Being Cracked- Part 4

My fourth job for Cracked was a parody of the movie “Gladiator”, also written by Barry Dutter, which appeared in issue #347, Sept 2000. Sadly this is the job where I had finally had enough of Cracked and how things were run there, and this became my last job for them.

This time we did the parody AFTER the movie had come out (unlike what we did for “Xmen” in the previous job I did), which for me is the only way to do a parody. You have to actually SEE the film before you can make fun of it properly. To be fair there was a time when I was doing movie spoofs for MAD when we also tried to do them in advance of the film’s release, but that didn’t work out too well. I’ll tell those stories when I get to those jobs in my chronological Monday MADness look back at my work. Anyway I really thought Barry’s script here was pretty good, and I was especially excited about doing the big two page splash in the colosseum. I was planning on doing a lot of fun visual gags about the tigers and gladiators.

I thought that my page and panel compositions, my inking, and my figurework had improved quite a bit since that first “Godzilla” parody. More importantly, my ability to make the caricatures “act” while still maintaining a likeness from panel to panel had taken a big leap with this parody… Russell Crowe looks like Russell Crowe pretty much across the board here even with a lot of different expressions and angles. This is a key element to pulling these parodies off. I was fairly pleased with the end result of this one, much more so than my other jobs for Cracked. I still felt I had a long way to go, but I also thought I was starting to “get it”.

So what was the problem that caused me to finally pull the plug with Cracked? Well, first I was still being paid very little for doing this work. No matter what else had happened that was going to eventually be the dealbreaker. Editor Dick Kulpa and Cracked really had no choice but to pay so little, because they had no budget. I knew that going in, and I was willing to do work for that rate just to get some experience and some printed work in a humor magazine. I never asked Dick for a raise because I think he’d have paid me more if he was able to, and I knew he was not able to. I either did the work for the rate they offered or I didn’t. Up to now the experience and print credit was enough to keep me working for them.

But something happened with this job that really angered me, and was the final straw in my deciding this job would be my last for Cracked.

In my last post about my third Cracked job, a parody of the movie “X-Men”, I mentioned that Cracked had a color section. The “X-Men” spoof was in color, and I was told this one of “Gladiator” was also going to be in the color section. I was pleased about that, because I thought that opening spread in the arena was going to look great in color. So, when I got all the inks done I really spent a lot of time coloring the opening two pages. I was nowhere near as efficient at coloring at the time, so I spend a full day getting this far in the process:

Then I get a call from Barry. Apparently it had been decided that the “Gladiator” parody would be bumped from the color section in favor of a color spoof of another movie. So, all the time I had spent coloring the splash was wasted. On top of that, you don’t just switch from color to B&W and have done. I would spend another few hours redoing that spread and beefing up the values so it looked good in black and white. This wasted at least a day of my life… for $100 a page.

That isn’t even the absolute worst part. The movie parody Dick decided needed to go into the color section rather than “Gladiator”?…

“Battlefield Earth.”

All other things aside, the fact that the guys in charge of Cracked thought that “Battlefield Earth” was a better choice of a lead feature than “Gladiator” showed that the magazine was doomed.

Just a week or so after I turned in this job to Cracked I attended the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Weekend, which was held in NYC that year. They had a MAD panel that year and both Sam Viviano and MAD editor Nick Meglin were there. All along I had been sending my finished Cracked spoofs to Sam at MAD and getting steady encouragement and feedback from him. I showed him the “Gladiator” piece in person at the Reubens, and this time he and Nick saw what they were looking for. Sam told me he thought I was ready to do work for MAD, but explained that it might be some time before an assignment came up that they could give to me. He told me there was also another problem…

Sam: “We have a policy that you can’t have a byline in MAD and Cracked at the same time.”

Me: “That’s not a problem. I don’t worked for Cracked anymore.”

Sam: “Really? When did that happen”?

Me: “Three seconds ago.”

Sam reiterated that he had no idea when they’d have a piece for me to do for them, it might be months. I fessed up then that I was done with Cracked regardless, and I meant it. This was in May of 2000. By October of that year I had my first MAD piece published, and would spend 20 years doing regular work for them, at a lot more than $100 a page.

Dick wasn’t too happy about me leaving Cracked. The word “betrayal” was used by him more than once. He also claimed that the only reason I was hired by MAD was that they wanted to take me, whom he referred to as his “star parody artist”, away from Cracked. He literally claimed credit for my getting work from MAD.

This, of course, was all ridiculous. Expecting anyone to work for that tiny page rate for long was ludicrous, and I was never offered even a token page rate increase. If I was really their “star parody artist” why was my “Gladiator” piece bumped from the lead color feature to a middle of the magazine in B&W? Dick seemed to think he was doing me an enormous favor printing my work in Cracked, and that I should be grateful enough to keep working there at their miniscule page rate. The opposite was more true. I was doing Dick a huge favor turning in increasingly professional quality work for peanuts, and putting up with some really poor editorial decisions. No one in their right mind would turn down an invitation to work at MAD to stay at Cracked. I wouldn’t have done that even if Dick offered to pay me the same page rate MAD paid, which he of course did not.

I guess I didn’t blame Dick for being upset I was leaving, after all where was he going to find someone doing reasonably professional level work for Cracked‘s cut rate pay? He only had himself to blame because I was done with Cracked even if MAD had never come calling, especially after the “Gladiator” incident. I did, however, take exception to his claims MAD only wanted me because I was doing competent work for Cracked, and that he was the only reason I got into MAD.

Dick had some misguided idea that that the guys at MAD considered Cracked an arch-nemesis. I think he imagined that someone from the MAD staff hung around a newsstand on drop-day and grabbed the first copy of the latest Cracked the moment the bundle’s twine was cut, and then raced to the MAD offices with it. He figured the entire staff would spend the day pouring over that issue of Cracked, raging about its latest triumphs and plotting their counter moves. Seriously. He actually told me once that he knew they had Cracked meetings at MAD. During his run with Cracked almost every issue had some “boy, does MAD hate us” rhetoric in it.

None of that was true. MAD couldn’t have cared less what Cracked was up to. If I hadn’t sent my work in to Sam he’d have had no idea what I was doing in Cracked because he never looked at Cracked. I was told Bill Gaines (or maybe it was Al Feldstein) used to have a voodoo doll in his office with pins it in representing the different MAD rip-offs, and one by one those pins were removed as the knockoff went under. That was just a gag and a nod to MAD‘s being the one everyone copied, they didn’t care what was being done in those magazines. MAD‘s only real concern with Cracked, or any of the other MAD knock-offs, what that none of their contributors had bylines in those knock-offs. MAD‘s “Usual Gang of Idiots” were their identity, and you were either exclusively a UGOI, or you weren’t. MAD never went headhunting for Cracked‘s talent, Cracked did that to MAD, with very little success. A number of former Cracked contributors ended up doing work for MAD for the same reason I did. They all wanted to work for MAD in the first place, and if you weren’t quite good enough to work for MAD you could work for Cracked until you were good enough to work for MAD. It was that simple. I got into MAD because I relentlessly pursued it, and my work improved enough to be given a chance with them. Being in Cracked had nothing to do with it.

So, that’s the full, sordid tale of my time with Cracked. I did appreciate the opportunity to get some movie/TV parody work in print, even if the pay was ridiculously low. I don’t regret my time there, but I was happy to move on to MAD.