BHOC: CRAZY #46

I had sampled the occasional issue of MAD Magazine before this, as well as its nearest knock-off, CRACKED, but I found neither of them so much to my liking that I followed them with any regularity. Now, it has to be said that MAD in particular was a trend-setting publication, and while it was past its highest heights by 1978, it was still selling many multiples of even the best-circulating comic book. It was a bit of an institution and it brought publisher Bill Gaines a fortune, despite never carrying any paid advertising, which is what sustained most other magazines. It was such a lucrative thing tha tin addition to CRACKED there were any number of attempts from other publishers to do their own clones. CRAZY was Marvel’s attempt, and it was successful enough to run throughout the 1970s and into the first half of the 1980s.

Over the course of its long run, CRAZY went through its ups and downs. At certain points, it was a pretty strong, pretty funny magazine. At others, it didn’t evidence a whole lot of ambition apart from beating MAD at its own game. This issue came out during one of those latter periods, and so while it’s perfectly fine for what it is, it’s lacking in that comedic spark that would have made a regular reader out of me. CRAZY was then being edited by Paul Laiken, and for the most part, while it was published by Marvel, it drew from an entirely different pool of freelance contributors. Possibly the most surprising name on this masthead from my point of view is Tom DeFalco, who woudl go on to become Marvel’s editor in chief, but who at this point was a freelance writer scrambling to bring home the bacon after leaving his Archie staff job.

The thing that got me in the door was no doubt Bob Larkin’s cover painting of the Incredible Hulk, based on a promo image done for the popular television show. This turned out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch, as the only Hulk content in the issue was a short faux interview between the Green Goliath and Walter Kronkite that was just an excuse to run some very basic set-up-punch-line gags centered around the character.

DeFalco’s contribution was a two-page feature that was a straight up riff on MAD’s Smart Answers To Stupid Questions. It’s perfectly fine, but even at this young age, I was a bit beyond gags like this. The interesting thing about MAD was that its humor was pitched simultaneously over my head and also too young for me at the same time, leaving relatively little in the strike zone. But CRAZY at this point was just not as smart editorially as MAD was, and so it tended to skew even dumber and more lowest common denominator. As such, it didn’t appeal to me.

Editor Laikin wrote a bunch of material for this issue, including this single-page quickie. There was a theater in my area that delighted in attempting to match up film titles on their marquee in this fashion, so it’s a gag I could appreciate, even if I wasn’t truly familiar with most of the films mentioned. Though Laikin and his production team did foul up the paste-up on SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS, stepping on that joke a little bit.

And of course, given its publisher, this issue of CRAZY did include another short piece making fun of super hero concepts. This manner of thing was pretty rank-and-file for the humor magazines of the day. It feels as though writer Mike Weiss wasn’t especially in touch with the comic books of that period, as all of his riffs here fall into the category of spins on the BATMAN television series of the 1960s or the SUPERMAN movie that was on the horizon. This piece could have run a decade earlier, and apart from some of the celebrity references becoming inscrutable, nobody would have been able to tell the difference.