Being Cracked- Part 3

After writing my own parodies for my first two appearances in Cracked Magazine, in the early spring of 2000 I was assigned the art duties working on someone else’s script for the first time. The movie being spoofed was the first X-Men film, and the writer was Barry Dutter. Barry had already been doing work for Cracked before the AMI buyout, so he was one freelancer who did continue into the Dick Kulpa era. He had writing credits at Marvel (including their “What The?!?” humor comic), Bongo Comics (The Simpsons), Ren & Stimpy Comics, and other work. He wrote a lot of stuff for Cracked and eventually became editor-in-chief there for a while, and was later credited as “head writer”. He also had a couple of things published in MAD. This parody appeared in Cracked #346, Aug 2000.

One thing interesting about this movie parody is we did it and Cracked published it in advance of the film’s release. The official release date of this movie was July 12 of 2000. Barry somehow either worked from an advanced copy of the film or from a script, because I know I did this art in mid-late April of 2000, and the issue was on newsstands in June. Cracked credited it as a “sneak peek” of the movie on the cover. I can’t remember if I’d seen the entire movie in advance (although I seem to remember having seen some full scene footage… maybe just long trailers?) or if I just worked from pictures, but somehow we ended up doing this parody before the movie’s official release date, and yet had many of the major scenes and plot points included. I must have seen some footage, because the characters and settings are too close to their look in the film to be done by guesswork.

At this time time Cracked had a color section. Usually it was 16 pages, the front 8 pages and last 8 pages of the issue. This parody was going to be part of that section. That made this the first time I did a parody in color, so there was a lot of experimentation on my end working digitally. I did the line art with dip pens and brushes, and then scanned that in to color in PhotoShop. I also did all the layout, design, text and boxes as with the previous two parodies I had done.

Barry was clearly a superhero/sci-fi/fantasy movie aficionado, because he leaned heavily on gags riffing on or featuring cameos from other such films. It’s been so long that I cannot remember how many (if any) of the visual gags were mine and which were Barry’s. The script I was sent is long gone.

I was a lot more cartoony in those days. Many of the secondary characters have big, googly cartoon eyes and don’t look like they belong in the same world as the likeness-based characters. That’s one of the first things MAD art director Sam Viviano cured me of when I started doing work for MAD. Many of the caricatures are swings and misses as well, IMO.

I’m sure the “We thought all the crippled kids would buy it!” gag in this last page would not fly today… since it’s not very funny it shouldn’t have flown back then either, but Cracked wasn’t exactly known for its sophisticated, take-the-high-road humor. Overall I thought Barry’s script was good and had some very funny moments to it. The best part of working on this was again a hands-off experience in terms of art direction. I don’t remember any major changes or direction at all.

However this was the point where the business end of things at Cracked was starting to get to me. I was still doing all this work for $100 a page, including all the design and production with the word boxes and text. That was ok for an issue or two, but these were a lot of work and just seeing my art in print was becoming less and less a balance against the low page rate. I didn’t complain, but I was starting to think either the pay would need to go up or I was not going to continue for much longer. It also took some time for them to get the checks out, which didn’t help. Worse, they pulled some things that made me unhappy, including on the cover of this issue:

I never said anything to Dick about this, but I was upset about this cover. Technically this is a “collage” image with elements from different interior features, but my X-Men splash page is overwhelmingly the dominant part of this cover. Yet I got paid nothing for doing most of the art on the cover. I don’t remember even being asked for my okay just out of courtesy. I didn’t complain at the time because I knew Dick was not paying anything for cover art anyway because he was DOING all the cover art, and it was really terrible. At least this looked good. However this was just another example of how Dick and Cracked did not give much consideration to the creators who did the work that was the content of their magazine. They’d take the content that was submitted and do whatever if they wanted with it if thought it would save them a buck or worse, if they thought it would “improve” it.

Here’s another example of that. My pal Ed Steckley had started doing work for Cracked at that time, doing the writing and art for a feature about a cat called “Mr. Precious”. The concept was that Mr. Precious was using up his nine lives by being killed at the end of each comic in some silly/gruesome way, then he’d come back the next week to get killed again. Ed cringes when “Mr. Precious” is brought up, but they were funny and kind of edgy one or two page black and white comics, done in pantomime. PANTOMIME, mind you. Imagine Ed’s surprise when Dick would add WORD BALLOONS to the comic with inane and unfunny dialogue which totally ruined it. Not cool.

Anyway, at this point I was starting to get fed up with the low pay and antics at Cracked, even though they mostly left my stuff alone. My next, and final, work for Cracked as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Toon in tomorrow for the ending of my Cracked career.