation for Cracked is unsure and because we already had to cut 40 pages from the originally planned 248 pages (to keep the price at $34/$26 at Amazon) and these early issues of Cracked alone could easilly fill a book on it's own.
As a sample, here is the onely Jack Kirby story in Cracked #14. Not typically his. Sp much so, that when an original page came for sale on eBay, I skipped it, not able to place the artist. My guess is there is a Cracked collector somewhere who got this page for $50 without knowing what he has.
2 comments:
That would be fascinating, Ger, to see your showcasing the early "Cracked". However, further to what you said, the later years' run was really "brutal" in quality compared to Mad. What’s good about today's technology, furthermore, is people can access YouTube to find episodes and "promos" uploaded for many of the old and long-defunct TV shows (pre-dating most of us) to which a satirical excerpt like this refers, so they can get some context to better appreciate the humour exemplified here.
I am old enough to have lived through most.... and you are right that the later Cracked certainly was interesting. But it seemed they were never able to match up the great new artists with great nu writers. I was also quite fond of Crazy, which had a lot of highlights - but like Cracked they never seemed able to lose the dumb features.
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