Cracked Spaced Out #2

Cover is new by Jim Bennett. There are 21 pages of new material. The rest of the contents are reprints.

Comment by Tom Smith:

I couldn't believe how bad this cover was when I first saw it, and seeing it again now, it's even worse than I remember it. This has got to be one of the worst Cracked magazine covers ever. It literally makes me cringe. Who in the world thought this was a good idea? Let me explain my reaction:

You take an extremely popular teen soap opera (that probably no sci-fi fan has any interest in whatsoever) and decide to morph the actor's faces with the characters from a sci-fi show with the end result being some very grotesque-looking faces. The end result is that you turn off fans of 90210 who resent what you did to their favorite actors, at the same time diluting any interest sci-fi fans might have had by combining one of their favorite shows with something they care nothing about.

Add to this the artwork, which executed as it is here, with a bunch of smiling floating heads, looks like it's intended for Sesame Street magazine or some other magazine for very small children. Jim Bennett did a lot of great back covers for Cracked, so I truly believe there isn't any artist that could have pulled off this terrible concept successfully.

The end result is you get a hideous cover with grotesque floating heads that looks like it was aimed at very small children, but probably wouldn't appeal to anyone. (As a side note, why are the eyes so off-center in the top left head? It looks like a first draft that the artist didn't care enough to draw again).

The person who came up with cover was so off-base, it's incredible, and once it was finished, it should have been scrapped before it was printed.

That's my take on this monstrosity of a cover. I wonder how much it contributed to the fact that this special edition lasted for only a few issues.