The magazine originated under the editorial oversight of Joe Simon, one of comicdom’s all-time greatest creators and a man with a long association at Prize. I wouldn’t have pegged Simon as a humour editor since most of his work as a writer/artist had been on adventure and romance books but Simon’s tenure (1960-1970) felt as though it had a steady hand guiding the enterprise. Even after he stepped down as editor, he continued to draw most of the covers through the Pyramid Books years. It’s not clear to me how much he had to do with the interiors - many stories in the early years had sporadic credit boxes - but he seems to have been a very good editor on the series.
When talking about black & white comic book humour magazines, eventually you have to mention Mad - it was considered the industry leader. It’s been said that Cracked was the magazine kids bought when they wanted entertainment while waiting for the next Mad to arrive - indeed, that Cracked staggered their months of publication to ensure that since they and Mad printed 8 new issues per year, every month that didn’t have a new Mad would be a month when they shipped Cracked. But if Cracked was what kids bought after Mad, whither Sick? How did Sick remain afloat for 20 years?
Sick benefited from having a lot of exceptional talent in its early days. Simon’s art director was the phenomenal Bob Powell up ‘til his death in 1967. Powell seemed to set a “house style” in the manner John Severin did for Cracked. Early contributors included Angelo Torres, Leo Morey, Jack Davis and Vic Martin; Don Orehek came and went at various times simultaneous to his Cracked career.
But more than that, Sick seemed to have a particular audience in mind when it launched. It was attempting to reach a sophisticated audience, perhaps a bit older than Mad’s readers. As time went by it set its sites lower and eventually became dominated by film and television parodies just like what Mad and Cracked were printing, but the first few years have a lot of political content and an emphasis on monologues. Writer/editors Dee Caruso and Bill Levine wrote monologues for comedians and adapted their work to Sick. It makes Sick very much a product of its times, very much navel-gazing at contemporary culture, but I do respect that initially the goal wasn’t necessarily to target the same kids & college students who were reading the better-known magazines.
But there were clear missteps along the way. Unlike Mad and Cracked, Sick never quite got a handle on repackinging its contents as reprints. That was one way Mad kept fans coming back during their skip months - there would be a ‘special’ of some sort that was mostly reprinted material. In time, Mad and Cracked published specials like clockwork. But although Sick printed a few specials here and there it was very scattershot and irregularly published. Sick made a deal to repackage their stories in paperbacks like the other magazines had, yet those books don’t seem to have made waves.
Powell’s death in 1967 led to Bernard Wiseman assuming the role of art director. Wiseman was a gifted cartoonist but his work skewed younger than Powell’s and Sick definitely became more kid-friendly under his tenure. I suppose I should also mention the magazine’s mascot; originally it was Dr. Sickmund, but in 1963 they knowingly went for an Alfred E. Neuman imitator called “Huckleberry Fink” who would remain with the magazine in some form up ‘til the end. Fink’s arrival was one of many signs that Sick had an identity crisis going on as they struggled to find oxygen in a Mad-heavy environment.
Simon’s successor as editor in 1971 was Paul Laikin, who had previously been editor of Cracked; he left the magazine when it moved to Charlton and moved on to Marvel’s Crazy magazine, then back to Cracked; heck, at one time he wrote for Mad - he was very much a career-humour magazine man. But having indexed Cracked and Crazy, I had a hunch Sick under his tenure would read much like the other magazines - and it did. Lots of familiar names from other Laikin books turned up (Eden Norah; Aron Mayer; John Langton; Lugoze; Caracu; Tony Tallarico), reprints became more common (usually 1 story per issue) and a reduction in the number of comic art stories and corresponding rise in the number of text features.
Common to all the humour magazines I find is an inability to make deadlines. Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad constantly had to fill pages with reprints from earlier issues, his “Hey Look” stories from Marvel or even old Punch magazine articles (indeed, I don’t think Al Feldstein gets enough credit for keeping Mad on the rails when he succeeded Kurtzman). But one popular trick of Kurtzman’s was to use text features (often written by he himself) to quickly fill pages. I sense that Laikin was a kindred spirit to Kurtzman; not a gifted artist like he, but similarly in a quagmire about how to fill 52 pages almost every month. A popular Laikin tactic in several magazine series was to present a parody of a famous poem in the public domain; that way Laikin could print the original poem on 1 page, his parody on the 2nd page. That’s 2 pages of easy content!
If I found the Laikin years a bit lackluster, that’s nothing on the Charlton years. Charlton was infamously the bottom rung of the comics industry, the place where otherwise-unemployable talent went to die (or find creative freedom if you’re Steve Ditko). By the time Sick arrived at Charlton it had lost just about everything that might have given it any cache; the series’ old recurring features were dropped and the logo redesigned while very few long-time contributors were still puttering around (Bill Burke being the biggest exception). Artist and 1960s contributor Jack Sparling took the reins as editor and also seems to have drawn the majority of stories during the Charlton era.
The Charlton era at least brought in some unusual talent. It’s not surprising to see a Charlton workhorse like Joe Gill churning out stories for Sick, but it is a bit surprising to find Arnold Drake writing a great deal for Sick at a time when he was still a busy DC Comics freelancer. Drake’s stories for Sick have a veneer of contempt for super heroes and particularly Stan Lee, who became parodied in Drake’s “Ego-Man” stories. Drake was one of DC’s funniest Silver Age writers, but I find his Marvel work underwhelming; perhaps he had some lingering resentment to Marvel that inspired Ego-Man.
The Charlton Sick also had able work from Dave Manak, but the era feels mostly cheap and sleazy. Cheap because the typewriter font used at that time looked very unprofessional. Sleazy primarily due to Jack Sparling’s recurring feature “Cher d’Flower” which appeared in the back of the magazine and featured a naked woman lounging in every panel (yet always framed in a manner to prevent actual nudity on the page). Perhaps Sparling saw the suggestive art Bill Ward worked into Cracked and figured he could do him one better, maybe get some publicity by provoking a boycott of his magazine. The “Cher d’Flower” stories are too risqué for children, too juvenile for adults.
In all, Sick is just barely remembered now and unlikely to be rediscovered and celebrated but for those willing to sift through, it had some diamonds in the rough.
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