So in a collection obtained on Thursday, I found one of the many MAD-a-likes that had been published over the years, hoping to ride the coattails of that famous magazine’s success. And it was in fact one I’d never heard of, through, I’d bet one American dollar, whatever that’s worth now, that I probably spotted a copy in one my visits to various newsstands in the early ’80s.
That mag is Wacko:
“Okay, so it’s wacko, what’s the name?” Pipe down back there, smart-aleck. Wacko was a very short-lived example of this genre of rip-off, lasting only three issues and maybe into 1981, I’m not sure.
The interiors are…MAD-esque, with a lead TV parody that’s illustrated very much in the Mort Drucker/Angelo Torres style. And there’s even Wacko‘s own version of MAD‘s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” or Cracked‘s “Shut Ups,” or even, as I was reminded of on Bluesky, Trash‘s “Trash Can-Its” — the very “hello fellow kids” article entitled “Wisecrack Responses Young People Come Up With.”
However, let’s get back to that cover. The large fella we see front and center there appears to be the mascot of the mag, though I can’t seem to track down a name for him. There’s even a Reddit thread, or at least an attempt at one, trying to find out his name, but three years on there have been no responses.
But there on the cover you can see the gentleman stomping on the mascots of other humor mags. From left to right, there’s The Nebbish from Marvel’s Crazy, that Alfred fella from whatever that mag was, Sylvester P. Smythe from Cracked, and then that last one took me a second.
Well, just a second, as I was showing this to a customer and he asked who that was. My immediate guess was that he from from Sick, another MAD knockoff that was a comic book originally, then run as a black and white mag in the late ’70s. It in fact ended its run right around the time Wacko started. Anyway, here’s a pic of Sick‘s fella in his natural environment:
The name of Sick‘s mascot was “Huckleberry Fink,” though the late ’70s seemed to be a little past the sell-date for “fink” as an automatically funny word (Johnny Hart’s comic strips notwithstanding).
But there we go, Wacko, one of the last gasps of that particular genre of humor mag…I mean, sure, Crazy and Cracked continued on for some time, but how many new MAD knockoffs were launched after that? Feels like the ’70s were kind of the final heyday for those sorts of publishing endeavors.
Very interesting! I had never heard of Wacko or Sick, and, looking closely at the covers, Wacko is an Ideal Magazine, while Sick is a Charlton Publication. It would have been sick if Sick magazine had poked fun at the Charlton Action Heroes–or E-Man, and Doomsday Plus One.
i know
i’m way behind on these posts, but does anybody here remember DC’s PLOP!! (I had to fix my typo that read POLIP.