Cracked vs Mad

A while back I wrote a bit about Mad magazine still being in print and how surprised I was. I carried on to talk about I was happy with the present state of the magazine and while that is technically still true I have to admit that I may be changing my mind.

Don't get me wrong, everything I originally said is still true, but I find reading a few more issues of the current magazine that they get a bit stale. This hurts me on a number of levels, the least of which being the nostalgic one; like I said, I grew up with Mad and I always firmly believed that just because it was funny didn't mean it was in Mad, but if it was in Mad it was funny.

This, by a great deal of circumvention, brings us to Mads dull witted ugly little brother Cracked. In the 80's Cracked was the magazine you read when there wasn't a copy of Mad around, it passed the time and had some chuckles, but at the end you felt a little cheated that it wasn't Mad you just read. Jump forward almost 30 years, into the digital age, and you now have Mad still chugging along with it's magazine and Cracked no longer on paper, but now a website, and I think I like it!

I find myself going to the Cracked site more and more as it's usually a source of at least some amusement and, at times, a bit interesting. Unfortunately this is more than I can say for Mad. Like they say, time makes fools of us all, and apparently I'm included in this statement as well.

I'll always have a soft spot for Alfred E Nueman and the William Gaines era of Mad magazine, but time's they are a changing, and this is a change I think I'll stick by.