Cracked Magazine

Amid much honking and squealing from the Great American Hype Machine, two magazines debuted in August -- Cracked and Hallmark -- and if anybody in America ends up subscribing to both of them, I'd like to meet that person. No. Strike that. On second thought, I do not want to meet that person. Cracked, to be published every other month, is not technically a new magazine. It's a resurrected and revised version of the formerly deceased humor magazine widely known as the poor man's version of Mad.

Amid much honking and squealing from the Great American Hype Machine, two magazines debuted in August -- Cracked and Hallmark -- and if anybody in America ends up subscribing to both of them, I'd like to meet that person. No. Strike that. On second thought, I do not want to meet that person. Cracked, to be published every other month, is not technically a new magazine. It's a resurrected and revised version of the formerly deceased humor magazine widely known as the poor man's version of Mad.

The story of how the crass comics magazine Cracked was brought back to life begins, of all places, at a white-shoe law firm in New York. A pudgy young lawyer named Monty Sarhan had been giving life to the dreams of Internet entrepreneurs by helping them with finance deals when he caught the entrepreneurial bug himself. He decided to leave the legal profession and "go for the brass ring" by acquiring a media company.

The story of how the crass comics magazine Cracked was brought back to life begins, of all places, at a white-shoe law firm in New York. A pudgy young lawyer named Monty Sarhan had been giving life to the dreams of Internet entrepreneurs by helping them with finance deals when he caught the entrepreneurial bug himself. He decided to leave the legal profession and "go for the brass ring" by acquiring a media company.

Genette (Ann Noble), the jury forewoman on a tabloid-grabbing New York murder case, has located Lowell (Josh Gordon), the ex-waiter she exalts in having acquitted. "Your trial," says Genette, vibrating with a sense of mission, "is the first time in my life ... I felt I had some value as a human being." As tension shivers between Genette, Lowell and fellow juror Seldon (Alex Douglas), Lowell replies, "I had sort of the opposite feeling."

Known as Mad magazine's maddest artist, Don Martin drew balloon-footed boobs cavorting with their heads under their arms, clowns who tap-danced into disaster, and insects in boxer shorts who cracked jokes. His sound effects were legendary. In Martin's world, people didn't talk, buildings didn't fall and objects weren't thrown: They blorted and skroinched and katoonged.

'U.s. paying Space Aliens to Find and Destroy Bin Laden!" This vital news story was shockingly overlooked by every major newspaper in America -- except one: the Weekly World News. Those other papers also left their readers uninformed about how the White house put out a hit on Michael Moore, why a judge ordered a vasectomy for an oversexed hamster and how a woman exploded after constantly being told, "You da bomb!"

Black spy, white spy and sometimes the gray lady spy blow each other up without exchanging a word. They've been doing it since 1961 in Antonio Prohias's "Spy vs. Spy." Movie-star caricatures trade puns in squared-off, interlocking speech balloons. Across the margins stretch itsy-bitsy disaster comics. For 39 years, Mad magazine has sketched out and read between the lines of American idiocy, targeting everything from lawn care to the evening news.

He's the kind of guy who waxes rhapsodic about his love for the human race but curses people who don't smile at his dog. He's full of odes to the sweep of life and won't stop sharing them with the strangers he accosts in coffee shops. He has no job and no family, and he's both totally oblivious and smart enough to know how insufferable he is. He's Wilson — the main character in Daniel Clowes' new graphic novel "Wilson" (Drawn and Quarterly: 78 pp., $21.95) and, it's worth remembering, not Clowes himself.

Don Martin presents the sights and sounds of the big city: Fagrooon. Fooma-doom. Splooga-poom. Whattaya, weird? Those are buildings col lapsing in the distance. Poit! Thwap! An eyeball pops out and hits the floor. Spwapo! One kid's fist meets another's nose. "Look, I just try to imagine what these things sound like, and then I draw them," Martin says. "If they're funny, that's all that matters to me. I've been thinking up these visual gags for years."

He has tried to imagine what heaven will be like, but contemporary Christian singer Bart Millard could not have dreamed up this -- his band joining Christina Aguilera and 50 Cent on the pop charts. "I Can Only Imagine," which he recorded with the band MercyMe, reflects the singer's musings about how he would deal with the afterlife, and may be the most overtly religious song to hit the Top 40 since 1974.