Shameless Hype
I’d actually completely forgotten to post about this until I saw Peter Lynn mentioning it over at Man vs. Clown!, but Issue #1 of Cracked Magazine is now out on newsstands, and contains quite a few things that I wrote.
As cool as it is to have stuff of mine in print, I have to admit it was even cooler play-acting as an editor this issue, bringing together comedians who’ve either been huge formative influences on me or just folks I hold in extremely high regard. I got the opportunity to contact the head writer and star of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Michael J. Nelson, for a column (I babbled on the phone like a thirteen year-old meeting Justin Timberlake); the hilarious Michael Kupperman, whose comic Tales Designed to Thrizzle is nothing short of brilliant; and Seanbaby, whose article doesn’t appear this issue but should be in Issue #3. It was a real treat to meet these guys, work with them and get them all together into one comedy magazine.
Alright, enough about those idiots. Here’s a rundown of the stuff in the new issue that I wrote. Feel free to rip out every page in the magazine besides these, so as to make it look like I wrote the whole thing, thus improving the quality of it tenfold.
- a two-page spoof comic called “Fastman” by Peter and me, lovingly drawn and inked by Steve Sloan and Chris Eisert from Witchthorn. It’s done much in the same vein as our Batman Origin Comics and Superman Origin Comics, so fans of those should enjoy this hopefully ongoing feature. The first page is available for free online as part of an issue preview; read it here.
- a “classic” article originally titled “It is Extremely Difficult to Buy a Mexican Boy for 300 Pesos”, which was taken offline from this site when I sold it to Cracked a year ago, prior to taking a job there. I’ve gotten many emails since wondering where the hell it’d gone to. The answer: to here, in this magazine, on page 20. It’s now called “Mexican Boys: Surprisingly Expensive” for brevity’s sake, but it’s otherwise identical to how it originally appeared, but now with handy charts, pictures and sidebars.
- a silly page-long spoof of those gossip rags called “CelebScoop,” on page 13. Obsessive-compulsive JP.com readers will note that it’s pretty much the same exact shtick I did over at Pointless Waste of Time back when I was writing News Skims with David Wong. (That’s the trick of any good freelancer: just keep trotting out the same tired crap until someone finally pays you for it.) One of the jokes got cut in production, to the point where I don’t think it makes any sense now and am really embarrassed by it. (See if you can guess which one!) But the others are still pretty much intact, inasmuch as a joke implying that Jude Law thinks the Holocaust never happened could be considered “intact”.
- a Bill Murray retrospective in the back of the magazine called “Laugh Audit”. A lot of what I felt were some funny lines got cut out of this to make room for all the white space and enormous picture of Bill Murray. This is how most of the publishing industry works; layout designers think visually, treating a block of copy as a single element in a palette that includes a headline, images, slugs and bylines. In a list of Important Things an Article Can’t Do Without, a layout designer’d probably put “the actual article” at #4, somewhere below “choice of fonts”. If it makes the page look nicer, they’ll happily recommend gutting the article in half, because, well, people hate to read anyway, so who cares. I’d have complained more if it wasn’t that, for the most part, this is in fact the case.
- a watercolor painting called “Great Moments in History” on page 15, featuring Prince beating the shit out of a bar full of pirates. I didn’t actually paint this; but I told someone else to, which is pretty much the same thing. I could care less if nobody likes it; I just wanted it to hang on my wall.
- an entry on Bono on page 40, in the “Douchebag” article. It’s like two sentences long. Originally it was 18. See above.*
Anyway, it’s on newsstands now. Telling you to buy it would only make me look like a corporate whore, so I’ll just reiterate that you can find all the stuff I just mentioned in it, and if that sounds like it’s worth four bucks to you, it’s currently available for purchase, using money.
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*Note that I’m not pissing on Cracked here; every magazine aimed at our demo is like this nowadays.