Magazine Decay: Difference between revisions

* After years of being a more or less open copycat of ''Mad'', ''[[Cracked]]'' Magazine began to slip greatly. Tabloid owner Dick Kulpa took over the mag and cut pay to the artists and writers, causing longtime contributors such as John Severin to leave, and stuffing the magazine with [[Filler]] out the wazoo. Newer issues were [[Schedule Slip|few and far between]] during Kulpa's tenure. The mag then [[retool]]ed itself with ''Maxim''-esque production values and adult lifestyle humor more akin to ''Spy''. (It says a lot when a mag that was always considered an [[Follow the Leader|inferior]] [[Expy]] of ''Mad'' still manages to decay.) It finally went to an online-only format in 2007, becoming [[Cracked.com|the website that it is best known as today]].

** The website incarnation, meanwhile, began as a [[Something Awful]] clone with lists such as "The 9 Most Hilarious <adjective> <nouns> of All Time". Then they seemed to realize that there wasn't much setting their site apart from every other satire site on the web, so they [[Author's Saving Throw|decided to go "intellectual"]] and picked up David Wong as editor. To everyone's surprise, it actually ''worked''. While lists still make up a large chunk of its content, it has since added videos, web shows and non-list articles to its repertoire.

* Arguably, ''Puck'' (roughly, the more political, 19th Century precursor to ''[[Mad]]'') after [[Author Existence Failure|creator and main artist Joseph Keppler died in 1894]] and was replaced by [[Suspiciously Similar Substitute|his son, Udo]]. The actual decay took some time, as between the elder Keppler’s death and the turn of the century, some of the magazine’s most famous and enduring cartoons were produced.