The time I spent as a regular contributor to CRACKED magazine stands out as one of the most exciting periods of time for me as a comic artist. Having spent much of my adolescence reading what is widely considered to be the MAD magazine “knock off,” I was thrilled when I was asked to illustrate a piece called ‘New Jobs For Bill Clinton’ for issue #353 back in 2001.

I continued to illustrate for CRACKED during the ‘Dick Kulpa/Barry Dutter years’ up until November of 2004. Usually somebody else wrote and I simply got to draw the funny pictures. My shining moment, however was issue #363 (July 2004) in which I not only illustrated two installments of ‘Shut Ups’ but actually WROTE and illustrated a three-page ‘Nanny Dickering Interviews’ piece! To top it all off, that very same issue had a cover illustrated by none other than Kent Gamble, who had drawn for Marvel’s CRAZY magazine back in the 70’s and 80’s! To the average person this probably doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but to a ‘humor magazine nerd’ like myself, it was as if all of the stars had aligned and God himself had looked down upon me and said, “Your moment of glory has arrived, punk!” It never got that good again, although it was awfully cool being the regular ‘Shut Ups’ artist for those last few issues until Dick Kulpa sold the magazine. Whew…what a ride, grasshopper!