Frantic Magazine
Frantic Magazine is a comic book series published by Marvel UK from 1979 to 1980. Part of Dez Skinn's revamp of the company, the title was a thinly disguised copy of Mad Magazine. It is notable for containing the first published work of Alan Davis, as well as early scripts by Alan Moore.
Individual issues contained a collection of parodies of popular culture - movies, TV series and printed adverts. These were mostly self-contained items that appeared in a single issue, though an ongoing strip featured the adventures of Howard The Duck. Many of these features had originally appeared in the US (Marvel) mag, Crazy.
The magazines mascot and cover character was an import from the original US mag, Crazy – a sinister clown called Obnoxio The Clown.
Notable movie parodies included:
- Alien, which culminates in Ripley realising that having "borrowed" elements from so many other movies, the way to deal with the creature is to "borrow" the ending from the movie Goldfinger...
- Moonraker, with James Bond reprimanded for "creating another Skylab debacle"...
- Rocky, which ends with Sylvester Stallone about to be beaten up by other leading Hollywood actors, irate at being forced to perform as boxers by the studios jumping on the "boxing movie" bandwagon...
US-specific references
Although published in the UK, most features seemed to be reprints of material originally published in the USA. Thus, the humour often relied on American slang, phrasing and cultural references - not well known to comics readers in the UK in that era - as well as more than passing familiarity with characters from Marvel Comics.
One example of this was a parody of the TV version of The Incredible Hulk, in which the Hulk gets *very* angry and changes into an "even more terrible creature": Richard Nixon proclaiming "I am not a clone"...