Being Cracked- Part 2

Following my turning in the final of my “Godzilla” parody to Cracked in late 1999, publisher Dick Kulpa gave me carte blanche to do another of basically anything I wanted. The HBO series “The Sopranos” had been a huge hit the year before, and season two had just gotten started when I decided to do a spoof of it. I hadn’t seen much of the show so I tracked down a few VCR taped episodes from some friends, including fellow caricaturist Jim Batts from St. Louis. I “binged” them long before “binging” was a thing.

Like the “Godzilla” parody, I needed to write this piece as well as do all the art, layouts, and text. Rather than try and depict certain moments or scenes from the show, I wrote an “episode” that spoofed the characters, the typical plot devices, and gangster fiction in general. I loosely based the script on the early MAD spoof of Batman comics called “Batboy and Rubin”, where the duo tries to stop a murder spree by running around Cosmopolis taking out gangs they thought were responsible only to find those gangs were not the killer(s) when another body pops up. In this story, Tubby Stuprano discovers there is a contract out on him, so he goes around whacking different famous gangster characters thinking he’s stopped the contract, only to find out it was someone else that put the hit out on him. He does most of this by telling the story to his therapist, another plot device of the show.

The thing was I never got a chance to really absorb the first season, so my pal Jim from St. Louis graciously punched up the script with gags and suggestions based on the show, which he was very familiar with. It’s been so long I can’t remember which gags were his and which mine, but I do remember he helped a LOT with the script and made it much better.

The end gag is that the people who put the hit out on Tubby were the stars of other HBO shows that were not getting much attention compared to “The Sopranos”. This parody appeared in Cracked #345, July 2000.

I don’t remember any drama around this one. I designed it at the correct page size so there was no “squeezing” the art like the last one, and no one messed with the text or anything else, so it appeared in print as planned. Another thing I remembered liking about this one was that the issue itself was pretty good, apart from the cover which was really REALLY bad. They still had some pieces by John Severin, Don Ohrek, Wally Brogan, Bruce Bollinger, Frank Cummings and some other pretty solid artists and writers in there like future MAD contributors Mike Morse and Ed Steckley. It was probably the best issue of Cracked I had something in.

This spelled the end of my writing career for Cracked. My next feature for them would be written by someone else. I just did the art. Toon in for that story tomorrow.