Cracked (magazine) - Early Staff

Early Staff

The magazine's first editor was Sol Brodsky, who was better known as a journeyman artist and later production manager and a publishing vice president at Marvel Comics.

Cracked's original publisher, Robert C. Sproul's Major Publications, often imitated other companies' successes in various genres, such as westerns, men's adventure, and the Warren Publications mid-1960s revival of horror comics.

Editor Terry Bisson later recalled, "The whole company was about lowball imitations. The publisher, Robert Sproul, wanted to put out some imitations of western, romance and astrology mags, and I was hired (at about age 27) to put them together because of my romance mag experience... The pseudomags did pretty well (this was a very low end market)." Many of the Cracked contributors would also work on these titles. A number of monster-themed issues were printed under the Cracked umbrella, capitalizing on such publications as Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Sproul published Cracked into the 1980s.

However, even as the company chased publishing trends, its long-running flagship title was Cracked Magazine—or Cracked Mazagine, as its cover often read, deliberately misspelling "magazine". (In the same vein, the magazine's website Cracked.com originally referred to itself as a "wesbite.")