We Are Not Mad

We Are Not Mad

     Bill Gaines the publisher of Mad Magazine had a voodoo doll that he stuck pins into whenever an imitation of Mad Magazine was published. Gaines would tag the pin with the name of the magazine, and pull the pin out when the magazine failed. There were many imitations: Sick, Crazy, Panic, Nuts, Gag, and Cracked to name a few. When Gaines died in 1992 only one pin remained: Cracked Magazine’s. In 1952 comic book writer/illustrator Harvey Kurtzman and Gaines launched Mad Magazine. In 1958 some of the artists and writers who founded Mad split from the magazine and my  father Bob Sproul, who was publishing a number of magazines at the time, hired them and started Cracked. I was Cracked’s editor for most of the late 70’s and early 80’s. There is no argument that Mad was a revolutionary humor magazine during the 1960’s and early 70’s and Cracked a lower budget knock-off; but in the late 70’s Cracked redefined itself and attacked Mad’s domination of the industry. For the first time Mad began to copy Cracked, and Cracked set the pace in the business. Cracked never exceeded Mad’s circulation but we changed the marketplace; and as Mad sales shrunk Cracked sales soared. In the 70’s and 80’s Cracked Magazine did a better job than Mad adapting to a changing market, by targeting a younger audience, offering timelier product, and developing a sound circulation strategy.

    Developing a target audience is a critical component of successful publishing, and both Mad’s and Cracked’s would change and evolve over the decades. By parodying American culture Mad had developed an audience of teenagers, who were empowered by the hip, biting humor that poked fun at the establishment; and Cracked merely copied this formula. From the beat generation through the revolutionary days of the hippy culture, Mad embraced the counter-culture and became its irreverent voice. Cracked rode Mad’s shirt-tails and although profitable it failed to achieve Mad’s success. To separate itself from Mad, Cracked developed a less profane editorial policy. Where Mad’s editorial content would contain adult themes, Cracked banned references to sex, drugs or scatology (see attachment). While Mad continued to pursue an older more sophisticated market [sic], Cracked was appealing to the younger 8-12 year old. Although both Mad and Cracked were primarily a boys magazine, Cracked’s less raunchy, cleaned up style was beginning to attract a female audience. The parents of the preteen market did not object to their children bringing Cracked into the house and knew it was a safer alternative to Mad.  As the mid seventies rolled around National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live and the popularity of irreverent stand-up comedy (Bill Cosby, Richard Prior, George Carlin…) began to lure away Mad’s audience.

     Another important aspect of magazine publishing is putting a timely product out on the newsstand.  Both Mad and Cracked parodied hit movies and television shows inside its pages. Although both magazines often featured these parodies on the front cover Cracked was the first to do so exclusively. Mad would eventually follow suit and it became a contest of which magazine would have the hottest topic on the cover. This is where Cracked beat Mad out consistently. Cracked beat out Mad by five months with the movie Jaws, four months with King Kong, three months on the original Star Wars, and three months with E.T. It became a standing ritual in the Cracked magazine office to guess which outdated topic would be on Mad’s next cover. We developed contacts all over the movie and television industries to help us get our writers, artists, and photographers to view prescreening and publicity events. We often had the parodies written before the movies were even released.

    The final step in being a successful publication is developing a sound circulation strategy. Mad’s circulation began to peak in 1973 breaking the 2 million copies per issue milestone. At this time Cracked’s circulation was just crawling up to ½ million copies (4-1 sales ratio). At this time, my father took a huge gamble that could have bankrupted the business. We changed national distributors and gambled that we could go head to head with Mad on every newsstand. The investment to increase the printing and distribution this dramatically is huge. My father hired men throughout the United States to insure Cracked had priority newsstand positioning. He developed a strategy of slowly saturating markets with the Cracked brand, increasing Cracked’s issues to nine a year, when traditionally Mad and Cracked were eight. Additionally, he expanded our line of Associate Cracked Publications (Collector’s Editions, Annuals, Paperbacks etc…) until Cracked was publishing twenty three issues a year. By 1975 the sales gap between Mad and Cracked narrowed to 2-1 as Cracked’s regular sales broke one million and Mad’s dropped under 2 million.  In the 80’s Cracked fine tuned its circulation to allow for the greatest profitability and although both Mad and Cracked didn’t see the sales figures they saw in the 70’s only 240,000 copies separated the two in the winter of 1985.  

      My father sold the magazine in 1985, for a few reasons. First, crack cocaine was in the news during the time and “Cracked” had a new, less than desirable connotation. Even if it was a confused, unconscious decision for a parent not to buy crack (ed) for their kids, it was a realistic threat to the magazines future. Secondly, the entire magazine industry began to see a drop in profits as sales fell off and the cost of printing and distribution rose. Third, he had built a valuable, profitable business and although he could “see the writing on the wall” it sold immediately and he spent the rest of his life either hanging out at his beach cabana or being dragged around the world by my mother. Cracked had a great run during the mid 70’s and early 80’s and although we never surpassed Mad in sales we still did a better job targeting and satisfying our audience and developing a sound circulation strategy.