3 out of 5

Yes, only up to 14, because I only picked these up ’cause of Gerber, and his involvement ends there.

Now I’ll be honest – I wanted to give this 4 stars, in part in comparison to Mad Magazine, but then I had to accept that I only have memories of Mad, and they certainly don’t stretch back to the “classic” era of the magazine, but only when it, in my mind, became harmless.  So it didn’t really seem like a fair comparison, and reading over the history of Mad, it obviously paved the way for stuff like Crazy… so who am i anyway yar de yar mumford

Crazy is rather uneven.  Unavoidably, I guess.  Humor magazines are rarely cover-to-cover laffs, bundled together, as they are, of various formats by various writers, while perhaps all writing or drawing with a general concept in mind, all playing to what they think is funny combined with whatever aspect of the mag they’ve been stymied with (parody, short story, etc.) combined with whatever yes or no directions their editor has tacked on…  So it’s almost like an anthology (again, a mixed bag) except readers aren’t expecting an anthology, but rather a cohesive presentation.  Tough job, I’d imagine.  How Crazy – to me – succeeds at this, or at least makes it more consistently enjoyable, than other similar humor mags, is by staying true to their slogan – “The magazine that dares to be dumb.”  While the book does carry the expected and required Mad influences via TV / movie parodies (with the same recognizable art style and square word balloons) and “lighter side of”-esque single panel cartoon gags, I was surprised by all of the inbetween stuff in Crazy – the fake ads, the fake stories from pulp magazines – that veer wildly into random, crass, and stupid humor in an almost stream-of-consciousness-why-did-they-think-it-was-funny manner that only is funny because of how audaciously ridiculous it is.  This seemed to especially hold true during Steve Gerber’s super brief editorial run from issues 11-14, wherein, according to the Wiki article, he felt that the magazine should be presented as though the writers actually were crazy, and it definitely shows for those few issues.  Still, the trend was established prior to that via the scattershot aim of the magazine to continually poke fun at itself if it tried to be too political or topical.  It’s a super weird and offensive mag that unaware comic readers of today would be surprised to find that it was part of the Marvel family.

I can’t speak to the rest of the 90 issue run of Crazy, and I won’t be hunting them down any time soon, but flipping through these early mags is – if not directly funny or even, eh, interesting – it is Something, and I can’t say I get the Something feel from just anywhere.  And if you say “this is stupid,” well, can’t say the magazine doesn’t try to warn you of that on almost any page.